🦈 Lunatic-level shark violence🩸 the nicest celebrities in Hollywood 🤩 the return of Finn's bell 🔔 are you being stalked?🧟♂️
🍭 👂 You're in for a treat! 🌈 🤸♀️
Bonjour!
Today is Monday, July 11. There are 86 days until I go on my next Disney Cruise. In case this email is too long, “lunatic level” shark violence here, a beautiful, beautiful show presented by a pharmaceutical company here, the ten nicest celebrities in Hollywood here.
xoxo lp
ps If you are pleased with Podcast The Newsletter, please spread the word.
👋q & a & q & a & q & a👋
Connie Walker
Connie Walker is the host of Stolen: Surviving St. Michael’s, which you can listen to in full on Spotify. Follow her on Twitter here.
The newest season of Stolen is incredibly personal for you. Was the story about your father with you for a long time?
No, I just learned of the story of my dad pulling over a priest who had abused him at residential school a year ago. Last May, my brother shared it in a Facebook post. I remember how sick I felt when I read it. I never knew that my dad had been abused by a priest. It was incredibly painful to learn about but it also helped me understand my dad in a new way. We had a difficult relationship. My dad was physically abusive to my mom when I was a kid and I witnessed that violence. That childhood trauma shaped me and our relationship and when my dad died in 2013, I felt like I’d lost my chance to repair our relationship.
How hesitant were you to share something so personal?
I think I was more nervous for my family than for myself. I always feel a responsibility to the people who trust me to help tell their stories and when those people are in your family, that responsibility feels even greater.
My family was so generous with me — helping me get to know my dad in a new way but also sharing with me their own experiences in residential schools. Those interviews were incredibly sensitive, they were things we’d never talked about before so I wanted to make sure they were ok with everything throughout our reporting.
How did the story change from when you envisioned it to the final version?
This podcast begins as a very personal story about my father’s experience at a residential school in Saskatchewan and the abuse he endured at the hands of a priest. However, I quickly realized that this story was actually much bigger than me and my dad. When I set out to find the priest who abused him, I quickly realized that there were other survivors in my family and in my community who were also abused. Our investigation grew, and our goals for the podcast changed. We wanted to expose as many abusive priests, nuns and staff members of St. Michael’s that we could. It took months of reporting but what we were able to uncover about abuse at St. Michael’s was shocking and horrifying.
Can you remember a particularly emotional day you had reporting?
There have been so many emotional days, it would be hard to pinpoint one. Bearing witness to what children endured at St. Michael’s has made this the most difficult story I’ve ever covered. But nearing the end of our season, I’m mostly left with a feeling of gratitude. We spoke to 28 survivors about their childhoods at St. Michael’s, through their voices and memories, we were able to reconstruct the school, to get a glimpse inside, to more fully understand what they went through as children. We wanted to amplify their voices and to create space for them to tell their own stories in Episode 4 - “Not A Place To Be.” It’s heartbreaking, infuriating and one of the most powerful pieces of audio that I’ve ever heard. It’s an episode that I’m still thinking about on a daily basis.
What do you hope this show accomplishes?
I hope that listeners walk away from their podcast with a better understanding of the truth about what children endured at St. Michael’s and other residential schools in Canada and the US. That in learning my dad’s story, they can empathize with what survivors have gone through, not just at the schools but in the decades after they left, they have been haunted by that trauma, and unable to get justice for the crimes committed against them. And the fact that it is 2022 and we are just learning this truth is shameful. Survivors have been carrying these stories on their own for their whole lives, we have a responsibility to listen, to learn the truth and until we can do that, we can’t talk about reconciliation.
🚨If u only have time for 1 thing🚨
I received a pitch for That Vampire Show (Kat, a high school senior wins a fan fiction writing contest for the TV show Bloodlines) and am embarrassed to admit how long I thought it was about the 2015 show Bloodline starring Kyle Chandler, Linda Cardellini, and Sissy Spacek. Like, it’s probably why I hit play in the first place, because that would be so weird. But I was instantly sucked into what I got—Bloodlines is not a real show, but the podcast is even better than it would be if this was my Bloodline (which I was obsessed with and suddenly want to start writing fan-fic about it, even though it was bad, we can talk about that later.) On this show, Bloodlines creator Warren Young is forced to select the winner of the fan-fic contest and meets Kat, who is flown to LA with her friend to visit the set (Kat is pretty unpleasant to her friend,) but Warren is going through his own shit and things are nothing like what Kat expects. Her fandom is put on trial and…there might be some surprising love in the air? Between episodes there is an in-universe talk show called “Behind The Screams,” which gives a glimpse into the TV show within the podcast. Kat can be found on social media, reacting in real time to the episodes on Twitter, Tumblr, and Archive Of Our Own. It’s meta, multi-dimensional, it’s creative on top of creative, it’s funny, and extremely listenable.
hey.
✨Thursday 7/14, I'm hosting a panel with Pod People and Deondric Royster of the Signal Awards on how to gain notoriety for your podcast through PR and awards. Register here...we're going to have a blast and I hope to see you there!
✨In Someone Dies In This Elevator, there is always an elevator and someone always dies in it. Amazing, right? You technically know what will happen each episode, but you’ll be caught by surprise nonetheless. Today Tal Minear and the team are kicking off a crowdfunding campaign for it. Click here and help them pay for cast and crew!
✨LWC Studios announced the expansion of The Podcasting, Seriously Awards Fund to include reimbursements for audio production education and training for BIPOC and LQBTQ+ independent producers, editors, and other creators. Through this expansion, the Fund will support educational opportunities for creators belonging to underrepresented groups.
✨Arielle Nissenblatt spotlighted Bloodthirsty Hearts in her newsletter and podcast.
✨Adela of Podcast Brunch Club and I released an episode of Femlore on our podcast discovery podcast Feed the Queue. Feed the Queue is technically the best podcast of all time because every episode is just the best episode of the best podcasts we can find. Listen here.
✨The Podcast Movement lineup has been announced! I’ll be speaking on a panels with Rebecca Lavoie, Arielle Nissenblatt, and Quill Inc. See you in Dallas?
✨The Love and Noraebang trailer drops tomorrow. Go directly to Love and Noraebang, do not pass Go.
⚡️News from Sounds Profitable⚡️
On Sounds Profitable, Tom Webster talks about why hosting platforms and publishers need to be working with marketplaces, and what a Baja Chicken Salad can teach us about the dangers of super-serving your current podcast audience. Read here. Listen here.
💎BTW💎
🎙️I could not press play on Réunion: Shark Attacks in Paradise fast enough—I guess I can add sharks to my list of podcast kinks. The show, hosted by journalist, adventurist, and surfer Dan Duane, brings us to a remote island in the Indian Ocean that has experienced “lunatic levels” of shark attacks in recent years. It’s grisly and almost unbelievable to hear about limbs being torn off and people getting hunted down by two sharks at once, a horror I had never considered. But Dan gets into the tensions on the island between surfers, politicians, business owners, and conservationists that erupt when the community tries to fix the problem. We hear from locals and witnesses, and get to explore the government’s response. It’s a community and climate story with a splash of absolute gory terror. Listen here.
🎙️You might be tempted to swipe past a podcast presented by pharmaceutical company, but I’m begging you to give ViiV Healthcare’s Love in Gravity a chance. It’s an anthology series aimed at addressing HIV stigma within the Latinx and Afro-Latinx communities, with eight original stories completely made by gay, bisexual, and queer Latinx and Afro-Latinx creators. The writing is fun, the acting is great, and the production is top-notch. While each story can stand on its own, the entire project is cohesive. There’s love, multi-cultural stories and characters, lots of jokes, and steamy sex scenes that probably wouldn’t make it on TV. God bless podcasts. Listen here.
🎙️We spend hours (years?) simmering in true-crime stories, and experts think that women listen to these stories to understand the criminal mindset. But how many of these stories are actively trying to help us? That seems to be what The Followers is doing. Not only does it have a chilling opening—LBC journalist Shelagh Fogarty describes with great detail how she notices the same face, her stalker, appearing throughout her day, and I felt the fear. (I also felt the fear watching Watcher last night, which is a nice companion piece to The Followers.) The show is getting into the causes and solutions of stalking. Why do stalkers start to stalk? There is a lot Shelagh wishes she had known about being stalked and her lessons are helpful. By the time you realize someone is a threat, it might be too late. Is there anything we can do to stop it? There’s real instruction, here. Listen here.
🎙️The fact that Ukrainians of all backgrounds are picking up guns to protect their country in the war with Russia is terrifying enough, but First Person zones in on an extra dangerous situation—that of Oleksandr Zhuhan, a gay man who along with his husband Antonia joined the volunteer Territorial Defense Forces, despite experiencing homophobia in Ukraine. The couple (who obviously had to go back into the closet but decorated their guns with stickers) are fighting to protect a country that hadn’t always protected them, along soldiers who in peacetime might have been their enemies. Oleksandr talks about why he volunteered and how he fears getting captured by the Russians more than death. Listen here.
🎙️On The Town, Matt Belloni and Lacey Rose do a run-down of the ten nicest celebrities in Hollywood, each bringing five to the table. (There is one overlap!) It ends up being not just a list of nice people. There are rules (it has to be someone they both have a personal experience with enough to form an opinion but it can’t be based on just that personal experience, they must be alive, it can’t be someone who is super old, the more famous you are the bigger the deal is if you are nice, no children, nothing obvious) that make this story an interesting piece about celebrity, what nice celebrities have in common, and Jennifer Garner’s “frightening” kindness. She’s also “aggressively not boring.” This episode was a nice and non bullshitty twist on the way most people report on celebrities. Listen here.
🎙️I have been listening to a lot of depressing stuff lately (the news) but this episode of Latino USA about undocumented and unhoused people in the Bay Area, while excellently done, was really hard to listen to. It’s a powerful string of stories about undocumented Latinos and Latinas who had to leave their homes during the pandemic that completely rewrites the housing story we are being told in mainstream media—the real reason why evictions are down, why we need to replace the word “gentrification” with “displacement,” how the terror of being undocumented makes people vulnerable to mistreatment, and the pandemic domino affect, which sent people from apartments to cars to under bridges to being invisible. This is a weighty listen that made me feel hopeless. Listen here.
🎙️On Mortified, storytellers read from their childhood and teenage diaries, and the I Want Some Action episode was maybe the best one yet. (Maybe I always say that.) Young TK’s diary entries are so funny she should be hired in a writing room, and I kept on wondering if she had any idea how sharp she was, or if it was entirely accidental and the result of being a boy-crazy girl. Stacey’s diary is adorable and plunges us into her puzzling-yet-strategic MO. Both open us up to the lives of teenagers dealing with their thoughts and confusions and horniness and dreams and maybe even their own self-awareness that someone, someday might be reading. Though I very much doubt they thought their diary would become this public. Listen here.
🎙️Last year, I wrote about Finn and the Bell and interviewed its creator, Erica Heilman, and I have never received more emails and notes telling me that they were so grateful to know about Rumble Strip and how they had gone and binged everything. Rumble Strip is hard to describe (stories about people?) but even harder to stop listening to. Erica is an audio magician. Since we last talked to Erica, Finn and the Bell was featured on 99% Invisible and it won a Peabody, and now Erica has an update to the story. Finn's bell finds its home at Hazen Union High School and rings in the Hardwick Memorial Day Parade. If you were crushed by Finn’s story, this episode will give you solace. Listen here.
🎙️In a multi-episode series of Those Happy Places, Alice and Buddy are going back to basics, outlining what they mean when they say that theme parks are literature. I have been beating the Those Happy Places drum for years (I wrote about their Birds of Paradise series for the Bello 100) but if you haven’t tried this show yet, this might be a good place to start—studying amusement parks and theme parks through the lens of literature is so interesting, and Alice and Buddy make it academic and fun. They kick things off by defining the word “theme park,” which is way more interesting that you might think. Listen here.
🎙️Sound Deals is the show that gives me more laughter per minute than any other show. Not giggles—hearty, spitting laughter. (The theme song along kills me every time I hear it.) On each episode, hosts Evan and Ivan let you into their warehouse where Ivan, who is being held hostage there, tests out made up products like the “Foam Stool,” and has a funny, improvised conversation with comics about what the product might be. (Evan seems to be spared from testing but is present in solidarity.) The more terrible the products Ivan must test, the more glowing reviews he makes. I would say I wish this show was non-fiction, but I care about Ivan too much to want him to have to endure the wrath of “Dunk Tank Spray,” the “String Wipers,” or my favorite, “The Lucky Pipe.” Listen here.
🎙️On StraightioLab, comedians George Civeris and Sam Taggart unpack straight culture with funny guests who pick the theme, from handshakes to death to the Boy Scouts. It doesn’t matter what the theme is, it doesn’t matter who the guest is, everything that comes out of George and Sam’s mouths has me rolling on the floor. There are two regular segments—one at the beginning that makes absolutely no sense and one at the end that lets the guest and hosts to do a TRL-like shoutout to the bros about something of their choice. What’s between is a focus on one specific thing that unfolds into a conversation about culture that is not just funny but shockingly insightful. If you think about it enough, everything about straight culture is hilarious and fucked up, and George and Sam are just the guys to tell us about it. They just wrapped up the end of season two (early episodes are especially unhinged) and have been picked up by Big Money Players Network, so if you haven’t listened, I am jealous of how much you get to binge. Your face will be in pain from smiling. Justin and I attended a live show over the weekend at The Bell House in Brooklyn (with guest Max Wittert who is truly an agent of chaos) and it was a) one of the funniest live events I’ve attended and b) amazing to see how many rabid fans George and Sam have. When Justin and I are listening to them, we obviously feel like their only fans in the world. Listen here.
🎙️On You’re Wrong About, Sarah Marshall spent three whole episodes with Carmen Maria Machado unpacking the fake book Go Ask Alice, a diary of a girl who goes on a downward spiral from innocent to addicted to drugs fast, that serves as a cautionary tale about drugs and homosexuality. It’s packaged as anonymous non-fiction but was in fact written by a Mormon youth counselor named Beatrice Sparks with an agenda. But I didn’t know that when I read it at age ten, which by the way is too young to be reading it. Sarah and Carmen take us through the story, pointing out the strategic plot points Beatrice used to terrify young readers and why the book has endured for 50 years, dipping into discussions about young girls and their diaries, how we can gage a girl’s awareness of the reader and witness her breaking the fourth wall to reveal more than she intended, and why we tell girls to write in their diaries in a way we don’t tell boys, as if documenting your personal thoughts is a home ec project in the 50s? As Sarah and Carmen point out, this fake book has endured because it is well written—it’s a fake book about drugs written by someone who understands depression. A fake book about doom and how life is scary and a reminder that you can’t slip up—the grim reaper is at your door. Whether Beatrice intended it or not, Alice can be interpreted as a depressed, queer teen self-medicating. In the last episode they talk to Rick Emerson who actually wrote a real book about the fake book, Unmask Alice (LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World's Most Notorious Diaries). This was one of the most engaging book discussions I’ve heard on a podcast. Listen here.
🎙️I love you!
This week we’re getting to peek into the listening life of Hayden Gray, Account Specialist for Sweet Fish, a podcast production company that helps B2B companies produce industry-leading podcasts. Hayden is also the owner of his own podcast consulting and production company, Podcasting for Visionaries, where he helps small business owners and creatives bring their dream shows to life!
The app you use to listen: I currently use Spotify for my listening, mostly out of convenience. I used Stitcher for several years, but found that its design didn’t make up for the lack of simplicity in its UX, especially as my listening cue grew.
What speed do you listen to podcasts? 1x speed: listening to podcasts is a form of self-care for me. I want to enjoy my shows, not just get information out of them. I’ve always found that 1x speed helps me to become more invested in the hosts and the conversations they’re having!
How do you discover new shows? Usually it’s through trusting the endorsement of my friends and the folks in the podcast industry that I trust. If the host of one of my favorite shows tells me that a certain podcast is worth a listen, I’m at least going to give it a try! I believe that it’s important that we as an industry work to improve the issue of discoverability as much as possible.
One show you love that everybody loves. Morbid: A True Crime Podcast - From the time I first watched “Ghost Hunters” on SYFY in middle school, I’ve been OBSESSED with all things spooky and paranormal. So Morbid is a natural fit for me! I love getting to hear the listener stories that the hosts share, and they do such a great job of letting us into their friendship, while also providing SO much spooky info about the subject of the day!
If you’re looking for a particularly great episode, “Listener Tales: Volume 37” is particularly bone-chilling!
One show you love that most people don't know about. MuggleCast was the first podcast I listened to when I was 10 years old in 2005. Little did I know that it would spark a love of audio storytelling in me that led me my career in podcasting! I really feel like I grew up with the hosts, and they are STILL finding new fascinating ways to explore the Harry Potter series!
Anything else you want to say…I moved into podcasting full-time in May. It was a dream of mine for years before it finally became a reality. I wouldn’t have made it to where I am today without people in the industry who were kind enough to invest their time and knowledge into me. It’s so vitally important that those of us in the industry do what we can to give a helping hand to aspiring professionals.
If anyone in the industry is ever looking for advice, encouragement or simply someone to cheer you on in your journey, my virtual door is always open! You can reach me at haydenmitchelgray@gmail.com
