The Daily: The Show Turns Five

February 18, 2022

Michael Barbaro preparing for a four-hour election broadcast in November 2020.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

On the morning of Feb. 1, Michael Barbaro sent an email to the Daily team with the subject line "5 Years!" For those of us still waking up bleary-eyed after producing that morning's episode, it was a reminder: The Daily was having a birthday.

Since 2017, our team has produced nearly 1,300 episodes and told countless stories. (You can revisit some of them in a playlist below.) Daily listeners have been with us through impeachments and elections, terror attacks and natural disasters, a riot at the Capitol and a global pandemic. You've allowed us into your lives, and you've shared with us your feedback and personal stories.

As we reflect on the show's half-decade history, we thought we'd share an excerpt from Michael's email:

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

(And for some bonus birthday fodder, check out the origin story of our theme music and this list of the names we almost called the show.)

From the Daily team: some much-needed 'good news'

Like a prospector in the Klondike at the turn of the 20th century, the team panned through nearly 700 messages for some good news.Bettmann Archives, via Getty Images

Luke Vander Ploeg is up next in our series in which we ask Daily producers and editors to tell us about the most memorable episode that they've worked on. Luke has been with the team since 2019.

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Luke's pick is "The Year in Good News," from December 2020. The episode focused on brighter stories from a dark and difficult year provided by Daily listeners in the form of voice notes. We sat down with Luke to talk about making the show and sifting through some 400 voice recordings, with the help of other producers.

How did the episode come to be?

One of my fellow producers pitched the idea of an episode in which we asked listeners to tell us about good news that happened to them during the pandemic. It had been an incredibly rough year for everybody — 2020 was a dark time — and we wanted to discover what surprisingly beautiful things happened while people were suffering so much. So Michael did a callout on an episode, asking listeners to send in voice memos, and we built an episode using those recordings.

What was it like sifting through all those recordings?

Going through those voice memos was possibly the most fun thing I've ever done for The Daily. It was endlessly fun. It's always inspiring to hear from our listeners. The recordings were poetic, they were beautiful, they were surprising. Some of them were deeply moving, funny and adorable. It was a real privilege to get to listen to all of them and put them into an episode.

What was it about this episode that you loved so much?

I like to be involved in making things that scratch at the complexity of being human. I was shocked by the depth of feeling I experienced while I was putting this together. There was this one story about a woman who, because of the pandemic, was able to reconcile with her daughter. (They had been estranged for a number of years.) It also felt so good to interact with our listeners and to be in touch with real people, especially after months of lockdown. I'm really proud of what we came up with, and I think it was a service to a lot of people in a dark time.

Is there a moment from the process that sticks out in your mind?

I think the one part of the process that sticks out to me the most was when I called this kid named Thor. A mom sent in a voice memo about her son who had a genetic developmental disease. During the pandemic, he went into remission. For the first time, he was gifted the ability to do so many things that he wasn't able to do before. Whereas most people's lives were being put on hold, this kid suddenly got a life. I remember thinking, "I want to talk to this kid." So I got to call him and just chat with him on the phone for a little bit.

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