Michael Barbaro

Michael Christopher Barbaro (born October 12, 1979) is an American journalist and the founding host of The New York Times news podcast The Daily, one of the most popular podcasts in the United States. His mother is Jewish and Barbaro identifies as Jewish. Barbaro's sister, Tracy Barbaro, works at Harvard University as a research lab coordinator. In middle school, he and his sister delivered the New Haven Register every weekday at 6 am.

High school and college journalism In high school, Barbaro wrote for Hamden Hall's official newspaper, The Advent. Barbaro, with classmate and future New York Times colleague Ross Douthat, also co-founded and ran the school's underground newspaper, La Verité. While at Yale, he reported for the Yale Daily News and later became its editor-in-chief, overseeing a staff of nearly 100 student writers. Later, he became a national political correspondent for the Times. During the 2016 United States presidential election, Barbaro frequently wrote front-page articles on the topic and became one of the most prominent Times reporters covering the election.

The Daily In February 2017, Barbaro began hosting The Daily, the Times ' first podcast to air five days a week. In its first year, The Daily attracted an audience of one million listeners a day. The podcast, which has episodes that typically are 30 minutes long, has experienced tremendous success and was the No. 1 podcast in the United States for every month of 2019. The Daily was the most popular U.S. news podcast for both Spotify and Apple listeners in 2020 and the No. 2 podcast in the United States. TIME said: "Barbaro and his team at the Times have established themselves as the most trusted voices in podcasting at a time when we as a country are desperate for information." In August 2020, the newspaper's president and CEO Meredith Kopit Levien noted that at the time, The Daily had more than 3.5 million subscribers every day, a "vastly larger" audience than both the Times''' daily and Sunday paper.

In January 2021, Barbaro apologized after privately pressuring some journalists to pull back criticism of the New York Times podcast Caliphate.

Public image Barbaro is known for his distinctive voice, frequently described as "dulcet", and his "staccato" speech style.

Since The Daily launched, Barbaro has received significant media coverage. He has made sold-out public appearances around the country, and a wide range of media outlets have interviewed him about The Daily, journalism, and politics. He has been featured on television shows such as Late Night with Seth Meyers, CBS This Morning, and PBS NewsHour. Vox's Recode Decode podcast,

Six months after The Daily launched, The New Yorker wrote an article about Barbaro entitled "An Appreciation of Michael Barbaro and The Daily." In January 2020, a New York Magazine profile on him called him "the voice of a generation."

In November 2018, Liev Schreiber portrayed Barbaro on Saturday Night Live.

Awards and honors In 2018, Barbaro won a duPont-Columbia University Award, one of the most prestigious awards in journalism, for his work on The Daily. Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, which administers the award, called The Daily "one of the signature achievements in podcasting this year," and said that the podcast is "raising the journalistic bar and inspiring a wave of imitators."

Personal life In October 2014, Barbaro married Timothy Levin, a fellow Yale graduate. Levin, who is eight years Barbaro's senior, founded Bespoke Education, a tutoring and test prep company.

After his divorce, Barbaro began a relationship with The Daily executive producer Lisa Tobin. They have a son and a daughter.

Barbaro's friendship with socially conservative Times columnist Ross Douthat has received media attention. In an interview with the New Yorker'', Barbaro reflected on how Douthat's socially conservative views affected the pair's friendship: "I've been on a long journey that I know Ross generally approves of," Barbaro said, referring to his ending his same-sex marriage and marrying a woman. "It's no secret that [Douthat] wants people to have children and to enter into monogamous heterosexual relationships."