Rachel Abrams and Natalie Kitroeff officially join Michael Barbaro as co-hosts of the show. Welcome to the next chapter. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Chapter 1: Who are the new co-hosts of 'The Daily'?
Come on in. I'm going to sit in the middle. Okay, I'm taking the flank.
Well, Rachel.
Hello.
Natalie.
Hi.
Welcome to the next chapter of The Daily.
I know.
Hosted by you.
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Chapter 2: What experiences shaped Natalie Kitroeff's journalism career?
Well, and you. It's the three of us. Yeah. The three of us, yep.
And, of course, our listeners know who you are. First, because you have been distinguished guests over the past eight years of the show. And then you were guest hosts. And now I'm extremely excited to announce you are both becoming hosts. My co-hosts, there are going to be three of us. Michael Barbaro, Natalie Kitcheroef, Rachel Abrams. And Natalie, you start today, officially. Yes.
Rachel, listeners will know, you already started. You've been at it for a couple of months. Yep. And we wanted to take a moment outside of the regular rigors of the show to mark this moment and officially share this news with our listeners. And honestly... Take a few minutes to talk about who you both are, what you did before this, why you wanted to be co-hosts of The Daily.
So I'm going to start, Natalie, with you. What made you ever want to be a journalist?
I think that I got to give my mom credit on this one. She is a professor of Latin American politics. She was always, from when I was really young, doing research in Guatemala. And when I turned 12, she started taking me there. And her research was doing interviews with victims and survivors of the genocide in Guatemala. And I would go and do these interviews with her.
I mean, she wasn't just talking with the survivors. She also talked to the guerrilla fighters who were part of the conflict. She talked to the ex-army commanders who were involved in some of these massacres. And so I was going in and out of these often tense conversations and just getting all sides of this very complicated story.
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Chapter 3: What inspired Rachel Abrams to become a journalist?
And I took that with me right out of college when I was looking for a job. I realized you could get paid to do this. And it's basically what I've done ever since. And what about you, Rachel? I have to follow that? God, I'm sorry.
I know. That's such a good answer. No. No, no, no. My dad was a screenwriter in L.A. that read comic books, which I read, and I was like, Lois Lane's the coolest person. Like, a reporter is the coolest person you could be. They had to give the man superpowers, but she is saving the world because she's smart and dogged and tenacious to speak truth to power and reveal things and uncover things.
I just, like, I want to be that. And I don't think there was any more thought. It was just that is how you can— coolest way to do good in the world.
And once you actually became a journalist, when did you feel you were realizing that goal?
Really early in my career at The Times, there was a story I worked on that I think will probably stay with me forever. General Motors was having this issue where their cars were just suddenly shutting off while people were driving them. And obviously, people were crashing. There were a lot of deaths.
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Chapter 4: What impactful story did Rachel Abrams work on early in her career?
Every reporter was trying to figure out who had died, piecing together various federal crash data to find the earliest victims, to notify them or to notify their survivors, their families, to let them know, you didn't just have an accident. Your car malfunctioned.
You didn't do anything wrong.
You didn't do anything wrong. And reporters around the country, including a team I was on, we had basically identified all these people. But there was one person in one of the earliest, if not the earliest crash, and nobody could find her name. And everybody was looking for it. And... I was like, I will find this person.
And I probably made 100 phone calls to everybody that might know somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody. And eventually, I found someone. It was a woman whose car had driven off the road, and she had crashed into a tree, and she had died. Wow. And I tracked down her family. And up until then, they had no idea. They thought maybe she had a heart attack. It was this lingering mystery.
And they finally got some sort of closure. And I know that there was a compensation fund that existed. And by telling them, they actually had a chance to apply for it. So anyway, that was the thing where I was like, if I didn't do that, they would have never known. And that would have been that.
Right. I mean, that's public service.
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Chapter 5: How did Rachel Abrams help a family find closure?
I was really proud of it.
Natalie, as we've already hinted at, You take the lessons that you drew from your mom's work, and you become one of the greatest correspondents, I can recall, in Mexico City. I don't know about that. And I wonder when all those lessons apply clearly in your work.
I think really the most recent stories that I did are the clearest example of how those lessons I learned early on began to apply. Because I spent, as you know, because we talked about on the show, several months investigating the Sinaloa cartel as a way of understanding the fentanyl crisis that was killing, you know, tens of thousands of Americans.
We really tried to get inside the cartel by going to Sinaloa, visiting a fentanyl lab where they were cooking and producing the drug, talking to chemists. We talked to people who were tested on by the cartels as they were looking to perfect their formulas for these drugs.
It was risky, it was dangerous, but it was the only way that I knew to try to understand how this billion-dollar business worked. behind this incredibly lethal drug actually worked. And yeah, I was reminded of all of those hours in a car, going up to the mountains, sitting and just listening with my mom.
So then why, both of you, but start with you, Natalie, why leave print and come here on The Daily full-time?
I mean, I love The Daily. I remember when the show first started and it oriented me. As a reporter covering this world, I needed to listen to what was on The Daily because it helped me think about coverage. And then I got to be a guest on the show, as we said. I worked with some of the very same editors. Mm-hmm. and producers who are still running this show.
So it feels like it's been a home away from home for me for a long time now. And so I'm excited to make it permanent. And you, Rachel?
Well, another line of reporting that I did years after the General Motors stuff was I was involved in the paper's coverage of the Me Too movement. And one of the stories involved a woman who lost her law license because she was a source to us. But eventually she reached out to me and said, I kind of want to talk about why I leaked. And we had lunch, and I listened to her, and I eventually said—
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Chapter 6: What does public service mean in journalism?
So there it is. Can we start talking about you? Yeah, can we start talking about you? Do you have any questions for me?
Yes, we have so many questions. But the basic one, how do you think about this job, about hosting the show?
I think the job is... To imagine that someone is at home, maybe doing their dishes, or on the subway, listening to the show, and they're plugged in, but there's also, like, passing trains and kids running behind them.
Right, a million things going on.
There's things going on, and the job is to ensure that I'm standing in for them.
Hmm.
Are they about to be confused by something? It's my job to clarify it. Right. Or the president of Princeton University like you just did, Rachel. Or Natalie with the whistleblower from Boeing. Or any of our 1,500 colleagues who are the beating heart of this show. And the real challenge is standing in for the listener while also yourself being really present in the conversation.
And it's kind of like those two jobs at once that is the challenge.
Right. Yeah.
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