Long before it became a bonafide, next-generation media phenomenon for The New York Times—a 20-something-minute morning podcast with millions of monthly downloads, an army of super-fans, and a big marketing campaign featuring giant ads in large cities—the concept for The Daily began almost as an afterthought. During the 2016 Democratic National Convention, Sam Dolnick, a Sulzberger family member and soon-to-be assistant managing editor, called then politics editor Carolyn Ryan to ask whether she had a reporter she could free up for a new experiment. Ryan was overseeing coverage of an unprecedented election season that largely coalesced around Donald Trump’s breakneck transformation from third-rate carny act to Republican presidential nominee. The news cycle was overwhelming and addictive, and newsroom management was looking for ways to apply age-old Times standards to new distribution methods—social media, video, audio, and so on.

The state of media demanded such creativity. The Trump era was beginning to produce a bump in subscriptions both digital and dead-tree—but an orange-haired president is not a business model, and the Times Company was a couple billion dollars lighter than it had been a decade earlier. It was clear that journalism was not the only thing that would save The New York Times. Digital was now everything, and the Times had become, partly, an unruly, intermittently successful laboratory of emerging projects and platforms—mobile apps, V.R., data verticals, etc. Dolnick, an ascendent newsroom executive who came up through the metro and sports desks, was now in the business of throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what stuck.

In his new role, Dolnick had assumed oversight of a fledgling audio department, with the objective of wading the Times into the largely uncharted waters of the podcast game. Dolnick’s team wanted to launch a twice-weekly show called The Run-Up, which would be produced by Lisa Tobin, a respected public radio and podcasting veteran who’d been named the Times’s first executive editor for audio. If nothing else, it was a way to get Times reporters gabbing about the jaw-dropping, often reality-defying stories that were dominating the news cycle, perhaps allowing them to relay details that didn’t make it into their print articles—or, in some cases, to discuss the news in a manner more mellifluous than the Times’s fairly rigid style guide might permit. In his initial call to Ryan, Dolnick wanted to know: who from the politics team could be the voice of this thing?

The editors homed in on Michael Barbaro, who had joined the Times in 2005 and succeeded on the Walmart beat before going on to cover City Hall and national politics. During the Trump campaign, Barbaro had become a front-page fixture and one of the most prominent Times writers chronicling the 2016 circus. Trump had even called for his resignation—on Twitter, naturally—over a damning investigation into the bawdy real-estate mogul’s inappropriate behavior with women, an outburst that many of Barbaro’s peers viewed as a badge of honor.

The scope of the opportunity wasn’t immediately evident to Barbaro, partly because he himself didn’t really listen to podcasts, but also because of the nuance of the Times’s newsroom culture. For all the conversation about digital subscriptions and innovation, the organization was still struggling to move past its print-centric roots. Top reporting and editing talent could be moved to high-profile new digital projects, but one couldn’t quite tell if those jobs carried the same prestige as the more traditional channels for advancement. As an enticement, the editors pitched The Run-Up to Barbaro as essentially a side project to his reporting for the paper. “Am I ever gonna be in the paper again?” he had apparently asked a colleague.

The Run-Up did well, and it positioned Barbaro to take the helm of something far more consequential. The Daily, which tacked on an additional three days to Barbaro’s hosting responsibilities, was born last February out of the ashes of its less ambitious predecessor. The show’s success was so strong and so swift that it almost seemed to have happened on a fluke. (Of course, like Serial, The Daily relied on expert audio production—the sort of pro details that only This American Life devotees might fully appreciate, but which nevertheless add tremendous value.) It also quickly became the type of word-of-mouth hit that most publishers can only dream of, and it gave Barbaro the keys to a brand that is now arguably the Times’s most promising franchise. Barbaro hasn’t had a byline in the print edition since January 9, 2017.

The Daily was the most-downloaded new show on Apple Podcasts last year, with 5 million listeners a month at the latest count, more than 1 million of whom tune in every day for the show’s narrative hard-news breakdowns, tear-jerking human-interest stories, and inside accounts of Times’s reporting. Barbaro also appeared preternaturally capable as a host, with his on-the-shrink’s-couch cadence, his whispery intros, his perfectly flummoxed moments, his signature bespectacled, Wesleyan-chic look. Barbaro, who is 38, was quickly becoming the Ira Glass of his generation. “Spending 20 minutes with Barbaro has become a necessary daily practice: like meditation, but with hair-raising breaking news instead of mindfulness,” The New Yorker’s Rebecca Mead wrote last August.

During the past year, Barbaro has actually become kind of legitimately famous. Here he is pleasing the crowd on Late Night with Seth Meyers; here, selling out 92nd Street Y. People stop him on the street, or at the laundromat, where a starstruck fan recently accosted Barbaro as he was dropping off his wash-and-fold. When Times colleagues swing by with their friends or kids for an intro, it’s as if they’ve come face-to-face with a movie star—a waistcoat-wearing movie star with impeccably manicured facial hair and glasses befitting James Joyce. People recently named him one of the sexiest men alive.

The Times, with its hundreds of intensely curious and deeply competitive reporters, can often resemble a large high-school cafeteria—the sort of place vulnerable to gossip and intently focused on even the most minute tweaks in the pecking order. And inside 620 Eighth Avenue, Barbaro’s rise was so obviously apparent that many couldn’t help but take note. One of the most sacred and sensitive codes of the Times, after all, is the pre-eminence of the institution over the star-power of any individual journalist. That tension has come into play over the years, with the ascent of Maureen Dowd, Andrew Ross Sorkin, and Nate Silver, among others, to cultural figures. But Barbaro, for his his part, has largely escaped the scorn or jealousy of his colleagues. For one, Barbaro is considered among the most loyal Times reporters of his generation, and despite opportunities in the marketplace, he doesn’t have an agent, and remains focused on growing The Daily. He wouldn’t discuss whether his compensation or employment arrangement had changed in a way that incentivized him to stick it out at the Times long-term—the Times wouldn’t comment on this either—but he did say that he is committed to hosting The Daily for at least several more years. “I came here when I was 25 and I very much became an adult inside this building,” he said. “Despite all the generational discussions about job loyalty and institutions no longer having a hold on people, the Times has a deep hold on me.”

Barbaro has also benefitted from other, more practical factors. Many reporters rely on The Daily to amplify their own work and, yes, personal brand. It’s a piece of star-making machinery, of a kind the Times has never possessed. “It’s created a celebrity out of our journalism entirely outside of the print product, and that never happens,” a high-ranking editor told me. The podcast is also starting to look like a business unto itself. Chief Operating Officer Meredith Kopit Levien wouldn’t discuss how much money The Daily is making so far, but a sales proposal for June sought $290,000-per-month to be part of the show’s monthly sponsorship rotation, which generally includes several advertisers. A person with knowledge of The Daily’s finances told me the show will book ad revenue in the low eight figures this year.

That’s insignificant given the $1.7 billion that the Times made in 2017 (about 60 percent of which came from subscriptions), but it’s a respectable start, especially given what start-up media organizations typically yield in their early years. “When we started the show, we had many goals,” Barbaro told me. “We didn’t realize we were going to make money that was actually going to get pumped back into the company.” The Times clearly seems to be thinking along these lines. On July 13, it announced The Daily’s inaugural marketing campaign, including commercials on Hulu, YouTube, and Spotify, plus highway billboards in Los Angeles; a light-rail wraparound in Portland; and a complete takeover of the Ogilvie Transportation Center in Chicago. As Levien told me, “The New York Times is now in a space that, before, was for morning television, and that is the reason [The Daily] can make a giant difference for our business.”

Podcasting is among the most vexing categories of our new media landscape. On the one hand, users (particularly in big, commuting cities) love the phenomenon. On the other, its been hard for traditional publishers to monetize their enthusiasm. But the tipping point may be coming soon enough to benefit Barbaro and the Times. Some analysts predict that the audio market will rise to $659 million by 2020, with the Times poised to become a major player in the space. “You could cut this a bunch of different ways,” said Nick Quah, who publishes the audio industry’s must-read newsletter, Hot Pod. “I’d be very interested to think about how you could create basically a new NPR with this, or even a new CBS Morning News structure where it hits both national and local markets. That is the pie in the sky.” The Times, in fact, is already thinking about what a California Daily would look like, or a New York Daily, a Global Daily, and related products that focus on tech or culture, and so on. “We think The Daily, in some ways, can become a platform in itself,” said Dolnick, who also noted the possibility of doing more spin-offs like Caliphate, a 10-part narrative podcast about ISIS that has racked up 18 million downloads to date.

There’s also money to be had in TV and film projects based on Daily programming. Caliphate is narrowing in on a development deal, and there’s been interest in a handful of specific Daily episodes, like the University of California professor who went to North Korea to meet relatives that her family didn’t even know existed; or the Indiana steel worker whose factory job of 18 years fled to Mexico despite Trump’s vow to keep factory jobs in the States. The Daily has also generated a forthcoming TV spin-off, on FX and Hulu, called The Weekly, and it’s getting a cut of underwriting fees from 34 public-radio stations that began distributing it earlier this year, with licensing fees set to kick in down the line. (The Times has several other podcasts at the moment, but the vast majority of revenue the company makes off of audio comes from The Daily.)

The big bucks, as one talent agent in the space suggested to me, could be in events and touring. It’s a formula that’s been doing gangbusters for the year-old podcast factory Crooked Media, home of the wildly popular Pod Save America, which sold out Radio City Music hall this spring. (Crooked Media’s 10 podcasts comfortably book eight-figure annual revenue, according to someone with knowledge of the matter.) The Daily has begun testing the waters, including an event this spring at Sixth & I, the historic synagogue and arts center in downtown Washington. But it’s tricky. “There’s a ton of interest in the show, a lot of opportunities, and then there are the demands of making it, which remain really unrelenting,” said Barbaro. “The show is so highly produced, with a rigor that makes it hard to simultaneously do lots of other things, and so we’re wrestling with that. We all wanna figure out how big this thing can be while still making it the way we make it.”