PODCAST · news
The Kicker
by Columbia Journalism Review
The Kicker is a podcast on the media and the world today. It comes out twice a month, hosted by Megan Greenwell and produced by Amanda Darrach for the Columbia Journalism Review. It is available wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.
Episodes
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A Victim of the ‘Elon Musk Playbook’
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...
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Ruth Ann Harnisch on life as the fairy godmother of newsletters, podcasts, and blogs.
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…
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So Are Nonfiction Books Dead or Not?
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...
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Kenya Hunter took a terrifying leap out of journalism. She couldn’t be happier.
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...
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Twenty Years of Food Blogs: Smitten Kitchen’s Deb Perelman has never needed AI to develop a recipe.
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...
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What Went Wrong: A first-time editor in chief reflects on a startup that didn’t work
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…
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Welcome to Hell: A site with personality big enough for the city it covers.
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…
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Why Do You Have to Run from Us? Local reporters are struggling to get answers from the politicians they cover.
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…
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No Fanboys Need Apply: Wired bares real teeth.
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…
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Sports Illustrated’s Emma Baccellieri on covering the changing world of women’s basketball.
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...
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How Documented is reinventing immigration coverage.
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....
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The Old Playbook of Power and Influence Is Different Now
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,...
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The Globe’s Emily Sweeney breaks out of Boston.
“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,...
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How Elon Musk is colonizing the future.
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,...
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Taking Back Saturday: “We’re sports people. We like to score.”
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...
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Student, Teacher: Eric Gustafson on fighting for journalistic integrity at every level.
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…
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The Inside Look: Chatting with the New York Times’ trust editor.
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…
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Lessons from an Early-Career Journalist
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...
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A Look Back at Covering Gaza for the Post
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...
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Profit or Nonprofit? A Debate over Journalism’s Future
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...
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The Letter of the Law, and the Law in Practice
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...
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Outlier Media Reimagines What Local News Can Be
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...
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A Veteran of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette—and its Long Strike—Prepares for What’s Next
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…
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How the Gawker Trial Was the Gateway to Trump: Examining a political legacy, ten years on.
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...
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Defector’s Jasper Wang and His Unvarnished Truth
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...
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Why You Should Never Marry a Journalist—and Other Lessons from Decades in Media
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...
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Jay Rosen on the Digital Revolution That Wasn’t
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...
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Ben Smith Isn’t Afraid of the Future
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...
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How Silicon Valley Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Oligarchs
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…
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The Future of Journalism After Gaza
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...
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Douglas Rushkoff on Being the Intellectual Dominatrix of Billionaire Tech Bros
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.”...
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Journalism 2050 - Trailer
Emily Bell and Heather Chaplin speak with the smartest minds in media to discuss the roots of today's crisis in journalism, from democracy's decline to the rise of AI, and to explore the uncertain future of journalism in the digital age. This series is brought to you by the Tow Center for Digital...
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Margaret Sullivan Takes a New Look at Journalism Ethics
This summer, Margaret Sullivan, the executive director of the Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security at Columbia Journalism School, and her colleague Julie Gerstein published a series of essays in CJR exploring what a new generation of journalism ethics might look like, as the...
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Chicago’s Block Club Is Ready for ICE
On Thursday, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order barring federal agents from using riot control measures like tear gas to disperse journalists seeking to cover protests outside the Broadview ICE processing center, near Chicago. The order was the result of a lawsuit filed earlier…
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Elle Reeve on the Charlie Kirk Shooting Suspect’s Inscrutable Memes
In 2017, Elle Reeve, then a correspondent for Vice News, became a household name when she reported from the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia—as neo-Nazis marched with burning torches and a white supremacist drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters. Reeve has developed…
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Garrett Graff Thinks the Press Should Be Taking Trump’s Health Much More Seriously
Last week, as DC reporters were patting themselves on the back for not falling for internet falsehoods claiming that Donald Trump had secretly died, Garrett Graff wrote an essay on his blog, Doomsday Scenario, saying, “It’s time to have a serious conversation about Trump’s health.” Graff is an...
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Hind Hassan Is Sorry We Didn’t Do More to Make Journalism Safe
Earlier this month, Hind Hassan, a decorated documentary news reporter who has covered everything from conflicts in Gaza, Lebanon, and Ukraine to the bizarre underworld of the global wellness industry, spoke at a graduation ceremony for students at Columbia Journalism School. In her address…
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Will the Jeffrey Epstein Scandal Break MAGA Media?
For the past few weeks, MAGA media and conservative podcasters have been torn apart over President Trump’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein saga. Anna Merlan, a senior reporter at Mother Jones, joins The Kicker to talk about right-wing media’s efforts to change the subject—and whether their...
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What’s the Matter with the BBC?
Recent weeks have not been very comfortable for the BBC. A documentary about Gaza it refused to broadcast was aired instead by a competitor, to critical acclaim. A livestream of the Glastonbury Festival turned into a political nightmare, after a performer led the crowd in a chant of “Death to the...
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The Kicker Live: Branko Brkic Wants Journalists to Wake Up
Last year, Branko Brkic, the founder of the Daily Maverick, a South African news outlet, left his day job to launch an advocacy campaign in defense of journalism. Called Project Kontinuum, the organization aims to sound the alarm about the global threats facing the institution of journalism—and…
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The Kicker Live: Arwa Damon on Leaving CNN and Telling Stories from Gaza
For nearly twenty years, Arwa Damon worked as a journalist covering conflict zones across the Middle East—much of it as a prominent correspondent for CNN. But in 2015, amid the unending horrors of the Syrian civil war, Damon had enough. She left the network and founded Inara, a charity that helps...
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The Kicker Live: Ghaith Abdul-Ahad on American Misadventures in the Middle East
Ghaith Abdul-Ahad is an award-winning Iraqi journalist for The Guardian and the author of A Stranger in Your Own City (2023), a reported memoir of his life as an architect turned journalist during the American war in Iraq. In this wide-ranging conversation, Abdul-Ahad shares his journey to…
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What’s the Point of Investigating Trump?
David Fahrenthold won the Pulitzer Prize for his 2016 reporting on how Donald Trump’s lifetime of charitable giving was largely a mirage. Nine years later, he’s still reporting on how Trumpworld’s claims about financial matters don’t always add up—this time, looking closely at the cost-cutting…
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‘I Try to Find the Question That People Cannot Squirm Out Of’: An Interview with Nashville’s Phil Williams
For more than thirty years, Phil Williams has been the steadying voice of investigative reporting at NewsChannel 5, in Nashville. His deep dives into toxic wastewater and lobbyist access to state politicians have earned him a slew of major journalism awards, including five Peabodys and five...
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‘The Threat Is Very Real’: NPR’s Katherine Maher on the Fight to Save Public Media
Last week, Donald Trump issued an executive order calling for the end of funding for NPR and PBS. It’s the latest attempt by conservatives to cut back on support for public media, and in particular target NPR, which they view as having a liberal bias. Katherine Maher, NPR’s CEO, says that...
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Inside El Salvador’s Dystopian Prison Network
A few years ago, El Salvador was one of the most violent nations in the world, with gang killings taking the lives of dozens of people every week. Nayib Bukele, elected president in 2019, changed all that—today, violence is way down. But his brute-force approach to the problem has involved mass...
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Kai Ryssdal Was America’s Economic Voice of Reason This Week
Kai Ryssdal has been the host of Marketplace, a leading daily radio show and podcast about the economy, produced by American Public Media, since 2005. He delivers the news—from the bitter latest on our 401(k)s to unexpected interviews about the modern-day resurgence of train robberies—with an...
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Carlos Watson Goes Free: A Surprising Coda to the CJR Podcast
Prosecutors weren’t notified in advance, witnesses are in shock—and Watson’s family celebrates his freedom. On the day that Carlos Watson, the founder of the digital media company Ozy Media, was due to turn himself in to prison last week, to begin serving a nearly ten-year sentence for fraud and...
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Molly White Knows You Don’t Understand Crypto
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...
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The Legal War on Journalism
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…
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
The Kicker is a podcast on the media and the world today. It comes out twice a month, hosted by Megan Greenwell and produced by Amanda Darrach for the Columbia Journalism Review. It is available wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.
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Columbia Journalism Review
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does The Kicker have?
The Kicker currently has 327 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is The Kicker about?
The Kicker is a podcast on the media and the world today. It comes out twice a month, hosted by Megan Greenwell and produced by Amanda Darrach for the Columbia Journalism Review. It is available wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.
How often does The Kicker release new episodes?
The Kicker publishes regularly with 327 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
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You can listen to The Kicker on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts The Kicker?
The Kicker is created and hosted by Columbia Journalism Review.
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