The Voice of a Generation

Michael Barbaro made the New York Times podcast The Daily a raging success. Or is it the other way around?

- By Matthew Schneier. Photography by David Williams

DANA,” says the voice you know by now, inaudible all caps. “WHEN DID THE UNITED STATES START TO FEEL A SENSE OF ANXIETY …” A pregnant pause. “Too much,” he says. And so Michael Barbaro, the voice of the New York Times, takes a breath, turns back to the Times reporter Dana Goldstein, and starts again.

This, as Barbaro announces every weekday morning, is The Daily, the Times’ tentpole podcast. In a studio tucked in the back of the New York Times Building on Eighth Avenue, in front of a four-legged spider of microphones, Barbaro spends most days interviewing his fellow Times journalists about a single splashy story of the moment, a deepish dive into the day’s news. Shrewdly edited for commute consumption (episodes hover around 22 to 25 minutes long, just about two minutes shy of the average American’s schlep), The Daily offers, if not wonkish completeness, a kind of cocktail-party competence. “You listen to The Daily and you’re better equipped to speak at a dinner party,” says Jenna Weiss-Berman of the podcast shop Pineapple Street Studios. “And that’s all you really want.”

Podcasting is an intimate medium, and podcasts live or die by their hosts. In the 40-year-old Barbaro, The Daily has found one who connects unusually, even unexpectedly, well. The Daily has turned Barbaro from a career Timesman into a celebrity, one with TV appearances, adoring fans, loving parodies, and a personal life chronicled by “Page Six.” The Daily introduced Barbaro to the wider world; it also introduced him to his fiancée.