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 pre...
12 Feb 1h 2min
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 ...
5 Feb 51min
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 lo...
29 Jan 44min
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 ...
22 Jan 1h 19min
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. A...
15 Jan 44min
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...
8 Jan 30min
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 ...
29 Dec 202541min
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 am...
23 Dec 202536min
