The New York Times Announces Co-Host For "The Daily" Podcast

  The other day, I talked with a millennial about podcasting. I'm a boomer who is days away from being 69. My conversational partner was close to graduating from the University of New Hampshire with a History degree.

"What is your favorite podcast," I asked.

Without hesitation, she responded, "The Daily. I listen to it every weekday morning before class."

Sure, there may be the more popular podcasts, but typically the audience is monolithic with little or no variety to the makeup of the audience. By contrast, The Daily, hovers in the top five in listener ship, and captures an audience much more diverse in every way -- age, race, religion, income, and political views. 

Constructing a podcast that appeals to a wide cross-section of the U.S. population is exceedingly difficult, but The Daily acts as the adhesive that offers citizens a "shared experience and commonality of information."

With such success in attracting listeners and maintaining a high level of journalistic excellence, The New York Times announced that Sabrina Tavernise will become the second host of “The Daily,” sharing hosting duties with Michael Barbaro.

Over the past week, Sabrina Tavernise has brought listeners of “The Daily” inside the Ukraine crisis with a steady string of urgent dispatches from the front lines. Drawing on her fluent Russian and her experience covering previous conflicts in Ukraine, as well as her years reporting in Russia, Sabrina has made the upheaval of war feel visceral and real. She has interviewed civilians receiving guns and mothers sheltering in subway tunnels.

Her reporting in Ukraine is only the latest example of her successful collaborations with the audio team, which stretch back to the early days of The Daily and include reporting trips across the country, from Baltimore to Oklahoma, as well as weeks spent filling in for Michael Barbaro in the host's chair. 

According to the Times, "having a second host will make The Daily even stronger. It will allow both Michael and Sabrina to dig deeper into stories and share responsibility for The Times's flagship show, which — as Michael himself has told us— has grown too big for one person."

Since joining The Times in 2000, Tavernise has covered major stories, from the war in Iraq to the battles over abortion to the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Sabrina Tavernise has already worked on many successful projects on “The Daily,” including The Battle for Missouri, The Abortion Wars, Roe v. Wade Part One and Part Two and a five-part series on race and policing in Baltimore. Prior to her work in audio, Sabrina spent 10 years as a foreign correspondent, based in Russia, Pakistan and Turkey, where she was the Istanbul bureau chief. 

 

New co-host of the podcast "The Daily" Sabrina Tavernise

 “I’m thrilled that Sabrina is joining me as a host and a full-time member of The Daily family,” said Michael Barbaro. “My admiration for her began a decade ago as a reader, when I marveled at the creativity and humanity of her journalism. When we started The Daily, that admiration deepened as I watched her adapt those same skills to audio to create some of the most distinctive episodes we’ve ever run. Her nose for news, empathy, fair-mindedness and collegiality will all make her a fantastic host and partner.”

Sabrina Tavernise is joining a show has been downloaded more than three billion times. It’s carried on 265 public radio stations in the U.S. through a partnership with American Public Media. It has built an original music library of 230 compositions, has won a DuPont Award and has been part of two Pulitzer Prize-winning lines of coverage, appeared on countless best-of lists and remains the most-listened-to news podcast in the country. 

“I fell in love with audio when I first worked with The Daily and its brilliant creators a few years ago,” said Sabrina Tavernise. “The emotional power of hearing people’s voices — and the music and the drums — took storytelling to a whole new level. I felt like I was suddenly seeing colors, after a lifetime in black and white. I am so excited at the thought of joining this incredible team.”