Michael Barbaro

Michael Christopher Barbaro (born October 12, 1979) is an American journalist and co-host of The New York Times news podcast The Daily, one of the most popular podcasts in the United States.

Barbaro grew up in North Haven, Connecticut. His mother, Jean, worked as a library media specialist at Anna Reynolds Elementary School in Newington, Connecticut. His father, Frank, was a New Haven, Connecticut city firefighter. His mother is Jewish and Barbaro identifies as Jewish. Barbaro's sister, Tracy Barbaro, works at Harvard University as a research lab coordinator. In middle school, he and his sister delivered the New Haven Register every weekday at 6 am. Both attended Hamden Hall Country Day School in Hamden, Connecticut.

In high school, Barbaro wrote for Hamden Hall's official newspaper, The Advent. Barbaro, with classmate and future New York Times colleague Ross Douthat, also co-founded and ran the school's underground newspaper, La Verité. As a teenager, he aspired to be the Times' Jerusalem Bureau Chief.

He graduated from Yale University in 2002 with a degree in history. While at Yale, he reported for the Yale Daily News and later became its editor-in-chief, overseeing a staff of nearly 100 student writers.

After his college graduation, Barbaro joined The Washington Post as a reporter covering the biotechnology industry. In 2005, he joined The New York Times, where he first covered Walmart extensively until 2007 for the Times' business section. Next, he reported on New York City Hall and the American retail industry. Later, he became a national political correspondent for the Times. During the 2016 United States presidential election, Barbaro frequently wrote front-page articles on the topic and became one of the most prominent Times reporters covering the election.

In August 2016, The New York Times launched The Run-Up, a twice-a-week political podcast that Barbaro hosted. The podcast ran until the presidential election in November 2016.

In February 2017, Barbaro began hosting The Daily, the Times' first podcast to air five days a week. In its first year, The Daily attracted an audience of one million listeners a day. The podcast, which has episodes that typically are 30 minutes long, has experienced tremendous success and was the No. 1 podcast in the United States for every month of 2019. The Daily was the most popular U.S. news podcast for both Spotify and Apple listeners in 2020 and the No. 2 podcast in the United States. Although the Times' has various other podcasts, most of its audio revenue in mid-2019 was from The Daily.

The Daily saw even greater success during the COVID-19 pandemic. TIME said: "Barbaro and his team at the Times have established themselves as the most trusted voices in podcasting at a time when we as a country are desperate for information." In August 2020, the newspaper's president and CEO Meredith Kopit Levien noted that at the time, The Daily had more than 3.5 million subscribers every day, a "vastly larger" audience than both the Times' daily and Sunday paper.