🥩 BEEF 🔮 Lizzy Cooperman's Last Ride? 🐕 mushers dogs & booties 🛷 conniving Tinker Bell ✨

🍭 👂 TRUST ME! 🌈 🤸‍♀️

Mar 06, 2023

Bonjour.

Today is Monday, March 6. There are 66 days until my next Disney cruise. In case this email is too long, my favorite sports podcast is here for an extremely limited time—join the excitement here, Bridget Todd has a new thing and it’s great (Dan Savage stars in episode one) and listen to this and send a voice memo to Lizzy, telling her to keep on making her show.

[I will never charge you to read Podcast the Newsletter. If you’d like to buy an ad, inquire here.]

xoxo lp

ps If you are pleased with Podcast The Newsletter, please spread the word.

Ashley Ray

Ashley Ray is a comedian and TV writer with a passion for all things television. She was a critic for Vulture, Variety, Emmy Magazine and The A.V. Club before becoming a creative and now she gets to celebrate TV with her Earwolf podcast TV, I Say w/Ashley Ray. Follow her on Twitter here. Follow TV, I Say on Twitter here.

Describe TV, I Say in 10 words or less.
It’s like a hangout sitcom! Writers, actors, comics talking TV they love!

Why are you the perfect host for this show?
Since I was a kid, I’ve loved all TV. I think today, there’s such a focus on prestige TV, but I like meeting shows on their level. I like celebrating trash TV, reality shows, docu-series, everything!

How is your show different than other TV podcasts?
Since I’m also a writer and creative, I think other artists feel more comfortable opening up to me. This isn’t a scary piece of criticism, they don’t have to worry about properly analyzing things. It’s just real TV opinions. I try to create a vibe that’s like a TV groupchat with all your favorite actors and comics.

What’s your ideal TV viewing situation? Snacks? Setup? Clothing?
A massive, massive couch, a suffocating amount of blankets and a giant charcuterie tray. I love a variety of snacks while I binge.

How do you choose what you’re going to cover?
I follow a lot of the conversation online, but I also just use my own weird TV intuition. I watch a lot of shows people miss and I can tell when something needs more attention. I love introducing people to shows they never would’ve heard of.

Should podcasters read their reviews?
NO! Maybe it’s because I used to be a reviewer and critic, but I think everyone should avoid reviews.

Who is your audience? Do you ever hear from them or engage with them?
Yes! I love my TV Club. I have a really engaged audience of TV fans and writers who love talking to me about shows. I love engaging with them and we use the podcast patreon as a little hub for really nerdy TV talk.

Are you a podcast listener?
Yes! But honestly, I mostly listen to true crime stuff or weird mysteries and investigative reports.

Read the whole thing

🚨If u only have time for 1 thing🚨

I feel a wave of excitement at the beginning of each March, when I know that mushers and their dogs are heading to Alaska for the annual Iditarod. The Iditapod is the once-a-year, very special podcast that takes you right to the race, with daily updates on every push and pull, interviews with the racers, and adorable details about the dogs and their little booties. And it’s back. In the first episode of the seventh season, host Casey Grove and trail reporters Lex Treinen and Ben Matheson recap last year’s race, warm us up for the smallest field in race history this year, and bring us a Dog of the Day, a spunky little leader named Dusty. You’ll feel like you’re all bundled up, cheering the dogs on from the sidelines.

Listen now

oh hey

✨12 Podcasts to Obsess Over If You Like You're Wrong About via Lifehacker

✨A marketing case study (or: how we made ourselves obsolete) via Podcast Marketing Magic.

✨Feed the Queue, the podcast discovery podcast I co-host with Adela Mizrachi of Podcast Brunch Club, featured an episode of The Turning: The Sisters Who Left. Listen here.

✨Arielle Nissenblatt spotlighted FOGO in her newsletter and podcast.

—sponsored—

The Boundless Audio Network is home to diverse shows with women at the lead! We support shows that are culturally conscious and are strong allies and advocates for creating spaces for voices within marginalized communities. It's our goal to grow and support shows that are culturally conscious with hosts who are strong allies and advocates who are creating spaces for voices within marginalized and under-represented communities. Learn more about Boundless Audio at www.boundlessaudionetwork.com

Kate’s Corner

I was visiting my friend Kate this weekend, and her baby Wheezy. Kate is a supportive friend who tries to like podcasts but she can’t. Her reasoning is unusual, and poses a challenge for me: she doesn’t like the sound of people’s voices. I’m not really sure how to get around this but I’m going to try. This is my whole theory about how I’m constantly trying to get people to listen to more podcasts if they already listen, but this year I’m really trying to get people to go from zero to one. Those are the tough nuts to crack. Kate might be the toughest. I still think she just hasn’t found the right podcast to listen to yet. So I’m going to start recommending something just for her, and I won’t stop until we find something. Hopefully she will listen and tell me if I’m getting closer. Kate is a new mom and very smart, who thinks podcasts are just men talking at each other. Which yes, unfortunately podcasts can be that. But I think she’d enjoy The Longest Shortest Time, Hillary Frank’s beautiful reflection on parenting. You’ll be proud to hear that Kate’s 3-month-old daughter Wheezy loves Small Talk Baby Podcast with Miss Pam. That gives me hope. Kate, try Hillary’s show and lmk what you think.

Kate, click here.

💎BTW💎

🎙️THE Bridget Todd is up to more great stuff, BEEF, a show that tells the stories behind notable rivalries in music, wrestling, movies, history, and more. Listeners will find out how these rivals tried to crush their competition, only to find that their enemies became the driving force behind their success. On episode one, Bridget gets in the advice columnist weeds, where Dear Abby and Ann Landers were hashing things out as sisters in the 60s. Dan Savage hops on to talk about how Ann Landers essentially taught him how to write "I sucked my partner off” in lieu of “I performed oral sex on my partner.” This show is packed with a dramatic story that inspired nearly all of the advice columnists we hear from today. Bridget makes the episode sing, Dan Savage makes it pop. (Upcoming episodes include: singers James Brown vs. Jow Tex, the executives behind Playboy vs. Penthouse, and the founders of Adidas vs. Puma.) Listen here.

🎙️I love fan theories, the idea that people can explode a created world into something even more fantastical, something so nuts it might even make sense, or maybe it doesn’t make any sense. I love it all. Fan Theory Queries is an unpolished, nuts and bolts show where three people read fan theories from mostly Reddit and decide whether they’re complete bunk, believable, wonderful, or even better than what the original creator intended. I don’t know how they choose which theories to cover, but a flash goes off in my brain every time they discover a new Disney theory, which is often. Last week they were hashing out whether or not in Hook (the 1991 film starring Robin Williams) Tinker Bell and Smee worked together to lure Peter back to Neverland. ICYMI I named my company after Tinker Bell because I love her, and this seems like just the sort of thing that magical little bitch would do. Listen here.

🎙️Lizzy Cooperman is considering ending In Your Hands and I’m going to need to you call her and leave a voice memo convincing her not to do it. Call 323-389-5156 or email me a voice memo from your phone, I will pass it along. Listen to her talk about it here.

🎙️On the brand spankin’ new Fixing Famous People, TV producers Chris DeRosa and Dominick Pupa are holding celebrities to the fire for their misdeeds, taking turns pitching ideas of how to best fix famous people’s crumbling public images. A guest will come on to decide who’s idea should win. Chris and Dominick are funny creatives who understand the ins and outs of the biz, and this show is an entertaining, totally unique way to explore celebrity culture. First up: Prince Harry & Meghan Markle and in episode two, MTV with guest Kate Casey. Listen here.

🎙️So Alie Ward is at the airport and sees a bunch of nerdy looking people holding posters whom she learns are brain scientists attending some brain science conference, and what does she do? She loses her cool, pulls out her mic, and gets some interviews with people abut their specialties in cravings, sleep, consciousness, addiction, dopamine, monogamy, Ozempic, toxins in your brain and so much more, for her podcast Ologies. This is a joy-filled adventure, an off-the-cuff, riding-by-the-seat-of-Alie’s-pants episode that panned out well. I hope more podcasters keep this episode in mind when they’re out in the wild. If you see a bunch of brain scientists at the airport (or whatever that means for your show) pull out your mic and start asking some questions! Listen here.

🎙️You Didn’t See Nothin came out with a bang, immediately stole my heart, and now is over and I feel like someone just kicked me out of the car flying full speed down the highway. Part investigation and part memoir, You Didn't See Nothin follows Yohance Lacour as he revisits a story—in 1997, a boy is beaten into a coma for being Black—that pushed him into a life of journalism. The story is incredible, the entire case became a terrifying, confusing, an all-encompassing shit show, and includes: mafia threats on the judge’s life, the defendant’s family mounting a public relations campaign that tried to smooth everything over, the disappearance, murder, and change of heart of the three case witnesses, more mafia stuff, stressed relations both between racial communities in Chicago and the ones within them, and then of course Yohance’s life selling drugs and eventually going to jail. On the last episode, Marcia Chatelain made an appearance, explaining how the same case also changed her life, and says “Black life is a series of negotiations that force us to evaluate what our life is worth.” (Yohance made her repeat that.) This is a compelling story but it’s Yohance’s hosting skills that makes this show something I won’t forget. Listen here.

🎙️On Too Niche?, Elizabeth and Lara haul the many—too many, one might say!—musical numbers released by the cast of Vanderpump Rules. (Scheana Shay's Good as Gold to DJ James Kennedy deep cuts.) I was listening to this on a flight and it was like I had tuned into a Vanderpump Rules radio station playing hit after hit of “songs?” emceed by two sharp women who are able to make 100 minutes of Vanderpump side story content feel like quite a journey. Yes, during the musical segments, I found myself squeezing my buttcheeks to the beat of the music, thank you for asking. Listen here.

🎙️Surely you saw The Cut’s viral article How to text, tip, ghost, host, and generally exist in polite society today. The world has changed mucho since Emily Post so this piece needed to be written. (Though you should still listen to the Emily Post podcast Awesome Etiquette…I go there weekly to hear about non-problem queries written in by people to have too much time on their hands. It makes me forget about real problems.) It’s also perfect conversation fodder for everyone, and I think it’s pretty right. On Story of the Week, Joel Stein sat down with the piece’s editor Choire Sicha, to talk about how the piece came to be and to dig into some of the most contestable items on the list and give context to some of the things that made you go “huh?” (“If you're penetrating, you pay.” When another human is present, don’t talk to your animal in the private voice you use when alone together.” “You don’t have to read everyone’s book.” “Never wake up your significant other on purpose, ever.” The Story of the Week theme song has Jonathan Coulton’s talented fingerprints all over it, is well-written and so funny, and it sets the perfect vibe for this show. Listen here.

🎙️Up Against the Mob is back for a season two, “The Springfield Crew,” this time Elie Honig is revisiting the death of Springfield mob boss Al Bruno, whose murder unraveled the notorious Genovese crime family. He’s talking to mobsters, victims, detectives, prosecutors, and more, to tell the story of how the government was able to flip mobsters sworn to secrecy. This podcast is dark, unbelievable, and has an accelerated pulse thumping behind it. The mythology behind the Genovese family is just as gruesome as it is in movies and your nightmares. Al Bruno even has the shirt sets and big old cigar hanging out of his mouth that make him seem ripped from The Sopranos, but without the comic relief. Listen here.

🎙️On Hollywood Gold, producer Daniela Taplin Lundberg of Stay Gold Features (The Kids Are All Right, Harriet, Honey Boy) talks to people behind the scenes of iconic films like Thelma & Louise, Memento, and Mean Streets to get the story behind the story. Just looking through the catalogue was exciting, binging felt like I was camping out in a dark movie theater. One episode I listened to was with Fred Roose, Academy Award-sinning producer of The Outsiders, and he explains how a YA book (before YA existed) landed in the hands of Francis Ford Coppola via a bunch of middle schoolers who loved the book and thought it should be a movie, plus the story behind how that fantastic cast was set into place. A podcast like this could easily get all inside baseball-y really quickly, but Daniela makes sure to explain terms that may not make sense to people outside of the industry, and adds context during intros and outros each episode with Becca Cammarata. Now let’s all go to the lobby and have ourself a snack. Listen here.

🎙️Re: Work is a show from the UCLA Labor Center that uses beautiful storytelling to share the voices of workers, immigrants, and communities of color. They aren’t on a regular recording schedule at the moment, so each episode feels like a special gift. An episode The Tractor Princess draws on excerpts from an oral history interview part of a community archive and research initiative called Watsonville is in the Heart, which highlights the stories of Filipino families from the greater Pajaro Valley region in California. In it, Antoinette Yvonne DeOcampo-Lechtenberg paints a picture of growing up in a rural farming community in the 1960s and 1970s, as the daughter of a Filipino immigrant from the manong generation. On a two-part episode called Soul Force, 93-year-old Rev. Lawson, civil and worker rights icon who has been teaching at UCLA for the last 2 decades, shares stories from his youth, and how he came to discover soul force and the path of nonviolence. Rev. Lawson says nonviolence is one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century, on par with Albert Einstein’s equations of relativity. I wrote that down. Listen to Tractor Princess here. Soul Force here.

🎙️You’re Wrong About’s resident survival coorespondent Blair Braverman was back on the show to talk about “Supertramp” Chris McCandless, who once walked into the Alaskan bush and died maybe because he ate some toxic plants. Chris’ story was the inspiration for Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild. This was a great conversation because it brought up so many things that were never mentioned in Into the Wild, like familial abuse, the complexities of Chris as a non-perfect, non-evil human being, and how new research can explains how Chris may have died. The first time I heard from Blair was in an interview with her husband, Quince Mountain, the Iditarod’s first transgender dog musher on Iditapod, where he explains how he and Blair went on the TV show Naked and Afraid. Back on You’re Wrong About, Blair hints at her personal story as musher, writer, and adventurer. But when you’re listening to her, you’re like, who is this person? If you’ve been in total amazement, how someone with outdoor experience and knowledge, and the ability to talk about the story beyond the story, just know that Blair is even cooler than that. This episode write-up is for the You’re Wrong About episode about Chris McCandless, but it’s also about Iditapod and Blair, mostly Blair. Listen to Blair’s latest on You’re Wrong About here.

🎙️On The Only One in the Room, Laura Cathcart Robbins interviewed Gilbert King, the reporter behind Bone Valley and the only one in the room fighting to prove Leo Schofield’s innocence. It’s a behind-the-scenes look at this fantastic true-crime podcast, which stands out for its down-in-the-trenches reporting and for capturing a confession of another man in jail on tape. The story behind the podcast is about Gilbert going down to Florida with his producer Kelsey Decker and mining for a story that didn’t yet exist. Leo didn’t commit this murder, and Bone Valley could actually help set him free. It’s happened before. (I signed this petition.) If you love The Only One in the Room, pre-order Laura’s book STASH, which is a gorgeous memoir about Laura’s Ambien addiction and how she set herself free. Listen here. Pre-order the book here.

🎙️Courtney Kocak’s Podcast Bestie newsletter released the first episode of Podcast Bestie the podcast, featuring Podnews’ James Cridland as the first guest. James offers a lot of smart advice about thinking about your SEO and how to just make a podcast (and your podcast’s website) smarter. Unsolicited tip for Courtney: Riff off Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend and ask each guest, “how do you feel being Courtney Kocak’s Bestie?” It works for Conan. Listen here.

🎙️Strangeland is an investigative series that examines cases in immigrant neighborhoods. For season two, journalists Ben Adair and Tinku RayMurder are taking us to Maple Shade, New Jersey, a “nice” town where an Indian tech worker, Sasikala Narra, and her six-year-old son, Anish, were found brutally murdered in their apartment in 2017. Sasikala’s husband, Anish’s dad, Hanumantha, technically had an alibi but the deeper and deeper Ben and Tinku get into the story, they discover new leads and are met with more and more unusual, unignorable blocks that point to police incompetence and a shady story hidden underneath. This podcast feels like you’re sitting a dark room where there is something huge missing, the answer within reach, something you can sense. Ben and Tinku strongly biased against Hanumantha, I’m not sure what the other side of the story is, really. But Strangeland is strange, it’s hard not to wonder what wall Ben and Tinku will run into next. And I like that this show is focused on the stories of immigrants, stories that are often ignored. Listen here.

🎙️Back Issue is back for season three, this time with Josh Gwynn stepping in to lead with different guest co-hosts to share their perspective on stories in pop culture of the past that were snappy enough to shape our present. For episode one Josh is on a mission to get a silk press, which leads to a fascinating conversation about the gendered politics of hair (so much about mens hair, something I am completely clueless about) with guest Carvell Wallace, who hosted one of my favorite podcasts ever, Finding Fred. Episode two stars Jazmine Hughes and is a dive into the Cheetah Girls franchise. Listen here.

🎙️Africa has its first Ambies nomination for Best Documentary, Short Series with a piece from Radio Workshop’s I Will Not Grow Old Here: A Girl from Alex, a three-part story-driven narrative podcast which grabs our attention and skillfully navigates our understanding of how millions of pieces of African youth realities fit together from the perspective of Mary-Ann Nobele, a 23-year-old youth reporter who joined one of Radio Workshop’s partner stations AlexFM when she was 16 years old. In I Will Not Grow Old Here she’s both reporter and character, leading us through the highs and lows of life in Alexandra township, South Africa. Listen here.

🎙️In December of 2002, NBC News producer Dan Slepian got a letter from a New York state prison that he couldn’t ignore. It was from Jon-Adrian “JJ” Velazquez, who was serving 25 years to life for murder he almost certainly didn’t commit. Five eyewitnesses named JJ as the killer, but the evidence does not add up. The first episode of Letters from Sing Sing sets up JJ’s story, and offers a heart-breaking interview with Jason’s mom and a detailed tour of JJ’s jail cell, where he shares his struggles to work on his own case and keep himself alive. Within a short amount of time, we feel like we’re inside JJ’s head, his cell, screaming to get out. On episode two we learn that the jury convicted not because they thought he was guilty, but because they were tired, and an interview with one of the jurors illustrates the stress jurors are under to come to an agreement. There’s more fucked up shit, like the fact that mug shot of JJJ shouldn’t have even been in the mix. It’s infuriating. Listen here.

🎙️I love you!

From the Archives

[From October 31, 2019] Remarkable Providences is the Salem Witch Trials podcast that goes so into depth that it surpasses that genre. It’s a portal to Massachuseets Bay Colony 1682, where we can explore the climate that generated one of the most enduring and misunderstood American myths. Former Salem tour guide Kate Devorak is host, and she’s skilled at taking us through history with great storytelling, allowing us to understand the context and what was at stake, and how fear, greed, prejudice, and zeal caused a community to nearly destroy itself from the inside out. Listen here.

This week we’re getting to peek into the listening life of Michele Dale, head of marketing at Wonder Media Network, where she oversees the growth of all original and client shows. Prior to this, she worked in the CEO’s office of a sustainable finance company focused on investments in gender and racial equity, as well as renewables. She is also the co-founder of Bossier Magazine, an intersectional feminist ‘zine dedicated to publishing writers and artists from underrepresented communities.

The app you use to listen: Apple Podcast

What speed do you listen to podcasts? 1x

How do you discover new shows? Mostly asking for recs from friends/people in the industry but also newsletters. I do actually listen to ads (although I don't know if I would if I didn't have this job) and I have heard about a show or two through an ad that I ended up loving.

One show you love that everybody loves. Pivot / Las Culturistas

One show you love that not enough people know about. Maybe Baby (I'm a subscriber to Haley's newsletter and highly recommend)

Hot take: I can't listen to The Daily anymore, sorry!

Self-care tip: Don't force productivity -- sometimes it is more "productive" to go for a walk or stop working for a while. Big believer in a flow state.

Podcast The Newsletter