The Kicker

Епизоде

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  Ruth Ann Harnisch on life as the fairy godmother of newsletters, podcasts, and blogs. 17.09.2026 50мин

  If you had lots of money to give away, what kind of journalism would you fund? City hall reporting? Big-swing investigative projects? Detailed coverage of your favorite sports team? The magazine of every narrative writer’s dreams? Over nearly three decades as a professional philanthropist, Ruth Ann Harnisch has funded many kinds of journalism, several of which fit none of those buckets. Deez Links, Delia Cai’s reliably hilarious “culture and online fixation report.” Oldster Magazine, Sa...
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  So Are Nonfiction Books Dead or Not? 03.09.2026 53мин

  Anna Sproul-Latimer, a literary agent, on what a shrinking market means for journalists. After a boom time for nonfiction books during the pandemic, sales have been flat or down for multiple years running. Even veteran nonfiction authors are having trouble landing book deals, and those who do are getting less money. For ambitious journalists, that’s bad news; writing a book has historically been one of the best ways to level up one’s career and supplement low newsroom salaries. Anna Sproul-L...
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  Kenya Hunter took a terrifying leap out of journalism. She couldn’t be happier. 20.08.2026 45мин

  One of my favorite dive-bar conversations with fellow journalists is “What would you do if you couldn’t do this anymore?” We’ve all thought about it; the tough economics of our industry haven’t left us any choice. It’s such an interesting window into people’s psyches: friends have told me about secret dreams of going to medical or law school, opening a restaurant, running a bed-and-breakfast, teaching kindergartners, and more. (Interestingly, no one has ever told me they would go into PR, whi...
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  Twenty Years of Food Blogs: Smitten Kitchen’s Deb Perelman has never needed AI to develop a recipe. 06.08.2026 53мин

  A friend recently posted a photo on Instagram of a giant zucchini harvested from her backyard in Chicago, with a caption that she needed recipes that use a ton of zucchini. I knew exactly where to send her. The best food blog on the internet, Smitten Kitchen, has thirty-seven zucchini recipes in its archives, ranging from quesadillas to latkes to chocolate bread. I sent my friend the link to a zucchini butter spaghetti recipe from five years ago—an internet classic. This summer, Smitten Kitch...
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  What Went Wrong: A first-time editor in chief reflects on a startup that didn’t work 23.07.2026 57мин

  When The Barbed Wire debuted, in 2024, it promised “something different: a site that combines the best of savvy, new-model online journalism with Texas’s deep—and very old—association with progressive ideas.” Its goal, Olivia Messer, the editor in chief, wrote at the time, was to reach the millions of Texans who weren’t reading their local newspaper or any statewide news outlet, and to do it in a way that created a new hybrid for-profit/nonprofit revenue model for journalism. The Barbed...
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  Welcome to Hell: A site with personality big enough for the city it covers. 09.07.2026 49мин

  Since last year’s uber-competitive New York City mayoral primary, my favorite election night activity has been watching Hell Gate’s live broadcasts. CNN it is not. The Hell Gate show is available only on YouTube; correspondents hold tiny mics with a card bearing the company logo; the set includes a disco ball. During the most recent stream, during the state’s congressional primary last month, Nick Pinto, a Hell Gate reporter, delivered coverage from his bike while commuting between candidate ...
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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 46мин

  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 ...
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  No Fanboys Need Apply: Wired bares real teeth. 23.06.2026 57мин

  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...
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  Sports Illustrated’s Emma Baccellieri on covering the changing world of women’s basketball. 11.06.2026 54мин

  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 ...
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  How Documented is reinventing immigration coverage. 21.05.2026 52мин

  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...
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  The Globe’s Emily Sweeney breaks out of Boston. 07.05.2026 44мин

  “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...
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  Taking Back Saturday: “We’re sports people. We like to score.” 23.04.2026 48мин

  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...
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  Student, Teacher: Eric Gustafson on fighting for journalistic integrity at every level. 09.04.2026 50мин

  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...
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  The Inside Look: Chatting with the New York Times’ trust editor. 26.03.2026 52мин

  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...
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  Lessons from an Early-Career Journalist 12.03.2026 48мин

  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...
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  A Look Back at Covering Gaza for the Post 26.02.2026 31мин

  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...
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  The Letter of the Law, and the Law in Practice 12.02.2026 1ч 2мин

  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...
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  A Veteran of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette—and its Long Strike—Prepares for What’s Next 29.01.2026 44мин

  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...
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  Defector’s Jasper Wang and His Unvarnished Truth 15.01.2026 44мин

  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 ...
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  Why You Should Never Marry a Journalist—and Other Lessons from Decades in Media 08.01.2026 30мин

  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...