The Kicker

This week, host Josh Hersh dives into the world of documentary news. Amel Guettatfi and Julia Steers just won the Polk Award for Inside Wagner, their hourlong Vice News documentary on the Wagner Group—Vladimir Putin’s private army of militiamen. They discuss their unprecedented access to a military training operation in the Central African Republic, the unique challenges of doing this kind of repo...

In recent years, numerous beloved sports news institutions have been shut down, or dramatically reduced their operations, while digital shows hosted by professional sportspeople, current and retired, have become ubiquitous,  Meanwhile, traditional sports journalism—particularly of the type that asks uncomfortable questions of what is, ultimately, a huge and powerful business—has been in decline. L...

News of stubborn inflation, increasing unemployment, and the housing crisis dominate headlines of late. Alissa Quart is trying to improve that reportage, in content and form. Quart is the executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, which challenges traditional narratives of economic class and issues through funding original reporting, done by independent journalists from diverse...

Before Russia invaded her home country, Ukrainian journalist Svitlana Oslavska was reviewing books for Krytyka, a Ukrainian magazine, and writing nonfiction books. Now, she’s documenting war crimes committed by the Russians against Ukrainians for the Reckoning Project. Since joining the Project, Oslavska’s reporting serves two purposes — to provide detailed witness testimonies for court cases agai...

The Columbia Journalism Review recently invited journalists, academics, and experts to convene at a conference called "FaultLines: Democracy." In this episode, taped at the FaultLines conference, Masha Gessen, of The New Yorker; Jodie Ginseberg, president of the Committee to Protect Journalists; and Sheila Coronel, an expert in global investigative journalism, discuss how authoritarian r...

For decades, Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty have broadcast into countries all over, in dozens of languages. Yet in some places where the United States has invested the most soft power, authoritarianism has only gotten stronger—and journalists remain at risk. That may be especially true in Afghanistan since the Taliban’s takeover. For CJR's latest digital issue, Emily Rus...

In 1982, about twenty Black journalists quit their jobs at American networks, banded together under the name Jacaranda Nigeria Limited, and flew to Nigeria, where they would work under the country’s newly elected president to revamp a state-funded journalism network. On today’s episode of the Kicker, Feven Merid, a Columbia Journalism Review staff writer, tells their story. She explains the many u...

Last week, the Columbia Journalism Review published a four-part investigation into the media’s fraught relationship with Donald Trump. In this episode of the Kicker, Jeff Gerth, who authored the report, talks to Kyle Pope, CJR’s editor and publisher, about the origin of the investigation and the intense responses to it, with which Gerth admits he is still “grappling.”On the podcast, Gerth says he...

After two decades of attending the World Economic Forum's annual gathering of business elites in Davos, Rana Foroohar, associate editor of the Financial Times, stayed back this year. In this week’s episode of The Kicker, Foroohar tells Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of the Columbia Journalism Review, why the annual meet-up of global technocrats imparts “icky” feelings, and why the Davos crow...

At the start of January, Jon Allsop, chief writer of Columbia Journalism Review’s newsletter, The Media Today, tuned back into the news after a two-month hiatus. On this week’s Kicker, Allsop discusses what he found upon his return: a “ghostland” of a Twitter feed and a keen awareness of the “trivial” nature of the news cycle. In conversation with Kyle Pope, CJR’s editor and publisher, Allsop also...

Elon Musk’s ownership of Twitter has inspired news headlines once unimaginable (see New York Magazine's "Elon Musk is Selling Off Twitter’s Cafeteria and Furniture"). It has also created serious problems for journalists who rely on the platform for developing sources, finding stories, and driving readership. It’s not safe to do journalistic business on the platform anymore, Emily Be...

Welcome to the weird, wild, scintillatingly stylish, and syntactically sound world of RED PEN—the grammar podcast that won't put you to sleep.  Brought to you by the Columbia Journalism Review and hosted by old buds Ryan Davis and Mike Laws, RED PEN plucks examples from the news (as well as from novels, music, movies—wherever!) to answer all those questions you were too afraid to ask in Engli...

Writing for The Guardian last week, Washington bureau chief David Smith recalled that Donald Trump, announcing his run for presidency at Mar-a-Lago, appeared an “ousted dictator, drained of power and surrounded by a dwindling band of loyalists in his last redoubt.” Many in the media similarly reported a lackluster atmosphere and an uninspired Trump, whose splintered Republican base, deepened by mi...

On today’s Kicker, what the media got right and wrong in the 2022 midterm election. Ross Barkan, a politics reporter for New York magazine, The Nation and more talks with CJR’s editor and publisher Kyle Pope about the media’s penchant for speculation in divisive elections. Also in the discussion: how the media grapples with writing about a democracy in peril. On today’s Kicker, what the media got...

Reporting from Moscow in the final years of the Cold War, Bill Keller witnessed the Soviet Union “fall apart like Humpty Dumpty.” On this week’s Kicker, Keller says Vladimir Putin is trying to put Humpty Dumpty back together again – evoking international anxieties from the past. Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of the Columbia Journalism Review, asks Keller about these anxieties, and, alongside CJR...

Just as Europeans prepare for winter amid rising gas prices – calling upon their old ties to gas-rich African countries – a colonial-era island off the coast of Senegal erodes into the rising sea. Both these stories, discussed on this week’s Kicker with Nic Haque, a reporter for Al Jazeera, underscore the urgency of the climate crises that journalists cover across the globe. Some of that work, inc...

In 1975, at the age of twenty-nine, John Bennet got a job at The New Yorker , under the editorship of William Shawn. He was first placed on the copy desk. Eventually, he edited Pauline Kael, Seymour Hersh, John McPhee, Alma Guillermoprieto, Oliver Sacks, Robert Caro, Elizabeth Kolbert, Bill Finnegan, and many others. In 2001, he started teaching courses in magazine writing at Columbia Journalism S...

On this week’s Kicker, Rebecca Traister, a writer-at-large for New York Magazine and the Cut, and the author of “Good and Mad,” a book about the history and political power of women’s anger, sits down with Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR. They discuss why the press seemed only willing to cover “medically chilling” abortion stories, and how to protect sources as abortion’s legal loopholes di...

Should climate crisis coverage focus on the danger at hand, or on optimism and solutions at work? On what individuals can do, or industrial changes? As newsrooms struggle to reach a consensus, the Covering Climate Now Journalism Awards provide a model for impactful work. Justin Worland, senior correspondent at TIME, was just named CCN’s 2022 Journalist of the Year. On this week’s Kicker, Worland s...

Nina Totenberg has covered the Supreme Court for five decades. On this week’s Kicker, the NPR reporter sits down with Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, to discuss a court she says is more conservative than it has been since the late 1920s and early 1930s, and what happens next in light of the leak of the Roe v Wade decision. Nina Totenberg is NPR's legal affairs correspondent. She has a...

The Columbia Graduate School of Journalism announced today that Jelani Cobb will be its new dean. Cobb is a professor at the school, a staff writer at The New Yorker, an author, a documentary producer, and the director of the Ira A. Lipman Center For Journalism and Civil and Human Rights. On this week’s Kicker, Cobb speaks with Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, about the role of journalism a...

Elena Kostyuchenko reported atrocities as they unfolded inside Ukraine until Russian censors forced Novaya Gazeta—her employer and Russia’s oldest independent newspaper—to halt publication. How did Kostyuchenko gain access to the country her homeland was invading? What did she see there? And how does she view Russia’s future? On this week’s Kicker, guest host Keith Gessen, who is a professor at th...

Last week, after years of public speculation on the matter, the New York Times named Joe Kahn as Dean Baquet’s successor to the position of executive editor. How did that process play out behind closed doors? And, as the midterms draw near, how does Kahn plan to cover the threat to American democracy? Baquet and Kahn sat down with Kyle Pope to discuss objectivity, the evolution of the paper from a...

Al Roker, weathercaster for the Today Show, is one of the best-known and trusted names in media. He has also led efforts to educate the American public on the ties between weather and the climate crisis. On this week’s Kicker, Roker and Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, discuss the evolution of weather coverage, from lighthearted entertainment to reporting on the frontlines of the biggest st...

Over the past week, Ukrainians have used social media to document Russia’s attacks on civilians. Those efforts have been more effective at blunting the Russian propaganda machine than anything that has come out of the technology companies themselves. On this week’s Kicker, Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, speaks with Jane Lytvynenko, a senior research fellow in the Technology and Social Cha...