The Kicker

In early 2024, scores of journalists fled Substack over the company’s refusal to ban Nazi newsletters. Smaller newsletter companies saw an opening. Beehiiv, which was founded in 2021 by former Morning Brew employees, became one of the trendy upstarts, luring journalists such as Oliver Darcy and Ryan Broderick. Since then, Preeya Goenka—who has spent her career in email and joined Beehiiv in 2022—h...

Gavin Newsom, California’s governor, had Matt Pearce sweating. Until the day before the signing deadline, Pearce didn’t know if the biggest piece of legislation he had ever worked on—one that creates a new standard for content-neutral government funding of local news—would become law or not.  And then, on September 30, Newsom signed the bill, establishing a groundbreaking precedent for state suppo...

For me, and for most of my fellow millennials in the journalism industry, the idea of spending more than two decades in the same job seems unfathomable. It’s not that I wouldn’t like to, but I’ve never made it more than four years without being laid off or experiencing circumstances so unbearable that I have no choice but to quit.  Alison Gerber arrived at the Chattanooga Times Free Press in 2003...

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 Link...

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 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, teac...

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...

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...

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...