When I took over the Kicker host chair, one of the things I was most excited to do was to interview early-career journalists, who see the changes to our industry from an entirely different perspective from those of us who’ve been around since the days when Twitter was king, or before social media existed. I’ve always loved working with young people—among my many freelance gigs, I help run a program for high school journalists—because I feel like I get smarter (and hopefully even marginally more relevant?) every time I talk to them.

For going on seven years now, Sofia Barnett has been one of my favorite young journalists to talk to. From the first time I met her, when she was a high school junior outside Dallas, she’s been uncommonly driven: toward a career in journalism, toward telling the stories of Indigenous Americans like herself, toward seeing the world and writing about all of it. Now, at twenty-three, she’s covered more big stories than many people do in a full career. She wound up at the Minnesota Star Tribune fresh out of college, moving to Minneapolis just in time for perhaps the newsiest year in the city’s history. As an intern, she was the first reporter on the scene of the Annunciation Catholic Church school shooting last August. Then, while formally assigned to cover the suburbs, she was named to the five-person team covering the Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids on the city.

In this episode, Barnett and I talk about all of that, plus about how she thinks about a career in this tumultuous time for journalism. Listen below—or wherever you get your podcasts.

Show notes:

• He couldn’t run. So they covered him instead. Sofia Barnett, Minnesota Star Tribune
• ‘Just another Native’: Minneapolis Indigenous women demand emergency response to violence. Sofia Barnett, Minnesota Star Tribune
• Texas ranks almost dead last in the nation for women’s health care, research shows. Sofia Barnett, Dallas Morning News
• The Princeton Summer Journalism Program

Megan Greenwell, host

Amanda Darrach, producer

Since October 7, 2023, Miriam Berger has been on assignment in Jerusalem, covering Israel, Palestine, and war. A few weeks ago, she learned she and hundreds of colleagues were being laid off.

One perk of hosting an interview podcast is having the opportunity to talk to journalists whose work I’ve admired for years but might never have met otherwise. Miriam Berger is one such journalist. She’s written some of the best articles I’ve read from Israel and Palestine: rich, textured narratives that tell stories of complicated human realities. A Philadelphia native, she’s spent a significant chunk of her career in the Middle East, working in both Arabic and Hebrew and becoming a go-to authority on the war.

Though it was a thrill to get to speak with Berger, the peg for our conversation was a brutal one: She was one of three hundred–plus journalists who learned early this month that they would be laid off by the Washington Post, a dismantling that all but eliminated the publication’s international desk. Berger was on leave when the cuts were announced, working on a book about Israel’s starvation of Gaza. In this week’s episode of The Kicker, she and I talked about how media coverage of the region has evolved since October 7, 2023; how she reported stories from Gaza despite Israel banning reporters from entering; and the outdated distinctions Western media outlets draw between journalists sent from HQ and “local reporters” like the Palestinians she worked with. Listen below—or wherever you get your podcasts.

Show notes:

Palestinian paramedics said Israel gave them safe passage to save a 6-year-old girl in Gaza. They were all killed. Meg Kelly, Hajar Harb, Louisa Loveluck, Miriam Berger, and Cate Brown, Washington Post

Thousands of Gazans have gone missing. No one is accounting for them. Miriam Berger and Hajar Harb, Washington Post

Support for Washington Post international employees, GoFundMe

Megan Greenwell, host

Amanda Darrach, producer

While the newspaper industry continues to contract, nonprofit news outlets have proliferated over the past decade. But dismissing profitable models for journalism is premature.

How can journalism survive? Perhaps the question would once have sounded unduly panicked, but it has only grown more pressing over the past twenty years. Between 2004 and 2019, newspapers lost an astonishing 77 percent of their jobs—more than any other industry on record, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In early February, the industry suffered another historic blow, as the Washington Post announced it was laying off nearly half its staff. When even a legacy media outlet like the Post struggles—when even ownership by Jeff Bezos, who has a net worth of two hundred and fifty billion dollars, cannot guarantee stability—it is easy to wonder what hope there is. Is journalism slowly, or not so slowly, going kaput?

Not so fast.

In this episode of Journalism 2050, we’re joined by two guests who show—in different yet equally promising ways—what the future of journalism can look like. Vanan Murugesan is the executive director of Sahan Journal, a widely acclaimed local news organization in Minneapolis that was set up in 2019 to cover immigrants and people of color. Joshi Herrmann is the founder of Mill Media, which launched in Manchester in 2020 and now provides high-quality local journalism across six different cities in the UK.

Sahan Journal is one of a growing number of nonprofit news organizations that rely on philanthropic grants. (The Institute for Nonprofit News now counts over four hundred members.) Mill Media’s success is based on subscriptions. Both are thriving, and both provide models that others can follow. What are the risks and rewards of each approach? Have we been too quick to accept that journalism cannot be profitable in the digital age? And what changes when, with rising authoritarianism, the pressures confronting a free press become political as well as economic?

Suggested Reading:

• “Straight to your inbox: meet the journalists shaking up local UK news,” The Guardian, July 2024
• “Sahan Journal Is Built for When the National Media Leaves,” CJR, December 2025

Hosts: Emily Bell and Heather Chaplin

Producer: Amanda Darrach

Production Coordinator: Hana Joy

Research: Samuel Earle

Art Director: Katie Kosma

Illustrator: Aaron Fernandez

Music: Henry Crooks