Read on Twitter
Good thread.
Context:
The Reply All team at Gimlet media made a deep dive documentary into the racist labor issues exposed at Bon Appétit.
Eric was co-host of The Nod at Gimlet/Spotify and left due to various issues, including rights to his work.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2020/6/30/21308074/the-nod-spotify-rss-feed-another-round-buzzfeed-podcast-ownership https://twitter.com/eeddings/status/1361789128006897668
Context:
The Reply All team at Gimlet media made a deep dive documentary into the racist labor issues exposed at Bon Appétit.
Eric was co-host of The Nod at Gimlet/Spotify and left due to various issues, including rights to his work.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2020/6/30/21308074/the-nod-spotify-rss-feed-another-round-buzzfeed-podcast-ownership https://twitter.com/eeddings/status/1361789128006897668
That thread led to this reaction from Starlee Kine, which is significant as her podcast Mystery Show was a huge hit for Gimlet then abruptly axed with no explanation, surprising fans of her work & seemed to derail her on mic career for a while. https://twitter.com/StarleeKine/status/1361828194031005698?s=20
Also worth recalling: Reply All started as TL:DR, a spinoff of On The media.
After they left Meridith Haggerty was brought on, took a slightly more political angle, got in trouble for an ep critizing a male feminist tech guy & got canned. https://www.politico.com/media/story/2015/03/wnyc-says-tldr-to-live-on-003569/
After they left Meridith Haggerty was brought on, took a slightly more political angle, got in trouble for an ep critizing a male feminist tech guy & got canned. https://www.politico.com/media/story/2015/03/wnyc-says-tldr-to-live-on-003569/
Here's details on that controversy, The on-air dressing down Merdith got & lengths NPR went to make it right is the most thorough I've ever heard. Arguably even moreso than when the Planet Money guys treated Elizabeth Warren like garbage. https://gawker.com/vivek-wadhwa-makes-great-case-against-vivek-wadhwa-on-w-1687016630
Side note: I remember one of the producers of Crimetown took the time to scold people (including me) who complained when the show's second season was spotify only for a year, which meant one had to sign up to hear it. This was before Gimlet was sold to spotify.
Plus how Gimlet began as a podcast about seeking venture capitalist money to create a podcast empire & ended with Gimlet selling itself to a streaming platform whose entire business rest on leveraging its dominance to screw over musicians & seeks to do the same to podcasts.
If one was to do a very deep dive on the patterns that inform this, consider the ugly side (class issues, weird management) of the start of This American Life, which is a key point of origin for so much of the modern podcast/NPR/hipster media market. https://m.chicagoreader.com/chicago/what-becomes-of-the-brokenhearted/Content?oid=897809
WBEZ & the success of TAL were part of a culture shift in Public Radio towarss syndicated behemoths & away from localized "boring" content. Very early in its existence, American Life even did a story about it with a vague mea culpa. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/61/fiasco/act-three-1
To make a stretch: in the pre-Mike Daisey era of TAL - when personal stories aired with minimal checking - they had a piece by Ken Kurson on Democrats Being Intolerent that's clearly BS & likely not checked with anyone he talked about. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/267/propriety/act-two-0
I noticed this because I knew about Kurson from his Chicago days & he was nortoriously confrontational & sketchy.
He's more recently known for being pardoned by Trump for stalking & harassment. https://www.thedailybeast.com/is-accused-stalker-and-kushner-family-friend-ken-kurson-donald-trumps-most-disturbing-pardon
He's more recently known for being pardoned by Trump for stalking & harassment. https://www.thedailybeast.com/is-accused-stalker-and-kushner-family-friend-ken-kurson-donald-trumps-most-disturbing-pardon
Plus TAL had Zoe Chace, who specialized in frustratingly softball pieces on the far right. Like one on racist exploitation of an assault at a school where she gave Anne Coulter a rather fawning interview with little pushback & no one to counter her after. Not linking to it.
TAL did have a great example of how to interview an extremist without legitimizing them by a black reporter.
On the same show, Chace did a piece on the Proud Boys that took their claims at face value & now seems a cringeworthy failure. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/626/white-haze/act-two-0
On the same show, Chace did a piece on the Proud Boys that took their claims at face value & now seems a cringeworthy failure. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/626/white-haze/act-two-0
Will save for later the critique of the tacit politics of Planet Money's hipster coverage of economics & the This American Life episodes they did on the 08 crash, except to say I prefer the episode TAL did with Pro Publica's pulitzer winning reporting. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/about/announcements/pulitzer-for-propublicas-wall-street-coverage
To be clear I'm a huge podcast head & old school fan of This American Life (my own social circles overlapped slightly with that scene before they all decamped to New York).
But there are ripples & patterns one can trace across the years to where we are now.
But there are ripples & patterns one can trace across the years to where we are now.
And may also someday get into Chicagoland's small but significant connections to various aspects of the hipster industrial complex that permeates the culture (McSweeneys, Albini, The Baffler, Chris Ware & other cartoonists, etc.).
Anyway, unspooled this tenuous thread of thought about as far as it can comfortably go in one evening. Thanks for reading.
