Good morning!
Welcome to Digestable, your mouthful of things happening in the world.
Today’s ferments:
Popping into your inbox on this dreary Wednesday with a Second Look that I just couldn’t get out the door on Monday! I’m currently on an incredibly slow train crawling its way from Washington DC to Chicago.
In addition to getting from the east coast to the midwest in absolutely the most geographically inefficient way, today has been a reminder that Amtrak doesn’t own the train tracks it runs on. Rather, freight lines do, so consumer goods take precedence over passenger trains. We spent an hour this morning fully stopped so a freighter could cross in front of us. I hate flying, and really disbelieve that I’d need to fly from one city to another when they’re connected by land, but boy, this has not been an advertisement for American rail travel.
Here’s a view from the journey.
The Second Look
Half-baked cultural criticism from Gabriel Coleman.
First Glance
There’s a point I seem to get to with most major podcasts where I suddenly switch from anticipating every episode to needing them off my feed as soon as possible. This happened last week to internet podcast Reply All when they added an episode that essentially functions as an hour long cryptocurrency advert where they attempt to reclaim some NFTs for a woman who bought them for $900 a piece and then fell for a phishing scheme. Reply All has been in and out of hot water for a while due to funky race and labor stuff and I want to talk about one particular aspect of their attempt to reestablish themself that leaves a bad taste in my mouth: the personnel change.
Double Take
About a year ago Reply All started a miniseries called The Test Kitchen where they attempted to unpack the racist underpinnings of Bon Appetit’s viral-boom-and-bust Youtube Test Kitchen team. But in a spectacular double take-down, their attempts to air Bon App’s dirty laundry ended up exposing reporter Sruthi Pinnamaneni and cohost PJ Vogt’s weird attitude towards attempts of their colleagues to unionize and got them both booted from Reply All’s team for some ugly abusive behaviors. Cue Emmanuel Dzotsi who stepped in to fill PJ’s position as co-host alongside Alex Goldman in an attempt to re-steer programming to prevent the potential exodus of listeners. And, nothing against Emmanuel because he seems like a lovely guy but the show has kind of limped along since. No doubt the cancel culture vultures would say this is because the show isn’t any good without PJ but I would argue that the lower appeal of the show isn’t to do with a new host being bad, but a new host revealing what was never really that great.
Reply All isn’t the only show I’ve noticed this with. RadioLab first saw the retirement of co-host Robert Krulwich last year and then co-host and founder Jad Abumrad’s departure this past month. The new hosts Latif Nasser and Lulu Miller are both so excellent but the show seems to be dominated by reruns of Jad/Robert shows of yore and Latif & Lulu seem to be more occupied with marketing the podcast’s new crowdfunding attempt The Lab than making elaborate deeply-reported stories. It seems in this case that Jad & Robert may have both seen the writing on the wall with reduced funding and, in the case of Jad new projects elsewhere, and jumped ship before it was time to balance the checkbook and make changes. It isn’t until the voices we listen to change that us listeners see what’s been going on for a while. And this is what seems to have happened with Reply All. Gimlet media, the startup that makes Reply All, was acquired by Spotify a while ago and seems to have languished since then with pressures to act as Spotify’s flagship podcast and potential staffing and budget changes. (Rumors are also circulating that Spotify is venturing into cryptocurrency which may explain this garbage fire of an episode.) But with PJ being mean to Alex like he always was, I didn’t really notice until I had to get used to a new person behind the mic.
Hindsight
A couple examples where this has gone differently: This American Life has played with trading out Ira Glass for different hosts more recently, especially with Bim Adewunmi stepping in to report on stories that deal with race. This works because Ira has always mostly functioned as the emcee of TAL, introducing the work of other reporters, so hearing other voices and styles is normal. Also TAL’s funding isn’t going anywhere so even in someone like Bim takes over full time, we’ll still get the mix of classic reruns and new exciting reporting we’re used to (hopefully). The oldest, and most successful, example of the host change is in Minnesota Public Radio’s Live From Here, a reimagining of A Prairie Home Companion started after Garrison Keillor’s sexual assault history came to light in 2017. Hosted by Chris Thile of the Punch Brothers, Live From Here works because it takes the things that made PHC great and completely reworks them around the host. MPR obviously devoted a lot of time, energy, and cold hard cash to making sure the whole thing would work.
I think the lessons we learn from all this are: 1. Don’t worry about handing your show off to someone new but also 2. don’t hand your new Black host a show that is on fire, in fact 3. Give your new host a bunch of money to play with and a supportive structure. Ultimately 4. just don’t sell your company to Spotify.