He doesn’t listen to many podcasts, and he doesn’t even own an Amazon Echo or Google Home, but Michael Barbaro has become one of this year’s breakout audio stars. Barbaro began hosting The New York Times’ The Daily at its February launch, and the show’s five-day-a-week window into the news has added a brighter, warmer coat of color to the Gray Lady — and attracted a huge and growing audience. In the process, The Daily has turned the 38-year-old reporter into something he hadn’t planned to become: a personality.
Is he comfortable with that new cloak?
“I don’t know that I’ll ever be comfortable being a personality, because it never occurred to me that the way that I talk and the way that I respond to people, or how I listen, would become something that people would focus on,” Barbaro, the show’s host and managing editor, told me. “It’s been really intriguing to watch people seize on just the way that I am, and in some ways I can’t help being, and…
