Dear Colleagues,

We hope you all had a fantastic start to the new year. If you’re like us, you’re counting down the days until warmer weather.

As we prepare for the start of spring, we’d like to give you a rundown of what we’ve been up to these past few weeks.

Sabrina Tavernise Joins The Daily as a Host

In early March, we announced that Sabrina Tavernise would become the second host of The Daily, sharing hosting duties with Michael Barbaro. They will take the reins on different episodes each week and allow the show to further its ambitions and reach.

Over the past several weeks, Sabrina 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. With tireless dedication, she has helped maintain The Daily as a home for the world’s best audio journalism, a magnet for innovation and essential listening for millions of people.

“I fell in love with audio when I first worked with The Daily and its brilliant creators a few years ago,” Tavernise said. “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.”

We’re thrilled to welcome her to The Daily family full-time.

Covering The Russia-Ukraine War

As we said above, The Daily has devoted several episodes to coverage of the Russia-Ukraine War with rigor, empathy and intrepid reporting. The Daily team has reported from the ground in Kyiv, spoke to Ukrainians about how they are thinking and feeling about this moment, analyzed Russia’s military strategy and explored the efficacy of sanctions.

Recent guests trying to help listeners make sense of the current state of affairs, on the ground in Ukraine and across the world, include Michael Schwirtz, an investigative reporter for The Times; Valerie Hopkins, a Moscow correspondent for The Times, currently in Ukraine; Clifford Krauss, a national energy business correspondent for The Times; Anton Troianovski, the Moscow bureau chief for The Times; and Eric Schmitt, a senior writer covering terrorism and national security for The New York Times.

Celebrating Five Years of The Daily

February 1, 2022 marked the five year anniversary of The Daily. Since 2017, the team has produced nearly 1,300 episodes and told countless stories.

Daily listeners have been with us through impeachments and elections, terror attacks and natural disasters, a riot at the Capitol and a global pandemic. We’d like to share an excerpt from an email that Michael Barbaro sent to The Daily team on the morning of February 1, reflecting on the show’s half-decade history:

Team,

Five years ago this morning, we published the very first episode of The Daily.

Listening back, as I did a few days ago, the host sounds gratingly high-pitched, but the episode vibrates with ambition. A new president had his first vacancy on the Supreme Court (sound familiar?), and we asked our inaugural guest, the ever-patient Adam Liptak, to prerecord two entirely different second segments, mini biographies of the two likeliest nominees, because we didn’t know which judge Trump would select.

Neil Gorsuch was his choice, and those who hit play on Feb. 1, 2017, heard something remarkable: the authority, curiosity and humor of The Times brought to life in a totally new and intimate way.

The question was how many people would actually listen? From the start, we confronted a mountain of justifiable skepticism. Did the world really need a five-day-a-week news podcast? Wouldn’t episodes get stale after 24 hours? Wouldn’t Times reporters get tired of coming on?

Fair questions, all. There were ample reasons to think we would fail.

But what nobody could foresee back then was that the right combination of producers and editors, the right blend of audio journalists and storytellers, of composers and wordsmiths, Pro Tools wizards and guest whisperers — not to mention the world’s best newsroom — could make a daily news podcast not just urgent and essential, not just beloved and addictive, but transcendent.

[…]

Here’s to the next five years.

Michael

We’re honored to bring The Daily to public radio listeners and value the relationships we’ve created with so many more people around the country.

Until next time,
-The Daily Team