The Kicker

When an outbreak like the Covid-19 pandemic hits, local journalists serve as first responders for global surveillance efforts. Elisabeth Rosenthal was a young physician when the AIDS epidemic hit New York City; she later covered the SARS crisis in China for the New York Times. Samantha Pak is senior editor at the Kirkland Reporter, the local paper covering Life Care Center nursing home, where 19 residents have died from the coronavirus. On this week’s Kicker, Rosenthal, who is editor-in-chief of Kaiser Health News, and Pak speak with Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, about the advantage of the local news template and what happens when we substitute politics for science.

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump didn’t visit towns like Storm Lake, Iowa in 2016. This election cycle, things are much different. Art Cullen, editor and co-owner of the Storm Lake Times, and winner of the 2017 Pulitzer for Editorial Writing, has interviewed 15 presidential candidates, including Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, and Pete Buttigieg. On this week’s Kicker, he talks to Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, about what national political reporters get wrong and what they should be focused on instead.Cullen is the author of “Storm Lake: Change, Resilience, and Hope in America’s Heartland” (Penguin, 2018)

Kadir van Lohuizen reports on the climate crisis with the same techniques he brought to his work as a war correspondent. His photography, video, and written work focus on the point of conflict between the crisis and human life. This week, Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, speaks with van Lohuizen about what kind of climate disaster coverage inspires real action.

Jess Brammar is the new editor in chief of HuffPost UK. She is also 7 months pregnant. When it comes to family leave policy, American news outlets lag behind their European counterparts. On this week’s Kicker, Brammar joins Kyle Pope, the editor and publisher of CJR, to discuss that difference and how family leave might just give newsrooms the diversity they need to survive.

In China, journalists are conditioned to keep their online activity apolitical. But the coronavirus outbreak took censors by surprise. In the panic, editors were temporarily emboldened. Han Zhang, who is on the editorial staff at the New Yorker, sat down with Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, to discuss the flow of outbreak information in the Chinese media, how many coronavirus fatalities may go unreported, and her last interview with citizen journalist Chen Quishi, before he disappeared.

Keeping the faith by Columbia Journalism Review

What do we miss when we obsess about Trump? The answer, it turns out, includes some of the most important stories of our time. On this week’s Kicker, Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, speaks with David Begnaud, lead national correspondent for “CBS This Morning” and anchor of CBS News Radio's “Reporter's Notebook,” Steven Greenhouse, a veteran New York Times labor and workplace reporter, and Tali Woodward, deputy editor of The Trace, to ask what stories we left untold in 2019, and how we can avoid making the same mistakes this election year.

In 2013, Dexter Filkins wrote the definitive profile of Major General Qassem Soleimani, the architect of Iran’s “Axis of Resistance,” whom the US assassinated last week. On this week’s Kicker, Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, speaks with Filkins about the nuances of Iranian public opinion that the Western press has missed, and why Iran’s response may be far from over.

Facebook, Google, and Twitter are going to be used to facilitate disinformation and racism in the 2020 US presidential election, and Carole Cadwalladr says we need to tell that story better. At the recent “Disinfo 2020: Prepping the Press” conference, Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, and Cadwalladr, a feature writer for the Observer who helped expose the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal in 2018, discussed her work and the connection between the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump.

Democracy is reliant on facts, but fact-checking no longer seem to dispel misleading information. As a prelude to next week’s Disinfo 2020: Prepping the Press conference, Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of CJR, discusses disinformation and the failings of the fact-checking industry with Emily Bell, the director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia, and media literacy expert Whitney Phillips, an assistant professor at Syracuse University.