The Kicker

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• Why Do You Have to Run from Us? Local reporters are struggling to get answers from the politicians they cover. 30.06.2026 46min

  Generations of local journalists mostly took for granted their ability to access elected officials. Talking to the local newspaper or TV station was one of the only ways to get the word out, so politicians didn’t have much choice—even if they were mad at the coverage. It’s not quite so simple these days. A mayor can talk directly to constituents through social media, or through influencers friendly to their politics. Anti-press sentiment is rampant across the political spectrum, leading some ...
• No Fanboys Need Apply: Wired bares real teeth. 23.06.2026 57min

  For a certain type of tech executive, and a certain type of fan of tech executives, the point of technology journalism is to cheerfully show off the cool new toys Silicon Valley creates. For the staff of Wired, the point of technology journalism is to hold the most powerful companies and people in our society accountable for the decisions they make. That has made the magazine remarkably unpopular with many people in the tech world (including newly minted trillionaire Elon Musk) and more popul...
• Sports Illustrated’s Emma Baccellieri on covering the changing world of women’s basketball. 11.06.2026 54min

  One of the most fascinating sports business stories of the moment is the explosive growth of the WNBA. TV viewership is up dramatically, multiple teams sell out regularly, and stars like Caitlin Clark and A’ja Wilson have become household names. This year, the players’ union won a groundbreaking new contract, including their first-ever revenue share and a 4x jump in minimum salaries. The league’s recent surge in popularity has also brought new questions of access. The WNBA was the only major ...
• How Documented is reinventing immigration coverage. 21.05.2026 52min

  Some of the most interesting journalism experiments aren’t taking place on the websites of publications. Instead, they’re happening on Facebook and WhatsApp and Reddit and WeChat and even Nextdoor, which I didn’t realize was anything other than a place for Karens to complain about loitering. Documented, an eight-year-old digital outlet that covers and serves immigrants in New York City and beyond, is behind many of these experiments—from producing a Chinese-language newsletter on WeChat to st...
• The Old Playbook of Power and Influence Is Different Now 14.05.2026 57min

  When Ronald Reagan won the presidency, in 1980, it was a victory long in the making. For almost half a century, conservatives had plotted ways to cut taxes and undo workers’ rights. Their playbook for political influence went something like this: create a think tank, publish reputable reports, build relationships with journalists and politicians, and disseminate free-market ideas to the public, creating a new common sense. Today, the art of political influence is rather different. Think...
• The Globe’s Emily Sweeney breaks out of Boston. 07.05.2026 44min

  “WHOA. Ohhhh. Freaking huge,” one of my favorite recent news videos opens. Emily Sweeney, a Boston Globe reporter, stands in the Museum of Fine Arts, gazing up at a thirteen-foot-tall, thirteen-thousand-pound Roman sculpture. Sweeney can’t hide her awe at seeing the statue the museum calls Juno, but that Sweeney knows from her teenage years as Gloria. Until a month ago, Sweeney was a rank-and-file breaking news reporter and the author of three books about Boston, her hometown. On March 31, th...
• How Elon Musk is colonizing the future. 04.05.2026 1godz 4min

  Before Elon Musk, there was Henry Ford: an attention-seeking car manufacturer, newspaper owner, and media celebrity who pushed reactionary views on the public and transformed society around his business interests. “Fordism” was more than a mode of production, it was a way of organizing society, involving large factories, nuclear families, stable employment, and affordable cars, refrigerators, and televisions. In a new book, Muskism, Ben Tarnoff, a technology writer, and Quinn Slobodian, a his...
• Taking Back Saturday: “We’re sports people. We like to score.” 23.04.2026 48min

  I have a galaxy-brained theory that the most effective fundraisers in the country aren’t politicians or the heads of major foundations, but a pair of Atlanta-based college football bloggers. Two decades ago, Spencer Hall—best known as the creator of Every Day Should Be Saturday, a site covering college football with a mix of analytical skills and many inside jokes—decided to raise money for refugees in the Atlanta area. Hall had worked for a refugee services organization before pivoting to wr...
• Student, Teacher: Eric Gustafson on fighting for journalistic integrity at every level. 09.04.2026 50min

  I’ve spent my entire professional career in journalism, but student publications are still my favorite news outlets. I broke the biggest story of my life for my high school newspaper, and I find something so infectious about the energy of students who aren’t yet jaded about the industry or the job market, who just want to write about topics that matter to their peers. Us pros can learn a lot from them. Eric Gustafson is one of the few people I’ve ever spoken to whose passion for student journ...
• The Inside Look: Chatting with the New York Times’ trust editor. 26.03.2026 52min

  I must confess that initially I was a bit skeptical of the concept. The New York Times was promoting a Q&A with two technology reporters, Mike Isaac and Sheera Frankel, and their editor, Pui-Wing Tam. The headline, in 2014 BuzzFeed style, was “Reporters Seek Comment. What Happens Next May Surprise You.” Over the course of several hundred words, Isaac, Frankel, and Tam explained how they ask sources for answers, especially those who might not be inclined to respond. Who is this for? I wond...
• Lessons from an Early-Career Journalist 12.03.2026 48min

  When I took over the Kicker host chair, one of the things I was most excited to do was to interview early-career journalists, who see the changes to our industry from an entirely different perspective from those of us who’ve been around since the days when Twitter was king, or before social media existed. I’ve always loved working with young people—among my many freelance gigs, I help run a program for high school journalists—because I feel like I get smarter (and hopefully even marginally mo...
• A Look Back at Covering Gaza for the Post 26.02.2026 31min

  Since October 7, 2023, Miriam Berger has been on assignment in Jerusalem, covering Israel, Palestine, and war. A few weeks ago, she learned she and hundreds of colleagues were being laid off. One perk of hosting an interview podcast is having the opportunity to talk to journalists whose work I’ve admired for years but might never have met otherwise. Miriam Berger is one such journalist. She’s written some of the best articles I’ve read from Israel and Palestine: rich, textured narratives that...
• Profit or Nonprofit? A Debate over Journalism’s Future 19.02.2026 1godz 13min

  While the newspaper industry continues to contract, nonprofit news outlets have proliferated over the past decade. But dismissing profitable models for journalism is premature. How can journalism survive? Perhaps the question would once have sounded unduly panicked, but it has only grown more pressing over the past twenty years. Between 2004 and 2019, newspapers lost an astonishing 77 percent of their jobs—more than any other industry on record, according to the Bureau of Labor Statisti...
• The Letter of the Law, and the Law in Practice 12.02.2026 1godz 2min

  Experts discuss the risks posed to journalism as the courts test the limits of press freedom law. If I recall correctly, the original news peg for a live Kicker recording about threats to the free press was a raid on the home of Hannah Natanson, a Washington Post reporter. By the time Amanda Darrach, The Kicker’s producer, and I were finalizing logistics for the event, which took place in CJR’s office, two independent journalists—Don Lemon and Georgia Fort—had been arrested for covering a pro...
• Outlier Media Reimagines What Local News Can Be 05.02.2026 51min

  In 2016, Sarah Alvarez, a former civil-rights lawyer and reporter, reimagined what journalism could be. Rather than break news or publish stories on a website, her project, Outlier Media, promised to provide the people of Detroit with information on any property they wanted, via text message—all they had to do was ask. Alvarez hoped that with vetted information, locals could hold landlords to account and avoid property scams in an increasingly hostile housing market. It was to be the first of...
• A Veteran of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette—and its Long Strike—Prepares for What’s Next 29.01.2026 44min

  At first, January 7 felt to Bob Batz Jr. like a triumphant day. The U.S. Supreme Court had declined to consider an appeal from Batz’s longtime employer, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the latest in a long string of legal victories for the paper’s union. After more than three years on strike, Batz and twenty-four colleagues returned to work in late November. Now, the P-G was legally obligated to reinstate the workers’ previous health plan, plus reimburse costs accrued when management failed to b...
• How the Gawker Trial Was the Gateway to Trump: Examining a political legacy, ten years on. 22.01.2026 1godz 19min

  In 2007, Valleywag, Gawker’s gossip column devoted to Silicon Valley, published a short piece about a then-little-known venture capitalist and tech founder, under the headline “Peter Thiel is totally gay, people.” Thiel’s sexuality wasn’t a secret, nor was the piece mocking. “Peter Thiel, the smartest VC in the world, is gay,” it read. “More power to him.” But it was the first time this information was made public, and Thiel didn’t welcome the attention. He vowed privately to get revenge on V...
• Defector’s Jasper Wang and His Unvarnished Truth 15.01.2026 44min

  Annual reports are generally pretty boring documents, bogged down with numbers taken out of context and marketing-speak about “thriving in the face of unprecedented challenges.” Not Jasper Wang’s. At the end of 2025, the cofounder and vice president of revenue and operations at Defector—the pioneering worker-owned sports site that grew from the ashes of Deadspin—managed to reinvent the genre, writing a riveting six-thousand-something first-person words containing not only full transparency ...
• Why You Should Never Marry a Journalist—and Other Lessons from Decades in Media 08.01.2026 30min

  The Kicker returns with our former host, Josh Hersh, and our new one, Megan Greenwell, in conversation. Between President Trump’s legal battles against news outlets, the defunding of public media, the rise of creator journalism, wave after wave of layoffs, and at least twelve hundred more things I’ve forgotten, Josh Hersh hosted this podcast during an eventful time for the journalism industry. Then he left! Now you have me. I’m an author and magazine features writer, and a longtime writ...
• Jay Rosen on the Digital Revolution That Wasn’t 29.12.2025 41min

  In 2006, Jay Rosen, the media scholar, published his influential article “The People Formerly Known as the Audience.” His medium was as important as his message. Although the essay would later appear in media-studies textbooks, it was first published on his blog, a form invented in the late 1990s that seemed, in Rosen’s words, to give everyone their own printing press. Armed with such technologies, he said, the public would no longer simply consume journalism as passive spectators. They now o...