Dear Colleagues,

As we get ready for the warmer, brighter days ahead, we’d like to give you a rundown of what we’ve been up to these past few weeks.

Get To Know Ben Calhoun

In early May, we announced plans that would help us take The Daily to even greater heights and offer even more support to our wildly talented team. Ben Calhoun, an editor at This American Life, joined The Times as executive producer of The Daily on May 31. Ben is the senior manager of The Daily’s team of 50, running editorial operations, building ties with the core newsroom, helping to set long-term priorities and developing systems and structures to support the most ambitious work within a culture of collaboration, equity and transparency.

Ben’s career has prepared him astoundingly well for this role. Since joining This American Life in 2010, he’s reported, produced and edited some of the program’s most memorable and decorated shows and stories. Ben also served as vice president of content and programming at WBEZ in Chicago.

His key partner is Lisa Chow, who has deftly steered The Daily for the past year. As the senior-most editor of The Daily, she’ll continue to help set editorial standards, run coverage and reporting, edit both enterprise and quick-turn stories and work with producers and editors to continually sharpen the work.

“I’m so incredibly excited to join The Daily. I come to the show as a listener, and I have such an enormous appreciation for what the founders and staff of the show have built,” Ben said when we announced his joining the team. “The Daily is such a forceful expression of the journalistic values and spirit of creativity that made me want to be a journalist to begin with. I’m looking forward to standing shoulder to shoulder with everyone at the show, and stepping into this role, to serve those same principles. I’m eager to empower the staff, and the members of the newsroom who contribute to the show, in every way I can.”

You can read more about our exciting audio leadership updates here.

Special Episodes Tackle a Possible Post-Roe America

Since the leak of the Supreme Court draft opinion on overturning the constitutional right to abortion in early May, both sides of the fight have been scrambling. In two parts, The Daily examined what’s next for a movement that looks to have achieved a decades-long goal.

In the first part, Sabrina spoke to anti-abortion activists such as Michael Gonidakis, president of Ohio Right to Life, about what comes next. And in part two, she talked to people working in abortion clinics about what the potential change could mean for their patients.

Sabrina Tavernise Featured in Vogue Magazine

Sabrina Tavernise and her fearless reporting are featured in a recent Vogue Magazine article highlighting how female correspondents are defining war coverage in Ukraine.

In a particularly memorable episode from early March, Tavernise, speaking fluent Russian, provided an intimate, documentary-style account of a two-day journey along the slow-moving, unpredictable evacuation route from hard-hit Kyiv to western Lviv, including audio of brushing her teeth alongside children at a kindergarten where she spent a night. She captured audio at a train station packed with refugees headed to Poland, where a seven-year-old boy named Tim confided a secret to Tavernise: He’d pulled out two loose teeth since fleeing Kyiv, where his father remained. “He wanted to talk about his Legos,” Tavernise said. “And when I asked him where he was, he said he didn’t know.”

You can read the full interview with Sabrina here.

-The Daily Team