Michael Barbaro

Michael Barbaro created and hosts The Daily, the wildly popular five-day-a-week podcast from The New York Times. Since its creation in 2017, at the beginning of the Trump presidency, The Daily has become the most popular news podcast in the world, with more than 3 million listeners.

The Daily has won a DuPont-Columbia University Award for audio excellence and has been named a top podcast of the year by Time, Entertainment Weekly, The Atlantic, Esquire, Adweek, The New Yorker, and New York Magazine. 

On stage, Barbaro frames his discussions in much the same way he describes his show: The moment demands an explanation—The Daily is on a mission to find it. Michael tells the story of The Daily’s creation and how it embraces new forms of storytelling to confront the media industry’s biggest challenge: distrust from the public. He describes his own journey from the highest ranks of political journalism into podcasting and the lessons he’s learned from both phases of his career. He describes, with striking candor, the state of the media today. And, tapping into work at The Washington Post and The New York Times, he provides audiences with an informed, nonpartisan perspective on the biggest stories of our time. 

Before hosting The Daily, Barbaro was a national political correspondent for The New York Times and host of The Run-Up, a podcast about the 2016 presidential race. Previously, he covered New York's City Hall and the U.S. retail industry. Upon graduation with a bachelor’s degree in history from Yale in 2002, he joined The Washington Post as a reporter covering the biotechnology industry, eventually joining The New York Times in 2005.