🎙️ Co-creator of The Daily makes her next move

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🎙️ Signal Flow: Theo Balcomb

Industry game changers and valiant minds share their wisdom, adversities, and paths to innovation.

Theo Balcomb created The Daily at The New York Times in 2017. Under her leadership, the podcast reached an audience of more than 4 million listeners a day and more than 200 public radio stations, won a duPont award, and served as part of multiple Pulitzer Prize-winning submissions. Before The Daily, she was the youngest-ever supervising producer of All Things Considered at NPR. These days, she is working as an independent editor and producer on projects across the audio industry, including the podcast Song Exploder, The Washington Post’s investigative series The Empty Grave of Comrade Bishop, a 2024 Peabody award winner, Broken Doors, a 2022 Pulitzer finalist, and Field Trip, a 2024 duPont award nominee.

Editor’s note: The following interview has been edited for flow and clarity.

I didn’t leave The Daily because I stopped believing in it. I left because I wanted to see what else I could make.

When you help create something that becomes part of millions of people’s mornings, it’s tempting to stay put. But after years of running at full speed, I knew the pace wasn’t sustainable. I was proud of what we built, the people, the process, the sound, but I also wanted to try new things, to make something that didn’t yet exist.

So I stepped away. I moved home to Maine. I swapped the urgency of a newsroom for a quieter rhythm, joined the ranks of freelancers and independent producers I’d always admired, and decided to see what it felt like to build a creative life on my own terms.

When I pitched The Daily back in 2016, people weren’t sure a newspaper should even be in the audio business. At the time, I was at All Things Considered, watching Serial explode and realizing my friends (people who’d never listened to public radio) were suddenly hooked on audio storytelling. They’d call me and ask, “Why aren’t you doing this?” And I’d say, “I am doing this. You’re just not hearing it because it’s on the radio.” That was the spark.

I wanted to make a news show for people like them, one that felt human and alive, not institutional. When The New York Times posted a listing for an audio executive producer, I applied and included a memo outlining the shows I’d make in the first year. The first idea on that list was a daily news podcast. They didn’t hire me for the EP job, but they called back later to say, “We liked that daily idea. Want to make it?”

I joined in January 2017, a month before launch. There were four of us (Michael Barbaro, Lisa Tobin, Andy Mills, and me) inventing the show day by day. Two weeks after Trump’s inauguration, we released our first episode. The world was chaotic, and people were hungry for clarity. Suddenly, this little experiment took off.

From the start, I wanted the show to feel completable. Something listeners could actually finish each morning without feeling buried. Some people worried that a new episode every day would stress people out, but I thought: then make it short. Make it a habit. A few minutes of focus in a noisy world.

Of course, that didn’t last. The stories got bigger, the stakes higher. We realized listeners didn’t mind staying longer if the story deserved it. The so-called attention-span crisis didn’t apply. People will follow a good story wherever it leads.

What made The Daily exciting was what it didn’t have: the constraints of broadcast. We weren’t bound by the clock or by the constant parentheticals explaining who’s speaking and where we are in time. We could linger. We could breathe. We could make journalism that felt cinematic.

Eventually, I left. Not because I stopped loving the work, but because I wanted to see what else was possible. I’d spent my career inside big institutions, and I wanted to learn how it felt to build things outside them. Freelancing gave me that chance. It’s not always comfortable, I miss the illusion of stability sometimes. But it’s exhilarating to choose your projects and collaborate across the industry.

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I’ve started using new tools, too. Descript changed how I do early edits. It lets you see and cut audio like text, which is wild and useful. As long as you remember to keep listening. Because if you edit only with your eyes, you lose the music of the voice. Technology can help the process, but it can’t replace your ear.

What worries me is the flood of meaningless audio that automation makes easy. Not because the tech is evil, but because the world doesn’t need more noise. The question I always come back to is: Why make this? If the answer isn’t that it adds clarity or connection, maybe it’s not worth making.

That was always the point of The Daily: one story, done right. Something thoughtful and necessary at a time when everything felt chaotic. We hoped it helped people understand what was happening around them, even for a few minutes.

If there’s a legacy for The Daily… I hope the legacy is that, instead of feeling like we unleashed a crazy idea that you can make a show every day and then everybody should do it, people understand the care that goes into it.

It wasn't necessarily an intention of the show, but a thing that happened as a result, is that more people understood what it was to be a reporter and what it was to get information, and make sure it was as right as we could get it. And so I hope that there's a legacy of understanding the media a little more. That we're all just trying our best to find the story, figure it out, and share it in a compelling way.

🎧 Podcast of the Week: Cheeky Pint

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