The late lamented Christopher Hitchens used to say that every morning he would cast his eye over the front page of the Times, look for the little motto in the top-left corner that reads “All The News That’s Fit to Print,” and see if it still irritated him. “If I can still exclaim, under my breath, why do they insult me and what do they take me for and what the hell is it supposed to mean unless it’s as obviously complacent and conceited and censorious as it seems to be, then at least I know that I still have a pulse,” he wrote.

What Hitchens would say if he were around to experience a more recent development in the Times’ self-fashioning—the podcast “The Daily”—can only be imagined. But of all the descriptors that might be attached to the podcast (which drops each weekday morning at six), complacent, conceited, and censorious are not among them. Try companionable, confiding, and congenial. “The Daily” offers not just facts but feels.

Hosted by Michael Barbaro, a former political reporter, the podcast usually consists of two interviews—with Times writers and correspondents—plus a summary of headlines. “We’re here because this moment demands an explanation,” Barbaro said in the début show. For a listener who has been downloading “The Daily” since the beginning, there was, at first, some irritation at its strenuously conversational informality—must so many reporters begin their sentences with the word “So”?—and then an increasing sense of appreciation bordering on dependency. Spending twenty minutes with Barbaro has become a necessary daily practice: like meditation, but with hair-raising breaking news instead of mindfulness.

In Barbaro’s hands—or, rather, in Barbaro’s voice—the Times becomes conversational and intimate, instead of inky and cumbersome. It’s a twenty-minute update murmured in your ear by a well-informed, sensitive, funny, modest friend—the kind of person who has as many questions as answers? (That’s judging at least by the redundant interrogative, a generational giveaway, with which Barbaro occasionally ends his sentences.) It’s the Times as an emo experience: not so much the Gray Lady as the Goateed Guy. It’s hardly a surprise to discover, through judicious Googling, that Michael Barbaro looks exactly like he sounds. He has intermittently sported an interesting arrangement of facial hair; he also wears cool glasses and, sometimes, daring combinations of clashing patterns. He looks like one of those late-morning commuters on the F train who carries a Greenlight Bookstore tote bag and a macchiato from Bien Cuit, like that guy you see in the audience at everything at BAM, like a core member of Ira Glass’s monthly poker game.

Where to begin with a taxonomy of “The Daily” ’s delights? Perhaps with Barbaro’s idiosyncratic intonation, which includes a habitual pause—the introduction of the aural equivalent of a period—where none is grammatically called for. (A faithful reproduction of Barbaro’s intro would read, “From the New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This. Is. ‘The Daily.’ ”) Then there’s the catchy way he begins every podcast with the word “Today,” which, in his emphatic delivery, assonates with “Ta-da.”

It’s hard to resist the empathetic vocables with which Barbaro punctuates his interviewees’ words—a technique used by many a journalist while conducting interviews on the phone, to let their interviewee know that they’re not just checking e-mail, but which is edited out of a transcript or a news report. “Whenever I tell my husband a story I imagine @mikiebarb grunting in appreciation at my profound insight” is how one Twitter user recently responded to Barbaro’s quasi-therapeutic aural hovering. Barbaro’s manner has already earned him that accolade of popular culture, a BuzzFeed feature, which called the show “an emotional roller coaster” and urged Barbaro to “keep doing you.” Given his success, others might be tempted to also do Barbaro. On Twitter, a user named Liam Weir scripted a plausible pickup line:

[INT. BAR—NIGHT] HER: So do you have a name? ME: From The New York Times I’m Michael Barbaro.

(In real life, an unlikely scenario: on the podcast, Barbaro has revealed that he’s married, to a man, named Tim.)

For all its emo softness, though, “The Daily” offers a thrilling insight into the culture of hard newsgathering. There’s the way that Barbaro addresses his colleagues—the male ones, at least—by their last names, which is the kind of thing that journalists like to do around the office to make it feel like we’re hard-bitten reporters, like in “All the President’s Men,” or “The Front Page,” rather than wussy technocrats with smartphones. (“Thrush!” “Hey!” “Hell of a time,” Barbaro’s interview with the White House correspondent Glenn Thrush began, on the day of Anthony Scaramucci’s precipitous dismissal from the White House.) At the same time, the listener has the sensation of being privy to high-stakes office banter, as when, after the Senate appeared to draw back from the brink on health-care reform, in mid-July, Barbaro began his interview with Carl Hulse, the reporter covering the story, with an apology: “I am rudely distracting you from what I imagine is a well-earned cocktail.”

“The Daily” has learned from its podcast forebears—“This American Life” is its ur-progenitor—the effectiveness of showing the work in progress of reporting, not just its finished product. When Barbaro conducted an interview with Congressman Tom Rooney, a Republican from Florida, he included the receptionist who tried to blow him off, and the hold Muzak that he listened to before being put through for the scheduled call. Most notoriously among Barbaro watchers, Barbaro did not edit out his weepy response during a phone interview with Mark Gray, a former coal miner from Kentucky—a guileless fellow, who broke off from telling Barbaro that he has third-stage black-lung disease to ask if he could be sent a copy of the paper. The finished segment included Barbaro’s long pause, his sniffs and gulps, when Gray asked whether he had ever been to a coal town. “I’m having a very strong reaction to what you’re telling me,” Barbaro said. “Because I realize I haven’t experienced those things that you’re quite rightly asking me if I have ever experienced.” (Speaking later about that interview with his colleague Susan Lehman, for a Times Insider podcast, Barbaro confessed that he was still working through his reaction with his therapist.)

Before launching “The Daily,” Barbaro covered Donald Trump’s Presidential campaign; after Barbaro co-authored a piece about Trump’s history with women as a private citizen, Candidate Trump called on Twitter for his resignation, an honor to which most journalists can only aspire. Since transforming into a podcast host, Barbaro has evolved from a mere byline into a personality. He’s smart, but not a know-it-all—a useful avatar for those among his listeners who, while trying to keep up with national news or world events, sometimes feel like a sixth grader who was at the orthodontist when the math teacher explained the difference between the median and the mode. “So, Rukmini, where exactly is Mosul?” is the kind of thing that Barbaro would not be afraid to ask, and his listeners are grateful for it.

If only Michael Barbaro could be cloned! Oh, wait—the paper is trying to do exactly that. In April, at the International Symposium on Online Journalism, Andrew Phelps, then a digital editor at the Times, talked about the “botification” of news and reported on some exciting new developments, citing the texts that Sam Manchester, a sports editor, sent from the Rio Olympics to subscribers who had signed up to receive them. “When is the last time the New York Times said ‘hey’ to you? For a big old news organization like the New York Times, that’s a pretty big deal,” Phelps said. The paper, he said, was exploring ways to replicate Barbaro, not just through texts but also by a voice model, similar to Amazon’s Alexa, “so that maybe you could actually interact and maybe even be friends with Michael Barbaro.” (This conference did not take place on April 1st.) In the meantime, while we wait for Botbaro, Barbaro’s admirers can subscribe to “The New Washington,” a weekly political podcast. “Hey, it’s Michael Barbaro,” the first episode began. “The story of Washington right now. Is filled with characters. Characters that we are all talking about. Cabinet secretaries and political aides. Have become household names.” To which we can only respond: More Barbaro? Bring it. On.