The Kicker

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 informa...

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, writ...

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. Th...

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...

It has been called “the last good day on the internet”: on February 26, 2015, Americans flocked online to watch fugitive llamas in Arizona evade their captors on a live broadcast, shortly before an ambiguously colored dress—blue and black to some, white and gold to others—was uploaded online. At BuzzFeed , which sent the dress to unprecedented levels of global virality, Ben Smith watched it all un...

When Natalia Antelava cofounded Coda Story , in early 2016, to cover democratic backsliding around the globe, she wasn’t expecting the tech industry to be such a big part of the story. It wasn’t only that autocratic regimes were benefiting from compliant Silicon Valley companies. By launching a new media organization, Antelava also discovered how entangled journalism itself had become with some of...

Examining an ongoing crisis for press freedom—and how to manage security risks going forward. For Journalism 2050’s inaugural live event, Emily Bell and Heather Chaplin are joined by Azmat Khan, the director of Columbia’s Simon and June Li Center for Global Journalism, and Anya Schiffrin, a professor at the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs, to discuss the consequences of the war...

In 1992, a writer named Douglas Rushkoff signed a contract for Cyberia , his book about the internet subcultures of the West Coast. The next year, his publisher canceled it, according to Rushkoff’s recollection, on the grounds that “by the time the book came out the Internet was going to be over.” (He later found a different publisher, and the book came out in 1994.) Since then, Rushkoff has been...

Emily Bell and Heather Chaplin speak with the smartest minds in media to discuss the roots of today's crisis in journalism, from democracy's decline to the rise of AI, and to explore the uncertain future of journalism in the digital age.  This series is brought to you by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism and Columbia Journalism Review, with help from the New School's Journalism...

This summer, Margaret Sullivan, the executive director of the Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security at Columbia Journalism School, and her colleague Julie Gerstein published a series of essays in CJR exploring what a new generation of journalism ethics might look like, as the media industry evolves.  “It is conventional wisdom among journalists that while the world around us chan...

On Thursday, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order barring federal agents from using riot control measures like tear gas to disperse journalists seeking to cover protests outside the Broadview ICE processing center, near Chicago.  The order was the result of a lawsuit filed earlier in the week by several Chicago news  organizations and reporters who had been injured or detained whil...

In 2017, Elle Reeve, then a correspondent for Vice News , became a household name when she reported from the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia—as neo-Nazis marched with burning torches and a white supremacist drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters.  Reeve has developed an expertise on what you might call the fringe beat, covering shadowy internet groups and right-wing p...

Last week, as DC reporters were patting themselves on the back for not falling for internet falsehoods claiming that Donald Trump had secretly died, Garrett Graff wrote an essay on his blog, Doomsday Scenario , saying, “It’s time to have a serious conversation about Trump’s health.” Graff is an author and historian who’s spent more than two decades covering American politics—more recently he’s wri...

Earlier this month, Hind Hassan, a decorated documentary news reporter who has covered everything from conflicts in Gaza, Lebanon, and Ukraine to the bizarre underworld of the global wellness industry, spoke at a graduation ceremony for students at Columbia Journalism School.  In her address , Hassan pointedly apologized for not doing more to make the job safer for the next generation—a reference...

For the past few weeks, MAGA media and conservative podcasters have been torn apart over President Trump’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein saga. Anna Merlan, a senior reporter at Mother Jones , joins The Kicker to talk about right-wing media’s efforts to change the subject—and whether their audiences will go along with it.  Read more: *Anna Merlan on what happened the last time Trump’s team tried...

Recent weeks have not been very comfortable for the BBC. A documentary about Gaza it refused to broadcast was aired instead by a competitor, to critical acclaim. A livestream of the Glastonbury Festival turned into a political nightmare, after a performer led the crowd in a chant of “Death to the IDF”—leading the network to ditch plans for future “high risk” live shows. But Alan Rusbridger, who sp...

Last year, Branko Brkic, the founder of the Daily Maverick , a South African news outlet, left his day job to launch an advocacy campaign in defense of journalism. Called Project Kontinuum, the organization aims to sound the alarm about the global threats facing the institution of journalism—and to begin to mount a defense. In this conversation, Brkic speaks about the admittedly “bleak” picture th...

For nearly twenty years, Arwa Damon worked as a journalist covering conflict zones across the Middle East—much of it as a prominent correspondent for CNN.  But in 2015, amid the unending horrors of the Syrian civil war, Damon had enough. She left the network and founded Inara, a charity that helps provide treatment to children facing some of the most difficult medical conditions. Her new role has...

Ghaith Abdul-Ahad is an award-winning Iraqi journalist for The Guardian and the author of A Stranger in Your Own City (2023), a reported memoir of his life as an architect turned journalist during the American war in Iraq. In this wide-ranging conversation, Abdul-Ahad shares his journey to becoming a reporter, what he was surprised to learn about his own country, and how he approaches depicting th...

David Fahrenthold won the Pulitzer Prize for his 2016 reporting on how Donald Trump’s lifetime of charitable giving was largely a mirage. Nine years later, he’s still reporting on how Trumpworld’s claims about financial matters don’t always add up—this time, looking closely at the cost-cutting from DOGE for the New York Times .  But does this kind of facts-first reporting still land? With Trump do...

For more than thirty years, Phil Williams has been the steadying voice of investigative reporting at NewsChannel 5, in Nashville. His deep dives into toxic wastewater and lobbyist access to state politicians have earned him a slew of major journalism awards, including five Peabodys and five duPont-Columbia Awards. But in recent years, his most viral moments have been his unflappable encounters wit...

Last week, Donald Trump issued an executive order calling for the end of funding for NPR and PBS. It’s the latest attempt by conservatives to cut back on support for public media, and in particular target NPR, which they view as having a liberal bias. Katherine Maher, NPR’s CEO, says that perception is deeply unfair—and notes that the vast majority of the funding for public media goes to local sta...

A few years ago, El Salvador was one of the most violent nations in the world, with gang killings taking the lives of dozens of people every week.  Nayib Bukele, elected president in 2019, changed all that—today, violence is way down. But his brute-force approach to the problem has involved mass arrests, secret deals, and forced disappearances into a harsh prison system—which is apparently the env...

Kai Ryssdal has been the host of Marketplace , a leading daily radio show and podcast about the economy, produced by American Public Media, since 2005.  He delivers the news—from the bitter latest on our 401(k)s to unexpected interviews about the modern-day resurgence of train robberies—with an affable, direct tone. And when he has something he wants listeners to know—as he did all this week, whil...

Prosecutors weren’t notified in advance, witnesses are in shock—and Watson’s family celebrates his freedom. On the day that Carlos Watson, the founder of the digital media company Ozy Media, was due to turn himself in to prison last week, to begin serving a nearly ten-year sentence for fraud and identity theft, he and his family received some unexpected good news: President Donald Trump was commut...