Michael Barbaro

In January 2021, Barbaro apologized after privately pressuring some journalists to pull back criticism of The New York Times podcast, Caliphate.

A New York profile on Barbaro from January 2020 reported that Barbaro and Tobin bought an apartment together in Brooklyn in 2019 and were engaged. On May 7, 2021, Barbaro announced on The Daily that he and Lisa Tobin had welcomed a baby named Tobin Barbaro. He wrote in The Daily's newsletter on May 28, "My wife and I had a baby," confirming that he and Tobin had gotten married. He took paternity leave on and off from The Daily for much of 2021. On August 5, 2022, he announced on The Daily that he had another daughter, Mira Ruth Barbaro.

The Daily has seen 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.

Six months after The Daily launched, The New Yorker wrote an article about Barbaro entitled "An Appreciation of Michael Barbaro and The Daily." In January 2020, a New York Magazine profile on him called him "the voice of a generation." AVanity Fair article in November 2021 suggested that The Daily had "vault[ed] Barbaro from a respected reporter to a full-fledged media celebrity."

Barbaro gave the 2019 UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism commencement speech and co-hosted the 2020 duPont-Columbia Awards with CNN's Chief International Anchor Christiane Amanpour.

In November 2018, Liev Schreiber portrayed Barbaro on Saturday Night Live.

In 2018, Barbaro won a duPont-Columbia University Award, one of the most prestigious awards in journalism, for his work on The Daily. Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, which administers the award, called The Daily "one of the signature achievements in podcasting this year," and said that the podcast is "raising the journalistic bar and inspiring a wave of imitators."

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 #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 #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.

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 October 2014, Barbaro married Timothy Levin, a fellow Yale graduate. Levin, who is eight years Barbaro's senior, founded Bespoke Education, a tutoring and test prep company. In July 2018, it was reported that Barbaro and Levin had since divorced. In a June 2019 interview with Evening Standard, Barbaro mentioned that it "wasn't a coincidence" that he and his husband broke up shortly after The Daily launched. He said: “[The show] was a massive change, and it exposed things to me about my life. It made me reflect on who I was. Anytime you go through a major life change it tests every relationship."

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.

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.

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