⛸ Yamaguchi girls 🧑⚖️ The Supreme Court sucking 🐊 animals trying to kill us 🥖 bread & tiny wine glasses🍷
🍭 👂 You're in for a treat! 🌈 🤸♀️
Bonjour!
Today is Monday, May 23. There are 135 days until my next Disney cruise. In case this email is too long, a Japanese star is making American friends here, My (own) Unsung Hero story is here, a new funny way to review movies is here.
xoxo lp
ps If you are pleased with Podcast The Newsletter, please spread the word.
👋q & a & q & a & q & a👋
Tonya Mosley
Tonya Mosley is the host of Truth Be Told. Follow her on Twitter here.
You announced the return of Truth Be Told with an episode called ‘Liberation.’ Why do you feel so free?
The longer title of that trailer episode is “Liberation, I Want It” - which is a nod to the Outkast song with the same name. There’s this line in the song that says, “I’m alive but am I living?” That really hit me in this moment.
The next few seasons of Truth Be Told is an exploration of what liberation means for Black Americans. Some much of our existence in this country has been looked at under the lens of our oppression, especially more recently, and while that dissection is extremely important in the fight towards equality, it’s exhausting. My goal is to turn the next few seasons of the show into a portal of sorts, where Black folks are talking to each other about what liberation looks and feels like in their everyday lives. How are we finding our own paths towards liberation? That’s the journey I’m taking through this podcast.
How was the new season of Truth Be Told be different from what we’ve heard in the past?
The next few seasons will focus squarely on what liberation looks, tastes and feels like for Black Americans. The seasons are broken up into four categories; love, nourishment, education and wealth. Listeners are in for a sonic exploration; sometimes we’ll be in a studio, sometimes we’ll be in person, sometimes we’ll be traveling to places to see up close what this work looks like.
Fill in the blank: If you like ______, you will like Truth Be Told.
Anthony Bourdain’s “Parts Unknown.” Reminding people of Anthony Bourdain’s “Parts Unknown'' is purely aspirational, but it's a good example of what we aim to do for the listeners. I am a curious explorer, and I want the audience to feel like they’re on a journey and learning with me too.
What do you hope Truth Be Told does for people?
My goal is for TBT listeners to feel smarter, and walk away with the language and tools they need to take these conversations to other spaces, to talk with loved ones and friends and colleagues. I’ve also heard from our listeners that they listen more than once to individual episodes. I want to create content that people want to refer to over and over.
Why are you the perfect host of this show?
I created this show because of my own curiosity about the ways people of color can build on the work of those before us who used media and language to shape the hearts and minds of people in ways that move society forward. This has been the core of my work since I was 15, and Truth Be Told is an evolution of that work.
What’s the secret to a great interview?
I am forever a student, so I don’t pretend to have mastered the perfect interview, but from my view it's about being present, curious and compassionately discerning and critical. It’s also about giving the person you’re interviewing space. Space to express ideas. I say that last part because sometimes as interviewers we can get in this mode of also trying to show how much we know. That knowledge should only be used to help your interview subject clearly express their ideas, or to push back on assertions from the person you’re interviewing. There’s a fine line between guiding a conversation, and looking like you know it all.
What’s a recipe for a great Truth Be Told story?
At its core TBT is an advice show, so the main ingredient is a dilemma that uncovers hard truths that gives us language to begin solving a problem. It’s not prescriptive and in most instances, there isn’t a line towards a resolution, but rather a starting point to move towards an answer.
What’s your sign? And what does that mean for you as a podcast host?
I’m a Taurus (Virgo rising) and most of the attributes are me! I’m grounded, hard headed, loyal, I love luxury and nice things. I love to work hard and play hard. I’ll sleep when I’m dead.
hey.
✨My podcast with Adela Mizrachi of Podcast Brunch Club, Feed the Queue, featured an episode of Other Men Need Help. Listen here.
✨The last issue of Podcast Marketing Magic gets into the weeds of Podcast Pinterest. Yes, you need to be on Pinterest. Read/subscribe here.
✨I wrote a piece for Lifehacker about my favorite scam podcasts. Read here.
✨Enter your podcast in the Podcast Partnership Database—we just hit 300 shows! If you have already applied, check back often to look for potential new podcast friends. Here it is.
✨I’m hosting another podcast marketing session with Radio Boot Camp on 6/6. Sign up here.
✨Arielle Nissenblatt spotlighted the podcast Seattle Now in her newsletter and podcast.
✨I’m going to be at PodFest in Orlando co-hosting the kick-off party with Adela and a presentation on podcast marketing. (Yes I am dragging Adela to a dinner in Disney World restaurant.) Come say hi!
🚨If u only have time for 1 thing🚨
If you have lived in Japan, you know the name. Naomi Watanabe. She’s been a hugely popular comedian there for fifteen years, but recently moved to the US. In order to improve her English and understand US culture, she’s started a (Spotify Original) podcast Naomi Takes America, where she reaches out to regular people like you and me (fans can submit to be on the show) to practice her English and learn about those hard-to-learn things that are important to the American identity. (Like what a Wawa is.) These are Naomi’s intimate conversations with strangers (I guess think Beautiful/ Anonymous) that are funny and sweet…in each episode Naomi not only learns about American life, she also makes a new friend. The first interview, with a woman from Philadelphia, taught me a bit about a pocket of the country I did’t know tons about, and what “jawn” means. Naomi Takes America is a unique platform for interview, storytelling, comedy, and culture. h/t Isabella Way.
⚡️News from Sounds Profitable⚡️
In Sounds Profitable, Bryan Barletta acknowledges the loss of primary neutral third-party prefix trackers and a solution that’s potentially better: first-party data. Here’s how we get there. Read here. Listen here.
💎BTW💎
🎙️My friend Kristi moved to Canada from China when she was a kid, and her parents let her pick her own English language name. If this had happened to me, this would probably be Podcast the Newsletter by Calvin Passell, but Kristi chose Kristi, after Kristi Yamaguchi. This illustrates what a recent example of Blind Landing is all about…how when Kristi Yamaguchi won the gold in women’s figure skating at the 1992 Olympics, she changed the lives of so many Asain little girls who weren’t used to seeing people who looked like them on TV. (Kristi Yamaguchi was one of the only Asian Americans on TV at all.) Reporter Stefanie Ritoper looks at the path Kristi took to become such an icon, whether or not she was American enough, the path she paved, what’s changed and hasn’t changed for Asian Americans, and shares personal stories from Kristi and a variety of Yamaguchi girls that speak to the importance of representation—especially for young people. Listen here.
🎙️My Unsung Hero is a show that lets people tell short stories about the people who saved them in some way. Sometimes the saving is metaphorical, but my hero story, which appeared on My Unsung Hero last week, was literal. I slipped on some ice, broke my hip, and a good samaritan scooped me up and went above and beyond to deliver me to safety. She may have saved my life. I was told I wouldn’t run again, but I’m going to use this chance to brag that a year later I went onto win the Disney World Princess Half Marathon in a Tinker Bell costume, which I wouldn’t have been able to do without her, either. Listen here.
🎙️One of my favorite new shows of the year, Normal Gossip, is back for a second season which made me a) do a dance across my apartment and b) slide into a big bowl of popcorn because this is titillating shit. Kelsey McKinney brings on guests to read listener-submitted stories (I had my own story read by Josh Gondelman on an episode) about low-level gossip, the kind your mom would tell you she overheard at the beauty salon. These are dishy stories told with funny commentary, and it feels like a “choose your own adventure show,” by making you wonder what you’d do at ever twist and turn of the story. The first episode of the season brings on Danielle Henderson (who you may recognize as Brendan Francis Newnam’s partner in crime on Not Lost.) Listen here.
🎙️5-4 is a podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks, and on each episode, Peter, Michael, and Rhiannon (and Slow Burn/Fiasco’s Leon Neyfakh) use dark humor to dismantle the Justices’ legal reasoning on affirmative action, gun rights, campaign finance, and more. The conversation is casual but they really outline hot-button Supreme Court decisions happening behind the scenes, the motivations of the main players (who often end up sounding like satirical villains in a comic book,) and the political forces that are pushing our laws to ridiculous places. There’s an episode about Roe V Wade that is crucial to the abortion story, and last week they cover a recent ruling that found that Puerto Ricans are not entitled to equal protection under the Fifth Amendment. It’s so wrong and unjustifiable but 5-4 is banking on the fact that at least we can learn about it, and laugh about it. If you’re looking for an explanation for why The Supreme Court makes sense, this show won’t explain it. But it will explain the complicated mess behind it. Listen here.
🎙️QCODE might be known for producing immersive audio dramas (that scare the SHIT out of you and make you trip while running across the Williamsburg Bridge because the sound is so realistic you feel like the story is happening to you…I still have a scar on my knee) but they’ve brought on an unscripted show, Tooth & Claw. Hosted by wildlife biologist Wes Larson (who has a Masters Degree in “Human/ Bear Conflict"!!), each episode features Wes explaining a real wild animal attack to his brother Jeff and friend Mike. I’m not a regular consumer of “dudes explaining things” shows, but Tooth & Claw is informative, light-hearted, actually horrifying at times, and I could have been fooled into thinking these guys were comedians. It’s part The Last Podcast on the Left, part My Brother My Brother and Me, part Ologies. I learned and laughed my way through an episode on polar bears. I think this show proves that animal true crime can be more gripping than the human kind. Listen here.
🎙️Tossed Popcorn is another movie podcast, but not just that. Lianna Holston and Siena Jeakle are going through the AFI's "100 Greatest American Movies Of All Time" to rewatch all the classics we have been led to believe, probably via mansplaining, we should? have watched and should? have loved. If you love segments (looking at you, Nissenblatt,) you will be overjoyed to hear the creative ways Lianna and Siena review the films. In the episode about The Godfather, segments include Voice Memo Predictions, Red Flags for the Ladies, Things That Caused Me to Mute the Film, Badges and Tradges, How to Pretend You’ve Seen This Film, and Should You See This Film or Do Literally Anything Else. Plus they rate the film on a scale of horse heads. They aren’t afraid to admit “I didn’t understand this,” or “do we have to like this?” Good questions to be asking about these movies that were lauded during a different time, when our standards may have been lower and I don’t know, we might have cared about racism homophobia and sexual assault expressed in a glorious light on the big screen. (For the record, I love The Godfather—and Lianna and Siena do find certain things about it likeable—the amount of bread eaten and the tiny wine glasses shown, to name a few.) Listen here.
🎙️Someone Knows Something has launched a season on the abortion wars, with host David Ridgen and investigative journalist Amanda Robb telling the story of the 1998 murder of Amanda’s uncle, a New York doctor killed for performing abortions. He was shot through his kitchen window while heating up soup. (You can hear more about this story on Things Fall Apart.) The story carries us over to a web of anti-abortion activists committing acts of violence in North America and Europe. There are going to be terrible stories about women prosecuted for miscarriages and undergoing dangerous procedures. This takes a look at what we might expect for abortion providers in a world without Roe Vs Wade. Listen here.
🎙️When The Forward approached me more than a year ago asking for help to market their new unnamed show, I assumed it would be newsy or tied tightly to current content from The Forward. Instead, the team has gone in the opposite direction, bringing content from the past. More than 100 years ago, The Forward started an advice column called A Bintel Brief, which helped Jewish people in America adapting to their new lives in the states. Reading these letters is like taking a time machine to the past, and reveals so much about what Jews were worried about, delighting in, and how they were maintaining their identities in a new place. The podcast, A Bintel Brief (back for season two) is a mix of old letters—brought to you by The Forward’s archivist Chana Pollack—and two bright rays of sunshine Lynn Harris (a comedian married to a rabbi in Brooklyn) and Ginna Green (a Black organizer in the south, also married to a rabbi,) who help answer questions from letter current readers of The Forward, which allows us to see how things have changed, and how sometimes they never do. Additional letters from podcast listeners breathe life into these conversations, revealing a vibrant look at what it was like then, and what it’s like now, being Jewish in America. Listen here.
🎙️Code Switch has partnered with Brooklyn Deep's School Colors, a show that ran independently in 2019 and analyzed how race, class, and power shape American cities and schools. In season two, Mark Winston Griffith and Max Freedman take listeners inside New York City School District 28 in Queens to find out why one of the most diverse places in the world needs a diversity plan, and why the area's parents were so opposed to it. It’s a complicated issue explored through vibrant storytelling and uncomfortable audio that again tackles race, class and power in American cities and schools with one glaring example that’s full of surprises and history about the North and South of Queens and Rochdale, New York, The Jamaica School War, and the prickly conversations happening in Queens today. You’ll like it if you liked Nice White Parents. Start listening here.
🎙️Stephanie Stone had lost touch with her brother Michael when he died in 2009, and he was declared indigent, meaning there was no money for a formal burial. His family didn’t claim his body and a local county stepped in to pay for final arrangements. Stephanie never learned where he was buried, which compounded her grief, and in a two-part episode, This Is Uncomfortable goes on a journey with Stephanie to locate his grave, on the way exploring what happens when a loved one dies and there’s not enough money for funeral. (Something that happens a lot—there are tens of thousands of unclaimed bodies every year. Funerals are expensive.) It’s a very personal story, a canary in the coal mine for thinking about larger social inequities. Talking about money usually makes me too…well uncomfortable. But This Is Uncomfortable is a show about people, with money issues as the backdrop. It tricks you into thinking about the economy with stories that pull at your heartstrings. Start listening here.
🎙️On Oprahdemics, historians, friends, and Oprah-obsessives Kellie Carter Jackson and Leah Wright Riguer take an academic look at pivotal moments from The Oprah Winfrey Show that shaped America and held up a mirror to it by giving voice to their concerns, reactions, and excitement about celebrities, diets, news, books, and more. On a recent episode they take us back to 2011, when Oprah was both subject and host, by inviting her long-lost half sister to appear on the show. It was a bold move, and offered many vulnerable moments, and showcased the kind of inviting, personable host Oprah was, and how she was able to relate to other people who had family secrets of their own. And don’t we all have them? Maybe we should be able to talk about them. Listen here.
🎙️”I feel like it would be quite helpful if people knew what the fuck they were talking about before they talk about politics…” was the impetus for the podcast Origin Story, hosted by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey, who are bringing the real stories behind the most misunderstood and abused ideas in politics. Episode one tackles McCarthyism, its history (a crusade against communists or a grifter’s opportunity that got out of hand?,) the people in Joe McCarthy’s orbit, and how McCarthy may have written the playbook for Donald Trump. Listen here.
🎙️You can finally start listening to Stolen, Connie Walker’s new (Spotify exclusive) series about residential schools in Canada, anchored by her own family story about her dad, who you learn in episode one, spent time at a school called St. Michael’s. Connie recently discovered that when he was a cop, her dad pulled over a priest whom he recognized as someone who abused him as a kid, and he beat the living shit out of him. It’s a gripping way to start a podcast, and Connie follows up with interviews with her family and a trip back to Saskatchewan, where her dad grew up, to try to trace her own trauma back to St. Michael’s and her dad’s experiences there. After listening to the first few episodes, I feel settled in with Connie and her family, and completely invested in her story. Connie is taking on a risky, vulnerable project to make clear the lingering trauma of residential schools, but also how trauma can complicate our relationships with people in our lives. Start listening here.
🎙️CBC podcasts has launched Kuper Island, which focuses on the aftermath of the Kuper Island Residential School after it was torn down in the 80s. There are ghosts where this school once stood, not the kind you associate with haunted houses, necessarily, but a presence that is felt by Kuper survivors. Duncan McCue is digging up undisclosed police investigations, confronting perpetrators of the abuse, and telling the story of a community trying to rebuild on a place where the ghosts of lost Indigenous children linger, and the families impacted by their presence today. This isn’t only about the atrocities or the numbers, it’s about them. Listen here.
🎙️To celebrate one year of This Is Good For You, Nichole Perkins is interviewed on her own podcast by her producer Eric about what she’s taken away from interviewing people about their passions—from sneaker collecting to honky tonk. I needed to hear this. It’s a reminder how important it is to have passions, why it’s okay to just do things that make you feel good, and why you shouldn’t feel guilty for enjoying chatty podcasts. Everything you like serves a purpose, and it’s really important to find that thing. Listen here.
🎙️I love you!
This week we’re getting to peek into the listening life of Sean Corbin, a big movie guy shocked to find himself in podcasting. In the best possible way. As much as he loves film, he thinks podcasts are so much more fresh and versatile. Which is why he’s shifted to producing, editing, hosting, and writing his own podcasts. Currently, he has one ongoing show, "F**k Your Opinion", a movie review podcast He’s been spending all his free time writing a narrative idea that he plans on producing soon.
The app you use to listen: Spotify is my go-to. I find it easy to find all the shows I'm looking for and it's easy to navigate.
What speed do you listen to podcasts? Call me crazy, but I stick to the 1x speed. I really want to absorb the sounds, conversation, and audio design as intended and not miss anything.
How do you discover new shows? Usually through recommendations from friends, podcasters, or any of the many ranking lists.
One show you love that everybody loves. The show that I love and tune in immediately to is "The Ringer-Verse" from The Ringer. Basically, a show where some really smart, really funny, really charming, and really amazing folks break down nerd culture and the newest superhero/sci-fi movies and TV shows. It really is true that we tune into podcasts for the personalities above anything else, and that's certainly true here. Even if I don't care for the show or topic they discuss, I still make sure to tune in as soon as an episode pops up.
One show you love that most people don't know about. I think people know this show because it was heavily advertised, but it didn't seem to do well, and kinda feels like because of that people don't know about it. "The Last Degree of Kevin Bacon". Personally, this is the podcast that really showed me how compelling and interesting comedy podcasts can be and convinced me to work on my own. If you haven't listened and dismissed it earlier, I'd strongly suggest giving it a chance.
Anything else you want to say... I'm really excited about podcasting and its future, in every regard. In regards to interviews and conversational podcasting - it's a genre that I loved before I knew I loved. Years ago, I loved listening to Radio DJs just talk and have funny conversations. Same with late-night interviews. So when that started to come to fruition in podcasting, my mind was blown. Similarly with narrative podcasting, I'm really eager to start working in the space. I find it fascinating because it's an art form that is both so new and so old. Old because in many ways they have their roots in old radio shows that really worked out great formulas and techniques. But on the other hand, so new because we're really carving out a new space and making it our own like Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin did with film. We're still at the beginning of this art form and the possibilities of experimenting with what we can do, as well as having the opportunity to tell the stories we want without the same limitations as film....I just find it all so exciting and I'm happy to be on the journey with you all.
