The Kicker

As long-time middle school principal and COVID survivor Lisa Edmiston prepares to reopen her middle school in Astoria, she has worked to manage the fear shared by her staff and students. She has also made arrangements for herself at a local funeral home.On this week’s Kicker, Edmiston, and Michael Elsen-Rooney, an education reporter for the Daily News, speak with Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, on how to assess what city education officials say, New York Mayor Bill De Blasio’s dismissive attitude towards education unions, and the pandemic’s effect on the culture of the Department of Education.

On this week’s Kicker, Professor Richard R. John, a historian and author of “Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse,” speaks with Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, on the intersection between the Postal Service and politics. For decades, the Postal Service -- the internet of its age -- was entwined in electoral politics. That ended, but now Donald Trump has restarted the fight. This episode of The Kicker looks at how reporters should cover the battle.

Radio rallies in church parking lots, candidates in their basements, and voters stuck in hibernation. When all that’s left to cover are the talking points, how should local and national political reporters adapt?This week, the national press missed the heartland’s biggest story, a series of storms that devastated the center of the country. On this week’s Kicker, Art Cullen, editor and co-owner of the Storm Lake Times in Iowa, and Ayesha Rascoe, a White House reporter for NPR, join Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, to discuss journalism’s struggle to avoid the mistakes of 2016 while in the midst of a pandemic.

Stephen Sackur and Interviewing Trump by Columbia Journalism Review

The uprising to abolish the police asks our country, and the press, to envision a new world. But the news business is not built to accommodate ideas that would transform society. On this week’s Kicker, three longtime writers and speakers on anti-Black racism and policing—Mychal Denzel Smith, Josie Duffy Rice, and Alex Vitale—discuss media coverage of recent protests, trace our use of the word crime, and urge us to focus on local activism.

When Nicholson Baker first fell in love with YouTube, it was for its “outpouring of human miscellany” and “first person journalism.” But when CJR asked him to write about YouTube as a purveyor of political information, he stumbled upon a different world—one that, in spite of recent algorithmic adjustments, makes radicalization a frictionless experience.On this week’s Kicker, Baker and Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, discuss Baker’s YouTube experience, as well as the extraordinary discoveries he made for his new book, Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act.

On this week’s Kicker, journalist Jack Herrera and Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, discuss the gaps in newsroom’s coverage of the defunding debate, and the blind spots journalists still have as a result of the lack of newsroom diversity.

Ed Yong on COVID-19 and American fatalism by Columbia Journalism Review

People with untreated mental illnesses are 16 times more likely to be killed by police. Studies show they make up close to half of all police shooting victims. Young black men with mental illness are the most vulnerable group of all, so why won’t the press tell their stories?On this week’s Kicker, Meg Kissinger, an investigative reporter and professor of reporting on the mental health system at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, and Dr. Stephanie Le Melle, the Director of Public Psychiatry Education at Columbia University Department of Psychiatry and New York State Psychiatric Institute, speak with Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, about how to report on police violence against black sufferers of serious mental illness.

As journalists cover the intersection of racist police riots, our president’s instability, and the coronavirus pandemic, we struggle to break the old mold of objective reporting. Wesley Morris, a critic-at-large for the New York Times, recently wrote about the terrifying detachment of white police violence, the inequalities the pandemic has underlined, and how Patti LaBelle’s 1985 cover of “If You Don’t Know Me by Now” depicts four hundred years of Black suffering. On this week’s Kicker, Morris joins Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, to discuss his piece and how to cover the heartbreak and rage sparked by the murder of George Floyd.