A sentence I did not expect to type this year: Jay Rosen was on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah last night, promoting The Correspondent, the U.S. iteration of the Dutch De Correspondent, which is in the midst of a startup fundraising drive.

It was kind of a weird segment! Not because of anything Jay did — he laid out The Correspondent’s principles and pitch perfectly well — but because Noah did the entire interview via a Siri-like voice on his phone. (He’s been having voice issues.) Unsurprisingly, it made the interview more, well, robotic. I think Jay would’ve gotten at least one additional applause break from The People Formerly Known as the In-Studio Audience without it.

At @TheDailyShow tonight, @Trevornoah stops in to "talk" with us (me, @robwijnberg @ejpfauth) before the show. He employed his phone and its voice assistant to chat with us because he's under doctors orders not to use his vocal chords. It was… charming. pic.twitter.com/CDwzxazF3u

— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) December 7, 2018

(I will note that Baratunde Thurston, a former Daily Show producer, and current Daily Show-er Anthony De Rosa are both Correspondent ambassadors, though I have no particular insight about how The Correspondent scored this appearance most crowdfunders would die for.)

This was not, I should add, Rosen’s first appearance on The Daily Show. Google tells me that would be a March 3, 2005 appearance in which he was interviewed for a correspondent segment by Rob Corddry, riffing off the then-current Jeff Gannon scandal. (Ah, simpler times.) Thankfully, I was able to find a clip. So if you’ve been waiting your entire life to hear Rob Corddry describe online journalism as “like f**king in the ’70s” — “there are no rules” — and to see Jay Rosen respond with this look, well, today you are truly living your best life.

Also, in 2010, “Stephen Colbert” took issue with Rosen’s thoughts on the Sunday talk shows, calling him “Field Marshall Thesaurus,” a name I deeply hope has stuck among his grad students. Stick around for three visions of an earlier age: a young(er) Bill Adair, a young(er) Jake Tapper, and rarest of all, a screenshot of Posterous.

If The Correspondent wanted to see an immediate tsunami of financial support after the segment aired last night, it might be a little disappointed. At this writing, The Correspondent has raised $1.3 million of its $2.5 million goal. (Twenty of those bucks were mine, for what it’s worth.) With only 7 days left in its month-long fund drive, that’s still a pretty tall climb, assuming there’s not a last-resort whale waiting in the wings. It reached $718,000 in its first 5 days. It took the next 9 days to reach $1 million, and it’s taken another 9 days to reach $1.3 million.