LAUREN SPEAKS❣️Elamin Abdelmahmoud ✨coffee shop sameiness☕slide show date night🤓
🍭 👂 TRUST US! 🌈 🤸♀️
Hi hello!
Wil Williams here to bring you a 💖VERY SPECIAL💖 update on Lauren. You may have noticed that Lauren has had her OOO on, and wondered if she was sick, dead, or disappeared. She is home in New York, nesting with her daughter Stella, who she adopted in January. She's still listening to podcasts and will be back with a regular issue on March 4! Email her if you want to see a photo of the girl taking over her world, and maybe the only thing in the universe that could tear her away from Podcast the Newsletter.
Lauren, we love you and we love Stella so much! Reader, absolutely feel free to shower our comments with well wishes for this beautiful family.
xoxo ww
👋q & a & q & a & q & a👋
Elamin Abdelmahmoud
Elamin Abdelmahmoud is the host of CBC Radio’s daily arts, pop culture and entertainment show COMMOTION, and a former writer for BuzzFeed News. His work has appeared in the Globe and Mail, Maclean's, Rolling Stone and others. Elamin is the author of Son of Elsewhere: A Memoir in Pieces, a number one national bestseller, a Globe 100 book, and a New York Times notable book.
WW: Describe Commotion in 10 words or less.
EA: Riffing with your smartest, funniest friends on big pop culture moments!
WW: What do you hope to give your audience in each episode of Commotion?
EA: Pop culture is a significant part of the fabric of our lives – the stories and the movies and the music and the shows that get everyone talking matter because they say something about us.
I hope Commotion gives you an entry way into what the current pop culture conversations reveal about what matters right now.
WW: Commotion is a daily podcast, each episode focusing on a new buzzy cultural topic. How do you keep your energy up every single recording? Does the rate of production ever get exhausting?
EA: The rate of production is not exhausting – it’s a thrill to get to have cultural conversations for a living! But, real talk: sometimes quickly learning about a new topic can be challenging.
Listen, there are plenty of topics on which I am ready to go (if we’re talking Taylor Swift, the streaming economy, or country music, I am ready). But sometimes, you have to get caught up quickly because the topic is urgent and it comes from a world you’re not steeped in. On those days, I rely on the brilliance of our producers and guests.
WW: What are some things people should know before attempting a daily podcast of their own?
EA: Be intentional about your media diet. You don’t want to be going to the same wells every day, so have a variety of places to read. And trust your gut. If it’s telling you “there’s a story/conversation here,” try it.
WW: How would you define your role as a host? What do you consider when moderating discussions with your guests?
EA: I have dual responsibilities – I owe the guests a duty of care to make sure they sound their smartest and most thoughtful, and I owe the listener clarity and representation. That means if a guest makes a point using shorthand that an average listener wouldn’t get, it’s on me to explain that shorthand so the guest can seem as clear to the listener as they do to me.
My biggest responsibility is the engagement of the listener. That means sometimes resisting rabbit holes that I find interesting, even though others might not. Occasionally, I’ll own up to a tangent being for me and me alone! But I like to think the listener will, from time to time, grant me an indulgence.
WW: The guest panels for each episode always have such brilliant insight, but they’re also great in audio. What do you think makes someone a great guest host?
EA: I don’t think we have a term for it, but in my head, the ideal guests for our show are people who have an easy expertise. People who know the topic so well that they can riff on the questions, follow me down related tangents, and build on each other, so it feels like a natural conversation between people who can distill complex ideas down to casual nuggets.
WW: How do you go about selecting stories when there isn’t one clear buzzy event to talk about?
EA: This is obviously not an exact science, but we try to arrive at not just a topic but also the frame around the topic. That frame tends to be in the form of a question the show will try to grapple with. Sometimes you have to ask yourself: Which question should we answer next?
WW: Are there any topics you didn’t get a chance to cover that haunt you?
EA: We missed the window for covering the reality TV stars’ union! I wish I could go back and spend more time on it. I think it has a lot of implications for the industry, how we think about reality TV, and our relationship with the genre.
WW: The state of culture journalism is, if we’re being optimistic, weird right now. (Thank you for that episode on Pitchfork.) What do you think podcasting adds to that space?
EA: I feel like much of the culture journalism universe has moved into the podcasting space! This is good and bad. It’s great because podcasting is quicker and has a lower lift, which means culture journalists can include listeners in their process as they think out loud about a thorny and complicated topic. I have always found this engaging, so I love this.
But culture writing demands a slower engagement that very few places are willing to fund anymore, and good ideas that penetrate and really clarify the moment usually take a long time to coalesce. You need people who are going to take that time.
🚨If u only have time for 1 thing🚨
From Lauren!:
“While You Were Sleeping came out when I was ten, and I can remember feeling weird about telling my mom I wanted to see it, because it was an adult movie about romance, something I had never expressed interest in, in fact had actively expressed complete DISinterest in. But I bit the bullet because I wanted to see it, but really…were ten year old girls flocking to this rom com? Turns out yeah, I was not alone. An episode of Hollywood Gold explains, plus why Sandra Bullock was perfect for the role, and basically the scientific reason for why this movie struck, strikes, and will continue to strike chords. Hollywood Gold is a great way to listen in on really insidery film conversations that makes you also feel like an insider. Big interviews about the stuff real movie lovers want to know. Even if you aren’t a While You Were Sleeping Fan, this is a great convo about rom coms. Listen here.”
🔥hell yeah🔥
🎙️Beloved audio drama Among the Stars and Bones is back for its second season, and the fiction world is celebrating bigtime. This is a great listen for folks who love sci-fi with intense world building, conveyed through a fascinating cast of characters who are xenoarchaeologists, xenolinguists, xenobiologists, and more looking for remnants of alien ruins on different planets. Start at the beginning!
🎙️h/t to Pod the North for this one: Canadaland has launched Canadalabs, “a hub for the next generation of audio journalists, open calls for short audio stories from across Canada, and applications to become Canadaland’s first Audio Journalism Fellows.”
🎙️On Friday, I wrote an edition of Podcast Marketing Magic on accessibility, and I’m really blown away by the positive feedback — but I’m also blown away by Apple’s auto transcripts, which I mentioned there briefly. James Cridland of Podnews ran a test and sent me a screenshot, and I gotta say, it’s really impressive. It even got my one-L Wil somehow? If you’re looking for a way to do transcripts, this might be a great first step.
💎BTW💎
🎙️Decoder Ring is a forever favorite of mine, and the first episode of their new season could not be more up my alley. This episode seeks to answer the question: “Hey, why do coffee shops look so similar across the world?” For my other CARI folks (anyone? anyone?) this isn’t a look into Global Village Coffeehouse, but instead, the impact the internet has had on cafes, from Google to Instagram.
🎙️Last week’s episode of Endless Thread was delightfully cringeworthy. What would you do if your first date with someone included a full presentation about why a movie you don’t really Get is actually a masterpiece? And what if you found out that presentation, and your reactions, were being filmed? The subjects of this episode are brave for so many reasons. Listen somewhere you can gasp out loud really loudly without causing alarm.
🎙️From Lauren!: “It’s “Freaky February” over on Blocked Party, which means John and Stefan are doing episodes that copy the format of their favorite podcasts, featuring the hosts of the real shows. They started with Your Kickstarter Sucks, last week was Stop Podcasting Yourself, and the latest was a Blocked Party version of Dudes about nu-metal guys. (John hosts a nu-metal podcast, The P.O.D. Kast.) It was funny and a really good conversation about nu-metal if you’ve ever wondered about it. I am obsessed with partnerships and I love this creative idea! Steal it for your show and credit Blocked Party! Listen here.”
🎙️I love you!
🎧From the Desk of Tink🎧
Today we’re talking to Avil Spreaks of Distribution Advocates Presents.
Who is it for?
Filmmakers and anyone who is interested in equitable solutions to the movies we watch.
Would love to be a guest on…
Here’s The Thing Podcast - they are so funny and they have created their own distribution channels that I think would be interesting to discuss
If I could force one person in the world to listen to my podcast it'd be…
Ava DuVernay. I believe she has some things to say about the systemic problems in our current media landscape
What do your parents/family think you do?
Sit around twiddling my thumbs until a “job” lands in my lap. But the reality is I’m constantly working, maintaining current projects and laying seeds for the next gig to happen.
<3 love this reveal!!!
So exciting! Congrats Lauren!! <3