The Kicker

If you thought “DOGE” only stood for the “Department of Government Efficiency”—well, you’re not alone. The world of crypto is full of double meanings and inside jokes, making the recent arrival of these alternative currency markets—and their attendant “crypto bros”—into the seat of power in Washington all the more mystifying. Enter Molly White, a longtime crypto researcher (and skeptic) whose work...

Over the past several months, Donald Trump has mounted a series of legal attacks against the media, including a libel case against ABC, an FCC investigation into CBS, and a lawsuit accusing an Iowa pollster (and the newspaper that publishes her) of “election interference.” The sometimes far-fetched claims in these cases notwithstanding, the maneuvers are having an effect. The parent company of ABC...

In January, the Baltimore Banner released an investigation into the star kicker of the Baltimore Ravens, in which multiple women accused him of sexually inappropriate behavior during massages, dating back years. (The player denies the accusations.) It was an example of a rare kind of journalism these days: hard-hitting accountability reporting on sports. Over the past several years, numerous inves...

András Pethő is a Hungarian journalist and a cofounder of Direkt36 , an independent investigative news outlet. Over the past decade, he’s watched as the government of Viktor Orbán—the world leader whom Steve Bannon once praised as “Trump before Trump”—has systematically eroded the freedom of the press in his country, in ways that may feel familiar to Americans watching corporate news leaders succu...

Jon Allsop writes and edits The Media Today , CJR’s daily newsletter. There, he’s closely watched as the American press has struggled to respond to, and cover, the barrage of news that pours out of Donald Trump. As a frenetic new term begins, Jon joins The Kicker to share his thoughts on what the media gets wrong—and how the political press might begin to chart a new relationship with the presiden...

Natalia Antelava spent many years as a correspondent for the BBC, before starting her own media company, Coda Story , in 2016. She’s covered wars in the Middle East and the rise of authoritarianism across Eastern Europe and the Caucasus. For the past year, she was a Knight Fellow at Stanford, where she examined how journalism might survive in an era of AI and tech supremacy. Antelava joins The Kic...

In the finale, Carlos Watson takes the stand—and the jury reaches a verdict. “The Unraveling of Ozy Media” is a special three-part series of The Kicker , on the trial of Carlos Watson and the excesses of the digital media age, presented by the Columbia Journalism Review . Hosted and coproduced by Josh Hersh and Susie Banikarim Produced and edited by Amanda Darrach 

How inflating traffic data went mainstream in digital media—and a key witness takes the stand. “The Unraveling of Ozy Media” is a special three-part series of The Kicker , on the trial of Carlos Watson and the excesses of the digital media age, presented by the Columbia Journalism Review . Hosted and coproduced by Josh Hersh and Susie Banikarim Produced and edited by Amanda Darrach

Carlos Watson’s media startup arrives on the scene—and insiders reveal a dark reality under its glossy veneer. “The Unraveling of Ozy Media” is a special three-part series of The Kicker , on the trial of Carlos Watson and the excesses of the digital media age, presented by the Columbia Journalism Review . Hosted and coproduced by Josh Hersh and Susie Banikarim Produced and edited by Amanda Darrach...

Starting on December 9, the Columbia Journalism Review presents a special three-part series of The Kicker : “The Unraveling of Ozy Media,” on the dramatic rise and fall of Carlos Watson, the cofounder of the digital media company Ozy. In 2023, Watson was charged with fraud after it was revealed that one of his partners had masqueraded as a YouTube executive, during a call with potential investors....

Nearly half of all Latino voters put their support behind former president Donald Trump this week, according to exit polls—a 14 percent increase from 2020. Those results surprised many, but not Jack Herrera, who has been reporting on the shifting voting habits of Latino communities across the country for years. Herrera joins The Kicker to talk about what he’s learned from his journalism in Pennsyl...

Martin Baron was the executive editor of the Washington Post from 2013 until his retirement, in 2021—which meant he was there for the arrival of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos as owner and publisher of the paper. He’s long praised Bezos for taking a firm line against any interference with the paper’s journalism, but Bezos’s sudden decision, announced last week, to torpedo the paper’s planned endorsemen...

The so-called Big Lie—that the 2020 election was stolen out from under Donald Trump—was more than just a series of individual false facts and misleading videos. It was a narrative, carefully constructed by people affiliated with the Trump campaign, and disseminated through friendly news outlets and social media channels. Four years later, that story still convinces millions of Trump’s supporters....

New York City is the media capital of the world, but the number of people and outlets covering the city locally has taken a hit recently. Over the past few years, the Wall Street Journal dropped its independent metro section, the New York Times announced it would stop endorsing local races, and the all-news radio station WCBS went off the air.  But a number of scrappy upstarts have started filling...

In March, the digital literary magazine Guernica published a personal essay by a British Israeli writer and translator, about her experiences in the aftermath of the October 7 Hamas terror attacks. It was raw and honest and painful to read. The writer, Joanna Chen, had spent years before the attacks and subsequent war on Gaza volunteering for an organization that transported Palestinian children i...

In late May, Kyle Clark went viral after he moderated a debate featuring six Republican candidates for Colorado’s Fourth Congressional District, including Rep. Lauren Boebert. He refused to allow the candidates to evade his direct questions with waffling, rambly answers, instead repeatedly cutting them off: “You didn’t make any attempt to answer the actual question,” he said at one point. Over the...

In early 2023, Patrick Lohmann, a reporter for the nonprofit Source NM , moved to the small town of Las Vegas, New Mexico, to learn how residents were coping with the aftermath of the largest wildfire in state history. What he learned there was that the destruction brought on by wildfires doesn’t end when the fire itself goes out. It can take years for people to extract benefits from the federal b...

The Democrats are gathering in Chicago next week, and the sitting president has dropped out of the race. But as the guests on today’s podcast remind us, that doesn’t mean history is repeating itself. In 1968, Ted Koppel was just back from a tour covering the war in Vietnam, and assigned to the comparatively tame—if, as he reminds us, not without its moments—presidential campaign of Republican Rich...

Eugene Daniels is a White House reporter for Politico , with a special focus on Kamala Harris. That’s put him front and center for a month of news that few people in politics saw coming. On this episode of The Kicker , Daniels shares what he’s learned from nearly four years of covering the vice president, how her relationship with the press will differ from the president’s, and why you can’t blame...

Lorena Lopez came to the United States from her home country of Nicaragua, where she was an investigative reporter, in 1992. But it wasn’t until 2016 that she managed to return to her passion, as the founding editor of La Prensa , a Spanish-language newspaper serving Western Iowa. On this week’s Kicker, Lopez talks about her long journey back to journalism, why reliable, trusted information availa...

Alex Thompson, a national political correspondent for Axios, first reported that President Biden had started wearing special sneakers, in part to reduce the risk of tripping, last fall. But until the debate last week, he was still one of a small handful of reporters who was aggressively pursuing direct evidence that Biden’s age – regular fodder for political talk shows – was actually having an imp...

Paul Farhi was a media reporter for the Washington Post until the end of last year. But instead of retiring, he’s been busier than ever, chronicling the seemingly endless stream of bad news stories about the media business, for outlets like The Atlantic and here at CJR. He joins The Kicker to talk about traditional journalism’s struggles to stay relevant amid the boundless other means companies an...

Steve Herman was the White House correspondent for Voice of America during the Trump administration. He joins The Kicker to talk about his new book on what it was like to cover a deeply unpredictable president—and why he believes it’s essential, even under extreme circumstances, for reporters to stay out of the political fray. This podcast is part of “Covering the Election,” CJR’s spring special i...

Haaretz is one of Israel’s most respected newspapers. It’s also one of the few willing to openly criticize the government for its treatment of Palestinians. The Kicker speaks with Hagar Shezaf and Omer Benjakob, two journalists with the paper, about what it’s like to do accountability journalism in Israel these days—especially in the aftermath of the devastating Hamas attacks of October 7th.  Read...

Jelani Cobb is the Dean of the Columbia Journalism School. He is also a staff writer at the New Yorker magazine. For much of the past few weeks, he has been enmeshed in Columbia University’s efforts to grapple with a protest movement on campus over the war in Gaza – one that culminated in the takeover of a building, and finally, on Tuesday, April 30th, a police raid. The Kicker talks to Cobb about...