We miss you already Broccoli 🥦 What IS the internet 🖥️ Twists and turns in true crime 🔍
🍭 👂 TRUST US! 🌈 🤸♀️
Hi hello!
Wil Williams back at it again here at PTN! We’ve got some huge podcast industry news to talk about — both good and bad — plus lots of recs, as always. 2024 is off to a strong and wild start for our industry. Want to read some of my predictions for this year in podcasting? I’m so honored to have guest edited last week’s edition of the CBC’s podcast newsletter, Sounds Good.
(We’ve also got something in store with a fave from the CBC slate coming soon to PTN! Very exciting q & a & q & a & q & a on our horizon!)
Tell me your predictions in the comments! Personally, I think this is going to be a strong year. I’ve been getting some very promising press releases and notices of works-in-progress, and I can’t wait to see how everything unfolds.
xoxo ww
🚨If u only have time for 1 thing🚨
This segment comes to you from the lovely Lauren herself!:
I can't be the only one in the history of the universe who didn't know what Eurovision was until she heard about it on Helen Zaltman's The Allusionist. (Here are parts one and two.) I would always immediately stop paying attention when I heard the name, which is terrible. (It's an almost 70-year-old annual international song competition held among the member countries of the EBU…each participating country submits a song to be performed on live television and radio, and then votes are cast to determine the winner. It brought us ABBA!) All it took was this episode of The Allusionist to become totally intrigured…it sounds like The Hunger Games, The Olympics, Wrestlemania, RuPaul's Drag Race, and Game of Thrones of singing and song-writing. You could just watch it it or you could get DEEP into it. It seems like every second of it is heavy with gossip, politics, history, and behind-the-scenes drama. It's like what you're seeing on screen is only have the story. I have to get to the whole POINT of this paragraph, now … MaxFun has dropped Eurovangelists, a complete deep dive (hosted by superfans Dimitry Pompée, Oscar Montoya, and Jeremy Ben) into the latest Eurovision news, the crazy stories from the past, why this competition matters, all the things normal un-super fans would not notice (Dimitry, Oscar, and Jeremy are Super FANNNNNS.) The best part seems to be that every single person can have a different favorite song, favorite group…Eurovision is ripe for discussion. Eurovangelists is the discussion you want to hone in on to get the most of your Eurovision experience. And maybe to continue the conversation with your own friends.
🧚♀️recs from Lauren 🧚♀️
✨This newsletter has become an update feed for Butt Out, Baby!, Ellie Gordon-Moershel’s podcast that meticulously and historically combs through the movie Dirty Dancing scene by scene. So I feel obligated to tell you that a new episode has been released. (They come so sporadically…I get very excited and find each drop incredibly newsworthy!) The newest episode covers scene six part. It’s evening at Kellerman’s lodge, Baby is begrudgingly dancing with Neil, a set up that allows Ellie to unfold not only the scene but the politics surrounding it, from the Peace Corps in the 60s, which Baby was planning to join, the the Freedom Riders, which Neil claims to have been a part of. Ellie even, to quote her, “takes this thought experiment further than anyone asked her to, which is the whole point of the podcast,” and imagines what Baby would have thought about the Peace Corps’ activity in The Marshall Islands. I am obsessed with and appreciative for Ellie’s obsession with Dirty Dancing, which goes far beyond the film. When you’re really obsessed with something you cannot read or learn enough about everything that touches it. That is why these episodes drip so slowly. Ellie even takes Foxtrot dancing classes. This podcast is the documentary of someone allowing themselves to artistically and fully immerse themselves in something and see where it takes them. Listen here.
✨Vipassana is a meditation ritual practiced by Oprah and Jack Dorsey that seems harmless enough from really far away…participants stop eating meat and talking all together, and work on introspection. But gosh the website creeped me out so much that I actually felt a wave of creepiness looking at it, I clicked off. Maybe that’s because I had just listened to Financial Times’ new series about the retreats connected to it, Untold: The Retreat. The trailer is really good—it starts with this haunting gong and eerie sense of place, putting you inside what it’s like to be on day three of this retreat. Episode one starts out with host and special investigations editor Madison Marriage, and a letter she received, from the father of twin girls who went to a retreat and came back shells of human beings. You are left to wonder what happened to these women and how dangerous meditation could be. Listen here.
✨Go Touch Grass has quickly become essential weekly listening for me. Very online comedians Milly Tamarez and Alise Morales cover everything that was trending in all our digital spaces that week, specifically with people who are very interested but don’t have time to witness it firsthand in mind. Even if I was spending enough time online to notice all of this, I’m not sure I’d be able to make connections to all the cultural references and historical context that Milly and Alise do. They’re also very funny. This show is new, I feel like I know them already. Go Touch Grass worked itself seamlessly into my life. It gives ICYMI vibes but the humor is even punchier. Listen here.
✨It was a total accident that I queued up the series about the survivors in the Andes plane crash from The Last Podcast on the Left—I had no idea the incident was the subject of a new documentary, Society of the Snow. First, I listened to The LPOTL guys comb through minute details, taking us through the personalities of the guys who made it, and didn’t. I feel like quite the expert—learning via jokes is a surefire way to get stuff to stick and make sense. I am currently stranded in a hotel room on the side of a highway in Houston right now (it’s a long story) with nothing to do so my husband and I watched the nearly three hour documentary, which I found impossibly boring. The podcast series was more compelling and informative, and a better piece of history. And so much funnier. Start here.
🔥hell yeah🔥
🎙️Lauren interview with Behind the Content is up today! Listen in to hear our amazing leader talk about what goes into podcast marketing.
🎙️Apple Podcasts is now giving every feed auto-transcripts (with the option of adding your own via your feed — and downloading them for your site). This is a huge move for accessibility! Read up on what makes transcripts so important here.
🎙️Voting for the 2024 NAACP Image Awards is live! I’m especially excited to see Small Victories by WGC Productions in the Podcast: Outstanding Scripted Series category this year. imo, it’s maybe thee best audio drama being made right now. Go vote!
🎙️Loving Bob Raymonda’s #AudioDramaSunday newsletter, Bobby’s Snacks. Those in the fiction scene know already know Bob’s taste is primo and their recs always deliver. Now, you can get those recs in your inbox every week!
🎙️Obsessed with this stunning review of Dirk Maggs’s Sandman Audible series by Roshan Singh Sambhi. Roshan is one of my favorite creators (Temujin, my beloved) turned one of my favorite folks writing about audio.
💎BTW💎
🎙️So sad to hear that Broccoli Productions is closing shop this month (h/t Podcasting by the Moon for this news). We love the work they’ve done, from their slate of podcasts to their work establishing the Equality in Audio Pact. Renay Richardson forever & ever & ever & ever.
🎙️A rec from Shreya of the Tink team!: I just tuned into the trailer, or as our UK-based clients say, the prologue for Lowlines. Ever wonder how the hell did we get here? Going from one efficiently digitized moment to the next, waiting for the next ping, the next dopamine burst. Petra Barran was wondering the same thing. She took it one step further, or rather, one step lower for her new podcast Lowlines. This fully indie female-led sonic scrapbook has got me buzzing.
🎙️Internet Thinker™️ (as in, thinker on the internet and thinker about the internet) Mike Rugnetta is back to thinking about the internet on upcoming podcast Never Post. As someone who was fundamentally changed and inspired by Idea Channel, stoked does not even begin to cover it — and that was before I heard it was also being worked on by thee Hans Beutow, as in the “produced by Hans Beutow” you hear at the end of a million amazing podcasts (e.g. Terrible, Thanks for Asking).
🎙️Josie’s Lonely Hearts Club dropped earlier this month and it’s such fun. This semi-improvised fiction advice show is a delight, and now is a great time to listen to the first two episodes to get caught up as their debut season keeps on a-comin’.
🎙️I am keeping my eyes peeled like a potato on the feed for Radiotopia’s upcoming The Recipe with Kenji and Deb. Deb Perelman and J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, two icons of the food and food writing world, are teaming up for the new recipe podcast of our dreams. J. Kenji Lopez-Alt thank you for my life (the oven wings recipe you developed which I use every year at least once in place of turkey at our Thanksgiving dinners).
🎙️I got a preview of the new season of KQED’s On Our Watch, and while it is an extremely difficult listen, it’s tremendous. This look into California’s purported most dangerous prison, New Folsom. Fans of In The Dark, this one is for you. Take heed of the warnings at the top of the first episode, and take a listen to their trailer for the season now.
🎙️And speaking of — In The Dark is returning via The New Yorker, returning to your feed soon, or available now with a subscription of $1/week. The new series is called “The Runaway Princesses” and is focusing on the lives of the wives and daughters of Dubai’s royal ruler Sheikh Mohammed — women who live lives of opulent luxury, but keep desperately attempting to escape.
🎙️I love you!
📦 From the Archives 📦
A while back, we were talking about true crime in the Tink Slack. We all have weird true crime feelings, but darling wonderful Lauren brought up one that took her by surprise: The Bakersfield Three, a 2023 release by the journalist who covered a series of very strange disappearances of three friends in Bakersfield, CA. She gave us this recommendation with specific instructions: “There’s a lot of characters, but just take them as they come. You have to get to episode 11.” 11 is a pretty big buy-in, but a Lauren rec never fails, so we buckled in — and it did not disappoint. There is a twist in this story that I never could have predicted, that is so alarming and wild and absolutely devastating, you simply must hear it for yourself. Do not skip to episode 11. It must be listened to in context. If you’re looking for incredibly well-reported, intimate, personal true crime with a huge dose of heart, this is the listen for you.