The Kicker

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

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 media industry evolves. “It is conventional wisdom among journalists that while the world around us changes, our ethics do not,” Sullivan wrote, in her introduction to the project. “Yet a fresh look at our standards and practices seems a worthwhile pursuit at this moment.”Sullivan joins The Kicker to talk about what it means for journalism ethics to evolve with the times—and how she views critical questions around transparency, media bias, and whether the public editor role might make its return.Read More:*“A New Look at Journalism Ethics”—A special project from CJR *“Is Objectivity Still Worth Pursuing?”*“What Do Journalists Owe Their Sources—and Their Audiences?”*“Can AI Tools Meet Journalistic Standards?”

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 in the week by several Chicago news  organizations and reporters who had been injured or detained while trying to cover ICE activity in the city. Stephanie Lulay is the co–executive editor and cofounder of one of them, Block Club, a seven-year-old digital nonprofit that seems almost perfectly built for this moment. She and reporter Francia García Hernández join The Kicker to talk about what they’ve seen around Chicago recently, and about what it’s like reporting on a city under siege.Read more:*The lawsuit filed by Block Club and other Chicago-area news outlets.*Some of Francia’s coverage for Block Club. *A September incident during which a Block Club freelancer was shot by pepper balls while covering protests at Broadview.*Dave Levinthal for CJR on how ICE has been routinely ignoring FOIA requests from reporters—including one from Block Club.

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 an expertise on what you might call the fringe beat, covering shadowy internet groups and right-wing political movements for CNN.Those worlds collided when a very online man assassinated the right-wing political star Charlie Kirk in a meme-drenched attack that left much of the media world mystified. Reeve joins The Kicker to help make sense of it all.Read More:*Elle recently spoke about interviewing extreme figures with CNN’s Donie O'Sullivan *Black Pill, Elle’s 2024 book on her journeys into the “darkest corners of the internet”*“Charlottesville: Race and Terror,” the 2017 Vice News documentary

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 author and historian who’s spent more than two decades covering American politics—more recently he’s written a series of oral histories on major world events, and hosted a critically acclaimed podcast series about the early days of the internet and the culture of armed self-defense.But today, Graff is worried that political journalists are failing to recognize the history they are already living through. He joins The Kicker to share his thoughts on what he sees as the fragile state of American democracy—and the need for DC reporters to dig a lot deeper.Read More:*Graff’s blog post on the need for more reporting on Trump’s health*Graff on the increasingly blurry lines between democracy and authoritarianism*Breaking the Internet, season 4 of Graff’s acclaimed podcast series, The Long Shadow*Liam Scott in CJR on how the White House press handled the rumors of Trump’s death

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, Hassan pointedly apologized for not doing more to make the job safer for the next generation—a reference to, as she explains in this week’s episode of The Kicker, the brutality of the war in Gaza. “We're responsible for what our industry stands for,” she said. “I think it is the responsibility of the industry, of those who have the power, of heads of news organizations, to defend journalists when they come under attack, no matter where they are.”Watch More:*“Starving Gaza”—Hind’s 2024 documentary for Al Jazeera’s Fault Lines*“Inside the Wellness Industry’s Controversial Supply Chains”—Hind’s 2022 film for Vice News*“The Business of War”—Episode One of Hind’s new series for Al Jazeera