The Kicker

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, Nic...

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 friendl...

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...

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...

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...

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, cr...

“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...

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...

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 refug...

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...

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 so...

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 progra...

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 writ...

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...

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 o...

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 acc...

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 rei...

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...