I Want to Tell You About My Podcast →

So, for a couple of weeks now, I’ve been making references here and there to my latest project, a podcast. Last week, I made it clear that if you looked, most of the information about it was right out in the open.

Well, today I’m ready to officially announce it.

The show is called I Better Start Writing This Down. The subtitle is “I leave a lot out when I tell the truth.” It’s going to be a monthly show and the first episode will premiere in one week from today, on February 2nd. But, because attention spans are short, and if you’re on the East Coast, you’ll need something to help you ride out this snowstorm, there’s a trailer up on iTunes already, Ep. 0, called “An Introduction.”

What I need from you all is support. Listen to the trailer and, if you enjoy it, tell a friend. Like the Facebook page. Tweet about it; use the hashtag #IBetterStart. Most importantly, rate/review the show in iTunes. I cannot stress enough how important this is. There are something like 250,000 podcasts in the iTunes Store. The only way to rise slightly above the masses is with the help of others. I’m okay with that, though. It just means I have to make something for you all that is worthy of your time. I think I’ve done that. Also, my goal (dream) is to get the show into the “New & Noteworthy” section on iTunes before the first episode goes live in a week. This can only happen with your help.

So, how do you listen?

There are plenty of ways to find the show:

-Search for it in the iTunes Store; just search for my name. Or, even easier, here’s a direct link to it in the iTunes Store.

-If you’re someone who uses a 3rd Party podcast app, you can search within it, or you can copy this URL and paste it into the app. That’ll get you the show almost instantly when I post it.

-You can listen to the show on SoundCloud if that’s your thing.

-Hell, you can listen to it in just a regular old browser window by bookmarking the show’s page (which you should check out anyway). Scroll down to ‘Episodes.’

This is the most exciting project I’ve undertaken in a while. I’ve got some cool stuff coming in the future around it, a couple of interesting spins on how I’ll approach advertising within the show, maybe some guests, but most important is, as the show’s description reads, the stories and the sound design.

So thanks for reading this, thanks in advance for your support, and I hope you enjoy listening to I Better Start Writing This Down as much as I enjoy making it.

Ed. Note: I don’t know if I’ve ever explicitly stated this before, but any text on this site that is orange is a clickable link.

‘Serial’ Sucked and Wasted Everyone’s Time →

Diana Moskovitz, The Concourse:

I know what it feels like to run out of reporting, because I have run out of reporting. It happens to crime reporters all the time. Your boss tells you they've saved a 15-inch hole on 1B for the story, but you've only maybe six inches of copy. The witnesses aren't talking (this happens to Koenig). The cops aren't talking (this happens to Koenig). The victim's family won't speak (this happens to Koenig). Here's the backwards relationship of all crime stories: The minute it happens is when most people want to know everything, but it's also when you know the least about what happened. So you plug. You describe the people crying, the blood splatter, the evidence strewn across the ground, the sounds of the tears, the tagging of the bullet shells, the sheet strewn across the body, how wide an area the cops taped off, even the weather. You talk about what you don't know: the questions the cops won't answer, the stoic silence of the family, the open-ended questions that naturally exist in these situations. The fancy term for this is "reporting with your eyes." Sometimes, these details do come in handy later. Other times, you look back on the story and go, "Yeah, I just had to fill."

I don’t quite agree with Moskovitz; podcasting as a medium got a big bump from Serial. But other than that, I couldn’t agree with her more.

Slate’s List of the 25 Best Podcast Episodes Ever →

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David Haglund and Rebecca Onion, Slate:

How exactly does one judge a carefully crafted story that took weeks to report and put together but is only 15 minutes long against a 90-minute two-man back-and-forth full of digressions and absurdity with no real point? Well, you just do, basically. Which is better, The Simpsons or The Wire? I have no idea, but they’re both TV shows, and that’s a fun argument to have. When it comes to podcasts, we’re 10 years into a vivid, crucial artistic medium. The time to have such arguments has arrived.

I find the idea of this list to be preposterous (the authors do as well; it’s the thesis of their introduction, in fact); I’m not even sure you can make a list of the twenty five best episodes of WTF (spoiler alert: the no. 1 episode on this list is an episode of WTF). But I’m linking to it because it might serve as a gateway for those looking to get into podcasts in general. I do, after all, regularly listen to eleven of the twenty five shows represented here, so I guess they got something right.

Except for Ricky Gervais, of course. Rick Gervais anything just plain sucks.

‘Serial’ and the Other Side of the Hype →

If you don’t know what ‘Serial’ is by now, you’re probably not a tenant of the internet. It’s a podcast, a true crime story told in installments that has put the term ‘podcast’ on the tip of everyone’s tongue, never mind the fact that there’s nothing new about true crime stories, crime stories set in Baltimore, stories told in installments, narrative arcs, podcasts, or listening.

As of the last couple of episodes, I’ve started to sour on ‘Serial.’ For one, they were boring. But I’ve become increasingly uncomfortable with basking in the details of a case where, if nothing else, someone’s daughter died. Frankly, I’ve never been all that comfortable with the Team Edward/Team Jacob-esque “Is Adnan guilty?!” speculation, when Occam’s Razor seems to have that answer already, to say nothing for a jury and a judge. And as a writer, I’ve been able to see the, pardon the pun, writing on the wall for a handful of episodes now—there is going to be little in the way of a happy ending, or even a payoff for listening. And anyone who has spent any amount of time listening to This American Life should have seen that as well. I wonder if the producers of ‘Serial’ are prepared for that backlash?

But this morning, I became aware of a new undercurrent to the show’s mostly positive reception—the clashing of the worldviews of Sarah Koenig, the woman reporting/telling the story, and the people she is reporting on. Jay Caspian Kang, in his piece “‘Serial’ and White Reporter Privilege,” writes:

The accumulation of Koenig’s little judgments throughout the show—and there are many more examples—should feel familiar to anyone who has spent much of her life around well-intentioned white people who believe that equality and empathy can only be achieved through a full, but ultimately bankrupt, understanding of one another’s cultures. Who among us (and here, I’m talking to fellow people of color) hasn’t felt that subtle, discomforting burn whenever the very nice white person across the table expresses fascination with every detail about our families that strays outside of the expected narrative? Who hasn’t said a word like “parameters” and watched, with grim annoyance, as it turns into “immigrant parents?” These are usually silent, cringing moments – it never quite feels worth it to call out the offender because you’ll never convince them that their intentions might not be as good as they think they are.

Now, I’m not writing this, or linking to Kang’s story, or the responses, because I agree or disagree with his take; (although, the people who I’ve talked to about the show will probably know how I feel. Hint: vindicated.) I’ll let you be the judge. Because maybe you agree with Lindsay Beyerstein, who wants to know why there’s “a cottage industry of think pieces dedicated to making us feel guilty about liking Serial?” Or maybe you agree with Jaime Green’s “The Problem With the Problems With Serial,” although I would hesitate against it, since it’s kind of lacking in substance, as Jay Caspian Kang points out here. Finally, maybe you agree with Julia Carrie Wong’s “The Problem With ‘Serial’ And The Model Minority Myth,” who takes a different track from Kang, but still raises concerns about the treatment of race in ‘Serial.’

What I do know is this—Liberals/Democrats often take Republicans/Conservatives to task for a lack of diversity in their chosen leadership. Well, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander, so I ask: does this look like the ideal team to dive deep into a complex story where race and religion are obvious factors, there are no white main characters, and it all takes place in a city that is 63% black?

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Why Podcasts Are Suddenly ‘Back’ →

Marco Arment:

The story of podcasts suddenly being “back” strongly suggests, and mostly requires, that they had been big at one time and had since gone away. That New York Magazine article even cites a “bottom” time: 2010. But that never really happened.

Podcasts in 2010 were a lot like podcasts in 2007, which were a lot like podcasts in 2004, which are a lot like podcasts in 2014. There’s a lot of tech shows (and a lot of tech listeners), but most of the biggest are professionally produced public-radio shows released as podcasts, with other strong contingents in comedy, business, and religion, followed by a huge long tail of special interests with small but passionate audiences.

All I ask is that anyone who is suddenly into podcasts because of Serial give this a read.

The Gist’s Pledge Drive →

I began listening to The Gist after Ira Glass name-dropped it on an episode of This American Life about a month ago and I haven’t missed an episode since. In yesterday’s episode, host Mike Pesca made an announcement. A pledge drive was beginning. But in lieu of the usual ask-for-money event, they’re trying, unsurprisingly, something different. Pesca does want a pledge from his listeners—a pledge to get at least one person in the next week to subscribe to The Gist.

So that’s what I’m asking you to do. Go right now, either in your podcast app of choice, or in iTunes, and subscribe. If you like language, and words, and a unique, honest take on current events (both mainstream and off the beaten path), The Gist is the podcast you should have already been listening to.

Scott Carrier’s ‘The Hitchhiker’ →

Rob Rosenthal:

I’m often asked “How can I get into radio?”  Typically, I respond with things like “Just start making stories. Take some classes then get an internship.”

What I don’t say is “Interview a lot of people then show up at a radio station and ask ‘Can you help me produce a radio story?’” That seems unlikely to work.

But, maybe I should give that advice because that’s how Scott Carrier got his start in radio back in 1983. Only instead of knocking on the door of a radio station recordings in hand, he went directly to the mothership — NPR.

Scott Carrier is my absolute favorite NPR voice, maybe even my favorite non-fiction storyteller/writer. I was so excited to see him get the HowSound treatment (a podcast that is most definitely worth your time) and to have it be his infamous first story ever produced was an added bonus.

And once you’re hooked, I’d recommend just about everything he’s ever done. You can get all of his contributions to This American Life here.

Oh, and since I’m all frothy at the mouth about this, in the piece, Scott Carrier mentions “The Kitchen Sisters.” Once you’re done with Scott Carrier, prepare to be bowled over by their work. You can start with their new Radiotopia show “Fugitive Waves.”

Holdout: The Story of Edith Macefield →

Roman Mars:

Around 2005, a Seattle neighborhood called Ballard started to see unprecedented growth. Condominiums and apartment buildings were sprouting up all over the community which had once been mostly single family homes and small businesses. Around this time, developers offered a woman named Edith Macefield $750,000 dollars for her small house, which was appraised at around $120,000. They wanted to build a shopping mall on the block where Macefield had lived for the last 50 years.

Macefield turned down the money. Developers went forward with the shopping mall anyway. The mall enveloped her house on three sides.

Really cool episode of 99% Invisible—in a lot of ways, it felt reminiscent of the “smaller” shows that they started off doing. This video, about the tattoo that Roman Mars mentions, is also pretty great:

The Sound of Sports →

Roman Mars:

Way back in October 2011 (see episode #38, true believers!), we broadcast a short excerpt of a radio documentary produced by Peregrine Andrews about faking the sounds of sports on TV broadcasts. It was one of our most popular and provocative programs ever, primarily because people were shocked that any aspect of a sporting event might be faked. Since then, I’ve received several requests from the audience asking where they can hear the full-length documentary. Well today, my friends, you are in luck.

All sports fans—and I mean any and all sports (the niche sports ((curling, archery, etc.)) that they get into here have the more interesting sound design stories)—should take a listen to this, preferably on decent speakers or headphones. It’ll change the way you hear sports. And if you’re not already listening to 99% Invisible, well what the hell are you waiting for?