What a 100 Million podcast downloads taught him
The producer behind one of the most downloaded podcasts on why he stopped chasing video and what he found when he turned journalism's lens on itself.
“I definitely feel FOMO sometimes when I just see like podcast clips going around and ours aren't in the mix. ”
Brian Reed
Disarmingly honest but his FOMO stops here. Brian Reed does not make podcasts the way most people make podcasts. He is the producer behind S-Town, one of the most downloaded audio series in history, and a central figure in the orbit that gave the world Serial at This American Life. He left the New York Times after the acquisition of Serial Productions, co-founded an audio company called Placement Theory and launched a new show called Question Everything, which turns the tools of rigorous investigative journalism onto journalism itself. That is who Evan Shapiro and I spent an hour with on The Media Odyssey Podcast, tell me how lucky are we?!
We started at the beginning, with a listener email that arrived at This American Life in late 2012 with the subject line “John B. Macklemore lives in shit town, Alabama” and followed Brian through the years of reporting in Bibb County that eventually became S-Town. The show got hundreds of millions of downloads on a story that opens as a murder investigation and becomes something else entirely.
Brian also walks us through how Serial came to exist, why the concept nearly died in a room full of people who did not see the point and what the sale to the New York Times felt like from inside a pandemic.
From there we got into the question on whether audio can sustain itself without chasing video. Brian ran the experiment and stopped, not because the content was weak but because the audience was not there and the video work was pulling resources away from what was actually working.
That argument connects directly to the larger question the episode builds toward, which is what sustainable independent journalism actually looks like when local newsrooms are disappearing, public broadcasting has been defunded and trust between journalists and their audiences is at historic lows. Brian has been reporting on all of it and he is not short of opinions.
Have a listen and come tell me your go to podcasts. Mine? Smartless for my Monday laugh, The Daily for my news, Totemic for my culture shot and On va déguster because of course we, French, listen to pods about food!
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That’s it for today but before you go: