The Kicker

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 reinstate the workers’ previous health plan, plus reimburse costs accrued when management failed to bargain in good faith.A few hours after rejoicing over the Supreme Court news, though, elation turned to mourning. Citing 350 million dollars in losses over twenty years, the P-G’s owner, Block Communications, announced it would shut down the paper — one of the oldest in the country — effective May 3. The company took no questions from its employees. The three weeks since have brought a flurry of activity designed to save some version of the Post-Gazette. Batz and his colleagues have been meeting multiple times a week — sometimes with potential funders, sometimes alone — to figure out the best path forward. This morning, a group of them announced the launch of the Pittsburgh Alliance for People-Empowered Reporting (PAPER), which is raising money to research “worker-owned and non-profit models as well as the potential for a truly independent Post-Gazette.” Forty-nine of their coworkers who didn’t strike, meanwhile, are working to overthrow union leadership in hopes of negotiating with Block Communications. Seemingly everyone in Pittsburgh’s large philanthropic world seems to be chattering about the potential for a nonprofit model.For this week’s episode of The Kicker, I talked to Batz about the highs and lows of his thirty-plus years at the P-G and his three years on strike, from his job editing the strikers’ award-winning newspaper, to the friendships that ended as a result of the battle, to the efforts to build something new.SHOW NOTESPittsburgh Alliance for People-Empowered Reporting (PAPER)Pittsburgh Union ProgressHost: Megan GreenwellProducer: Amanda Darrach

Maria Bustillos, a journalist and court reporter for the Gawker trial, Samuel Earle, an author researching political movements, and Marine Doux, a media co-creator, delve into the explosive ramifications of the Gawker trial on media and politics. They discuss Peter Thiel's vendetta against Gawker, the legal strategies that led to its downfall, and the deeper political shifts towards authoritarianism. The conversation touches on media independence, cooperative models, and the critical role of digital ownership in preserving journalism's future.

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, writing a riveting six-thousand-something first-person words containing not only full transparency on the company’s revenue and costs, but also a meditation on the past, present, and future of worker-owned co-ops. “When Defector staffers speak to journalists interested in starting their own publications, with some frequency we sense that they are naively imagining worker ownership as a panacea to the ills of their previous workplaces, and treating meaningful subscription revenue as a foregone conclusion,” he wrote. “But the truth is that launching your own business is hard, and much harder today than it was five years ago.”As I started thinking about what The Kicker could sound like with me in the host chair, I knew immediately that I wanted to interview Jasper first. Narratives about exciting new business models like worker ownership often get flattened; rooting for them to thrive can sometimes mean talking less than honestly about the challenges as well as the triumphs. Despite Defector’s innumerable triumphs, Jasper never falls into that trap. Listen to his wisdom wherever you get your podcasts.SHOW NOTESDefector Annual Report, September 2024–August 2025Host: Megan GreenwellProducer: Amanda Darrach

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. Then he left! Now you have me. I’m an author and magazine features writer, and a longtime writer and editor at publications including ESPN the Magazine (RIP), Deadspin (RIP), GOOD magazine (RIP), and even some that still exist (the Washington Post, Wired, etc.). I’m very excited to be taking over from Josh, who—as you will learn in this episode—was one of the first journalists I really admired. Going through the archive of Kicker episodes from Josh’s run, one thing that sticks out is how many of the stories he covered are still relevant now. And a thousand new ones seem to pop up every day, so I don’t think my run is likely to be any less exciting than his. I wanted to have Josh on as my very first guest to talk about what he learned from hosting this show and what advice he has for me. We talked about journalists’ ongoing battle for relevance in the age of streamers and why journalists should never marry journalists. He even persuaded me to pay more attention to TV news. I hope to make The Kicker feel approachable and warm, like listening in on conversations at the dive bar around the corner from the newsroom. Mostly, I’m excited to talk to a whole bunch of smart people in the only industry I’ve ever worked in and call it a (part time) job. I’d love to hear from you about what you think I should cover on The Kicker and who you think I should have on. Let’s get going.Show NotesEx-Reporter Relies on the Book, Not the Pen, Joshua Hersh, Columbia SpectatorAlex Jones Says Trump Is Just The Start, Michael Moynihan, VICE News‘I Try to Find the Question That People Cannot Squirm Out Of’: Nashville’s Phil Williams on local investigative reporting, Josh Hersh, The KickerHost: Megan GreenwellProducer: Amanda Darrach

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, he said, the public would no longer simply consume journalism as passive spectators. They now owned the means of media production. A beautiful democracy and a newly accountable press were sure to flourish. As Rosen knows as well as anyone, the world did not quite pan out that way. What was initially understood to be a technology of liberation became, increasingly, a mechanism of control: a means of surveilling the public, selling ads, and generating enormous profits for a small number of companies. Journalism and democracy both entered periods of sustained crisis from which they have yet to recover. The internet has even begun to abandon participation as part of its core ethos. As a recent analysis by the Financial Times shows, “social media has become less social”: partly because of these platforms’ algorithms, people are interacting with one another less and returning to the passive media consumption that the internet was supposed to disrupt. In this context, it seems that the people formerly known as the audience are… once again the audience.In this episode of Journalism 2050, Rosen joins Emily Bell and Heather Chaplin to discuss where it all went wrong and what journalists can do to fight back. Were the assumptions that the internet would help democracy and journalism simply naive? What did commentators fail to see at the time? What should we make of the return to blogging culture via platforms like Substack and Medium? Further Reading:“The People Formerly Known as the Audience,” Jay Rosen, Press Think, June 2006“Have we passed peak social media?” John Burn-Murdoch, Financial Times, October 2025“Winter is coming: prospects for the American press under Trump,” Jay Rosen, Press Think, December 2016Hosts: Emily Bell and Heather ChaplinProducer: Amanda DarrachEditor: Emily RussellProduction Coordinator: Hana JoyResearch: Samuel EarleArt Director: Katie KosmaIllustrator: Aaron FernandezMusic: Henry Crooks

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 unfold. He realized in that moment just how popular divisive content could be. In hindsight, it was a grim foreshadowing: social media created the perfect conditions for an exceedingly polarizing presidential candidate to thrive.In this episode of Journalism 2050, Smith, the cofounder and editor in chief of Semafor, joins Emily Bell and Heather Chaplin to reflect on the thrill of being a journalist in the early years of social media, the internet’s evolution since then, and how AI has become the latest vehicle for techno-evangelism. Even as politics and the tech industry tack right, he insists upon his “core conviction” that good journalism will always find a way to survive.Should we mourn journalism’s past? How worrying is the future of the news? If Ben Smith was starting out now, would he even be a journalist? Over twenty-five years, as a blogger, editor, and founder—from Politico and BuzzFeed News to the New York Times and, now, Semafor—Smith’s career has always been a revealing indicator of the state of the journalism industry, and where it’s going next.Further Reading:“What Colors Are This Dress?” BuzzFeed, February 26, 2015“The Internet of the 2010s Ended Today,” by Charlie Warzel, April 2023, on how BuzzFeed News “defined an era.”“The New York Times’ success lays bare the media's disastrous state,” Emily Bell, The Guardian, February 2020“Why the Success of the New York Times May Be Bad News for Journalism,” Ben Smith, New York Times, March 2020Hosts: Emily Bell and Heather ChaplinProducer: Amanda DarrachProduction Coordinator: Hana JoyResearch: Samuel EarleArt Director: Katie KosmaIllustrator: Aaron FernandezMusic: Henry Crooks

Natalia Antelava, co-founder of Coda Story and former BBC foreign correspondent, delves into the troubling intersection of journalism and technology. She unveils how news organizations naively trusted tech giants like Google and Facebook, leading to compromised reporting. Natalia discusses the dangers of a 24/7 news cycle that prioritizes noise over substance, and highlights the growing power of oligarchs in shaping democracy. She urges journalism to seek alliances that uphold democratic values, moving away from complacency with tech giants.

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 on Gaza on journalism and what history can teach us about the role of the press in times of crisis.According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, it took only ten weeks at the end of 2022 for Israel to kill more journalists in Gaza than had previously been killed in any one country over an entire year. The attacks have not relented in the three years since: while barring international journalists from entry, the Israeli military has treated journalists inside Gaza as acceptable collateral damage and even, at times, explicit targets. In September, Irene Khan, the UN special rapporteur, described it as “the deadliest conflict ever for journalists.” These attacks on journalism, and the limp response from the US and other powerful countries, set a dangerous precedent for the future. How might journalists and media organizations take the defense of their principles and values into their own hands? What lessons can we learn from the past? What tools do journalists need to navigate this new world? Further reading: Urgent Ideas for Defending Press Freedom in Gaza, Columbia Journalism Review, by Azmat Khan, Meghnad Bose, and Lauren WatsonGlobal Muckraking: 100 Years of Investigative Journalism from Around the World, edited by Anya SchiffrinProducer: Amanda DarrachProduction Coordinator: Hana JoyResearch: Samuel EarleArt Director: Katie KosmaIllustrator: Aaron FernandezMusic: Henry Crooks

Douglas Rushkoff, a media theorist known for his insights on technology’s cultural impact, chats with Emily Bell and Heather Chaplin about navigating the present amidst digital chaos. They discuss the origins of internet subcultures and critique the dominance of Silicon Valley. Rushkoff shares his views on AI's potential to reshape employment and the fragility of billionaire escape fantasies. He highlights the importance of local journalism and community ties as resistance against authoritarianism, envisioning a future that balances global and local media narratives.

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 Journalism and Columbia Journalism Review, with help from the New School's Journalism + Design Lab. Journalism 2050 is supported by the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation and available wherever you get your podcasts