The Kicker

Journalists on Twitter are faced with an impossible task, a choice between building their following or avoiding harassment. More often than not, they face those risks without the support of their editors and newsrooms. On this week’s Kicker, Jacob L. Nelson, an assistant professor at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University, and Kyle Pope, editor...

As Ian Urbina’s investigative work uncovered human rights abuses and climate destruction across the world’s oceans, he realized he needed to diversify his audience—beyond even the reach of legacy outlets like the New York Times. On this week’s Kicker, Urbina and Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, discuss this week’s story on Libya’s migrant prisons, and the journalism model Urbina built to ch...

On this week’s Kicker, Marcy Wheeler, an independent journalist, and Erik Wemple, a media critic at the Washington Post, speak with Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, about media accountability and where press discussion of the Steele dossier fell short.

Most reporters in the developing world can’t afford to attend high stakes climate conferences like the COP26 held in Glasgow this month. Neither can most climate activists. What is lost? Jon Allsop, author of CJR’s newsletter “The Media Today,” spent the past week at COP26. On this week’s Kicker, he sits down with two conference attendees, Disha Shetty, a public health journalist from India, and M...

As journalists struggle to cover the latest revelations in the Facebook story, they also endeavor to write stories that land with the general public. How much context is sacrificed for the sensation of something new? On this week’s Kicker, Renee DiResta, who is the technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory and an ideas contributor at Wired and The Atlantic, and Mathew Ingram,...

The network of websites that pose as local news outlets but aren’t has grown exponentially in the run up to next year’s midterm elections. Who funds the sites, and how can we track them? And why are they called “pink slime”?On this week’s Kicker, Priyanjana Bengani, a senior research fellow at Columbia Journalism School's Tow Center for Digital Journalism, sits down with Kyle Pope, editor and...

This week, the most conservative Supreme Court since the Great Depression convened. The 6-3 “super-majority” is poised to roll back decades of law. On our latest episode of the Kicker, Jay Willis, the editor in chief of Balls and Strikes, a site that launched last month promising “progressive, bullshit-free commentary” about the legal system, joins Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR. They disc...

Medhi Hasan has built a global reputation on devastating interviews. Now on MSNBC and Peacock, is he a corrective to the equivocal tendencies of the American press? Jon Allsop profiled Hasan for our latest issue. On this week’s Kicker, he sits down with Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, to detail how Hasan’s approach can be seen as “an explicit rebuke to outdated journalistic norms."

Adam Piore spoke to 50 current and former staffers at the Wall Street Journal on how the paper’s editors limit subject matter and political coverage in an effort to hold on to their traditional audience. On this week’s Kicker, Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, and Piore discuss his findings, the Journal’s obsession with the New York Times, and what it all means for the journalists who work t...

In his five-plus decades of photographing performative wealth and celebrity at events like the Vanity Fair Oscar Party and the Met Gala, Larry Fink perfected the art of taking “candid pictures of very non-candid people.” On this week’s Kicker, Fink joins Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, to discuss coverage of last week’s Met Gala, how journalism can learn from his ability to capture the spa...

For CJR, Jon Allsop followed the weekend’s deluge of September 11 anniversary coverage—where it excelled, and when it lacked self-awareness. On today’s Kicker, he joins Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, on what the media got right and what it didn’t.

Gender and sexuality can feel natural and even immutable, but science and the lived experience of numerous humans tell us that these categories are far more variable than they may seem. At a time when dozens of states around the US have passed or are considering legislation to enforce rigid definitions of gender, queer theorist Jack Halberstam and journalist Zach Stafford discuss the fallaciousnes...

The American Dream is often portrayed as the hook that pulls people to the United States. What is usually left out of the story is the hell many flee, sometimes a hell fed by the very country in which they seek refuge. The story of U.S. involvement in Central America is a classic example of wars inflicted on people by U.S. financed repressive regimes and later by gangs grown in the U.S. and deport...

Steel produced in Youngstown, Ohio, helped America win World War II, and it was used to build the bridges that we cross and the buildings in which we live. But in the 1970s, the mills began closing. Some 50,000 well-paid jobs were gone. There was a concurrent rise in anger as the workers and their children struggled to survive with minimum-wage jobs or in the gig economy. Youngstown represents the...

There is a long tradition of imperial denial in the United States. After all, Americans fought the British Empire and have always thought of themselves as different from European colonialists. They are Empire Slayers — why else would “Star Wars” and its fight against the Galactic Empire have such a hold on the popular imagination? In this episode, two scholars explain how, from the nation’s birth,...

Whiteness in America isn’t just the neutral norm against which racial minorities, particularly Black people, are measured. Whiteness in America means having the privilege and power that go along with being part of that supposed norm. And becoming white – not in terms of pigment but of social status – is a choice that nearly every immigrant or refugee group in America has had to embrace or reject....

The issue of police violence and racism is a familiar one. It’s been present in the United States since the Republic's beginnings. And the stories of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tamir Rice and others cannot be understood if we do not know and comprehend that history. In this episode, we discuss race, crime, criminal justice, violence and the kind of cyclical dynamic that we have seen repeat...

How We Got Here is a podcast for journalists about how history and identity shape narrative. As journalists, we like to say we’re writing the first draft of history. But if we don’t know our own history, we run the risk of misinterpreting what we see and what we hear. Of failing to connect the dots. George Floyd’s murder, the Black Lives Matter movement, the election, the attempted coup - they’ve...

When Samuel Getachew was a sixth grader in the Oakland public school system, Akintunde Ahmad was a “hometown hero,” headed to Yale. On this week’s Kicker, Ahmad, now a CJR contributor and Ida B. Wells fellow, and Getachew, a rising first year at Yale, discuss the media’s misuse of successful Black students.

How do we report and contextualize the January 6 insurrection, or the largest efforts to suppress the vote since the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, or the way political power is wielded in the US without understanding the racial history of our country? On this week’s Kicker, Hannah-Jones, the new Knight chair in race and reporting at Howard University, and a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter...

The pandemic’s limits on primary candidates and the journalists who cover them; a drastically shorter campaign season; and all but absent public polling thanks to the new ranked choice voting. This has been a New York City primary season like no other. On this week’s Kicker, Errol Louis, who is the anchor of NY1’s “Inside City Hall,” the host of the podcast “You Decide with Errol Louis,” and a pro...

At the start of the pandemic, the UK government’s suppression of data prompted Carole Cadwalladr and her colleagues at All the Citizens to found Independent SAGE, a group of scientists who shadow official government scientists. Now, as the UK hurtles towards a June 21 reopening that now looks unlikely to happen, the group’s findings are more concerning than ever. On this week’s Kicker, Cadwalladr,...

With over ten thousand athletes from more than two hundred countries, the Olympics are typically a sports writer’s dream. But with Covid protocols in Tokyo this summer, and heightened awareness that players no longer need the press to connect with their fans, is spontaneous sports access also obsolete? On this week’s Kicker, Andrew Keh, a sports reporter for the New York Times, and Kyle Pope, edit...

About half of daily local newspaper circulation in the US is now controlled by hedge funds. On this week’s Kicker, Rebecca Lurye, a reporter for the Hartford Courant and unit chair for the Hartford Courant Guild, and Danielle Ohl, a reporter for the Capital Gazette and chair of the Chesapeake News Guild, join Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR. They discuss what comes next after Alden Global C...

As the Supreme Court prepares to hear Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a Mississippi case that outlaws abortion after 15 weeks gestation, the media’s coverage of abortion, and the language used to describe it, will be back in the spotlight. On this week’s Kicker, Maria Clark, a Louisiana-based healthcare reporter with USA Today’s American South team, and Jessica Mason Pieklo, senior v...