Nieman Foundation at Harvard
Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is issue 215, published June 25, 2019.
For a U.K. studio, long distance…and price competition [by Caroline Crampton]. Chalk & Blade, a London podcast production company founded by two ex-BBC staffers in early 2016, caught my attention recently when it announced several production partnerships with big outfits in the U.S., including Puskin Industries and the Rockefeller Foundation. Among their credits: the Malcolm Gladwell-hosted Solvable, Bethany McLean’s Making A Killing (on Luminary), and another paywalled series heading that way later this year.
It’s not every day that you get a small U.K. outfit working on big American shows like this. (Chalk & Blade has four staffers in its Shoreditch office, plus part-time freelancers.) So I put in a call to co-founder Ruth Barnes to find out a bit more about these partnerships, and why they’ve decided to work across the Atlantic rather than focus on U.K. commissioners and regional outlets like the BBC.
Part of it came down to something she and fellow founder Laura Sheeter decided when they left their jobs at the BBC in 2016 to start the company, Barnes told me: “We were very definitely not going to be a radio supplier, that was the one thing we decided. We wanted to be podcast-specific.” They worked on branded podcasts and on editorial projects for places like The Guardian, but soon realized within the first few years that there just simply wasn’t enough money on offer in the U.K. for the kind of podcasts they wanted to make.
“We were just fed up with the world of radio…there was only one place to pitch your ideas, and that was the BBC,” said Barnes.
When Panoply appointed another ex-BBC staffer, Ryan Dilley, to run a London-based production office in late 2016, Barnes and Sheeter sought him out. They pitched him Haunted, a series about the supernatural that won the hearts of U.S. executives as a show where “British people talk about ghosts.” The success of that project convinced them to pursue work in America, rather than in the U.K.
Barnes and Sheeter identified a gap in the market: top-drawer production talent at a slightly lower price. “Through the people that we were talking to in the industry, we realized that there were very few companies set up like us who weren’t going to charge you $25,000 to $30,000 an episode,” she said. “The only other podcast-specific companies were people like Pacific Content, like Gimlet — it’s just a fortune, you can’t afford it. And we, obviously, we are cheaper. I mean, that’s the truth.”
Working with Dilley got Barnes and Sheeter in the door at the newly-founded Pushkin Industries. Pushkin’s Jacob Weisberg and Mia Lobel, both former Panoply executives, had been impressed with how Chalk & Blade had handled the Haunted series and were keen to work together again. “We’re obviously saving them a bit of a penny in terms of the production,” Barnes said. “We work well together and, I mean, why not work across the time difference? There are lots of WAV files flying around across the ocean.”
Pushkin brought Chalk & Blade in on the production process for two shows they were producing for Luminary — Making A Killing as well as “an investigative foodie series” with Tamar Adler, due to drop on the app later this year — as well as the project that became Solvable, supported by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. Separately, Chalk & Blade also have a narrative series in production as part of a collaboration with First Look Media’s Topic Studios.
Barnes and her colleagues worked with Pushkin on pre-production, training hosts and fine-tuning formats. In particular, they worked with Bethany McLean, “turning her in from a print journalist into somebody who actually has a podcast.” The Chalk & Blade staffers travel to the U.S. frequently and listen in on recording sessions via Skype when necessary. Edits happen at their base in London, and then final cuts are sent back to Pushkin for tweaks, final mastering, and delivery to Luminary.
It’s the big budgets that Luminary’s VC money has been able to provide that has allowed Chalk & Blade to level up, Barnes said. “I do understand the controversy around Luminary and all of that, but we are happily making two shows for them which are going to be behind the paywall. It’s worked out very sweetly for us,” she said.
Meanwhile, podcast commissioning has suddenly taken off in the U.K. in a way it just hadn’t when the company was founded in 2016, largely thanks to the BBC’s recent efforts towards getting more involved with original on-demand audio. Chalk & Blade can’t work directly for BBC Sounds — Barnes is married to Jason Phipps, the BBC’s commissioning editor for podcasts, which would be “a huge conflict of interest,” she says — but are now working on a pop culture show called Obsession With… for BBC Radio 1, which acts as a companion to major BBC TV properties like Killing Eve, Line of Duty, and Peaky Blinders.
“It’s great — it’s another avenue for us to be able to pitch content,” Barnes said of the BBC’s new enthusiasm for podcasts. She’s hopeful it will translate into more commissions and better rates across the board for British producers (who, as this recent pay survey showed, can see wildly varying rates depending on what part of the industry they’re working in). Chalk & Blade is absolutely committed to paying their staff and freelancers fairly, Barnes said, and has chosen projects so far that enabled them to do that.
“I think it is changing,” she added. “I hope so, anyway.”
Inverting NPR: a speculative proposal. Much like last week’s audiobook deep dive, there’s no news peg to this piece, but it’s something that’s been tooling around in my head for several years now. It was, at one point, a white paper I was developing during my Knight Visiting Nieman Fellowship in 2017, but which I had kept unpublished in a GDrive folder for a myriad of reasons.
In any case, I recently found myself in several conversations that brought up some ideas from that old document, and it made me think that now’s as good a time as any to dig it up, pull out a few major bits, and get them out into the open. (Plus, I wasn’t working on any other stories, so what can you do.)
Fair warning: This is a wildly speculative (and luxuriously navel-gazing) take on public radio, local stations, and the future of the system. So if you’re not interested in all that, feel free to skip the next 3,600 words.
The station argued that TAL’s distribution partnership threatened to undermine public radio’s broadcast model. That threat was driven by Pandora’s profit-seeking disposition, its scale, and most importantly, its disruptive structure as a digital distributor that goes around terrestrial stations like WBAA and directly to audiences.
WBAA would later reverse its decision, citing “considerable listener feedback,” and TAL continues to stream exclusively over Pandora to this day. (Which also means, by the way, that you can’t listen to the show on podcast-expansionary Spotify. Though, interestingly, you can find a genre in that app called “Podcasts like This American Life.”)
I wasn’t particularly sympathetic to WBAA’s brief resistance campaign, and I continue to not think much of it. It felt shortsighted, and — more to the point — it felt driven by an impulse to preserve an untenable status quo. But I do sympathize fully with the core anxiety that had animated the pushback, more so these days than ever before.
That anxiety is this: It’s hard to be super optimistic about the fate of local public radio stations over the long term, particularly the ones that serve smaller markets.
Much as the internet has fundamentally compromised the value proposition of local newspapers over the past two decades, it feels like the internet is on the verge of doing the very same to the public radio system, which includes more than a thousand independent stations, big and small, dotting the country from coast to coast.
I’m sure that anxiety is felt keenly when a wildly popular public radio program like This American Life strikes a deal to directly access more audiences through a private digital platform like Pandora. It reflects the reality of the situation: A show like TAL doesn’t existentially need a public radio station to reach the kinds of audiences it wants anymore. But then again, TAL is a single show — one that is in many ways an “add-on” to the core value proposition of a public radio station.
What isn’t an “add-on,” though, is the stuff that comes from the public radio mothership, NPR. Which is why, if I ran a local public radio station, I’d be raising a bigger eyebrow towards NPR and its various podcasting adventures than the digital decisions of any single show. (Also, NPR’s experiments on smart speakers. And its partnerships with streaming platforms, à la “Your Daily Drive” playlist inclusions on Spotify. But those are columns for another time.)
NPR continues to be among the biggest podcast publishers in the industry today — the biggest, according to the Podtrac ranker (caveat, caveat) — and while it hasn’t publicly discussed revenue numbers in a while, we broadly know that it makes considerable money off its growing podcast assets via National Public Media, its sales and sponsorship sister group. It’s highly likely that NPR will continue to be a major podcast presence for the foreseeable future.
That’s great for NPR, of course. But as it stands, a strong NPR podcast operation doesn’t necessarily seem to benefit the public radio system as a whole in any direct fashion. Sure, you could make an indirect-gains argument along the lines of: “NPR’s podcast revenues contributes to improving the NPR broadcast products that are sold back to local stations.” While that may be true, it still doesn’t help the public radio system deal address the underlying structural quandary: Local stations are still defined by their broadcast orientation, and as long as the long-term fate of broadcast radio remains in question, the long-term fate of local stations also remains in question.
Here’s a breakdown of the problem, as I understand it:
Much like print newspapers, a public radio station derives most of its power from its control over geography. Prior to digital distribution, a station’s fundamental value proposition was unimpeachable: NPR had highly desired national audio products, and structurally it needed local stations like WBAA to access audiences they otherwise could not reach alone.
Stations generally capitalized on the opportunity created by that dependency, bundling NPR’s nationally oriented programs — as well as programs purchased from other stations — with local editorial and revenue products to deepen its value among those geography-specific audiences.
The internet, however, provides the ultimate complication. One of the internet’s primary effects is the obliteration of geography, and the general arc of internet-based publishers has been the gradual chipping away of the geographic advantages held by traditional media companies. In the public radio context, the emergence of digital distribution chips away at the fundamental value proposition of a given local public radio station. Stations are no longer literally necessary. They are now complementary, and in some cases, they are optional. Audiences no longer need stations to access NPR’s programming, technically speaking, because they could now access them over the internet.
Now, in the streaming context, it seems that the local-national bundle has more or less held, because when audiences sought out public radio programming, they’re still essentially served with the linear experience that has always been constructed and curated by their local station, which NPR’s website would have routed them towards based on geotargeting. But in the on-demand audio context, the bundle doesn’t really hold, because the station is no longer fully in control of the experience…or of the audience.
To make things worse, another primary effect of the internet is the flattening and consolidation of those audiences. All media organizations are generally made to compete for the same combined pool of audiences. And to phrase the situation in overly reductive terms, there appear to be two broad ways to participate in the media industry these days: you compete for the whole pool (scale) or you compete for a very specific slice (niche).
Under these terms of competition, the opportunities for local stations are deeply uneven. Where station strength in broadcasting was derived from geographic control — which gives even smaller cash-strapped stations a moat to sustain a middle-class existence — station strength on the internet is based purely on content. In this scenario, not everybody can win over the long term. Not all stations can compete at scale — which is to say, not everybody can be WNYC or WBUR — and more importantly, we have yet to find out whether public radio stations, acting as podcast publishers, can effectively compete as niche media companies using local content as their competitive edge. Indeed, it’s unlikely that all, or even most, of the 1.000-plus member stations will be able to build sufficiently strong editorial operations to effectively compete in the combined audience pool.
Put another way: Under these conditions, it’s unlikely that the majority of stations can survive acting on their own.
Furthermore, on the internet, the entity with the biggest brand, scale, and access to digitally-fluent constituencies tends to win…and win big. This is the ultimate environment for NPR, because the organization stands to benefit more than ever before from the long-standing brand confusion in which audiences label all kinds of public radio products and experiences as simply “NPR.”
Assuming these conditions, what is the maximal outcome that can be extrapolated? Quite possibly, it’s a world in which the number of working local public radio stations radically declines — dropping from 1,000-plus down to maybe 100 or 200, most of which are barely scraping by — thus causing the public radio system to be increasingly embodied in a handful of organizations, probably concentrated in the big cities. Which is to say, it looks a lot like the newspaper world we have now.
And that world sucks, by the way. Look, I’m far from the first media hack to lament about the death of local news orgs or make arguments as to why we should all worry about the trend. But I’ll give you two reasons nonetheless.
The second is a hobbyhorse of mine: I don’t think it’s good when the risk and responsibility of an entire system is placed on the backs of a handful of companies. Consider: Can you trust, say, NPR or WNYC to consistently make the right decisions — in hiring, in organizational culture, in representation, in appropriately balancing local and national stories for a country of 330 million — all the time? Look, we’re all human. We all fail sometimes. Which is why it’s important that the system transcend the actions and health of a few individual players.
With all this in mind, the local–national bundle as historically expressed through public radio broadcast’s practices has never felt more miraculous. Your basic public radio programming blocl, as manifested by the Broadcast Clock, is an elegant marriage of local and national within the same listener experience. Not to get too maypole-dancey on you, but it’s a pure embodiment of the Imagined Community, in which the wide expanse of geographically disparate American communities are socially stitched together by the same national information source while being balanced out by local information unique to them that affirms their identities. (*takes a sociology class once*)
But the ubiquity of that local-national bundle was rooted in what was once the technological necessity of broadcast. Now broadcast isn’t literally necessary, and audiences don’t need local stations to access NPR, and so it’s important to figure out how to rebuild that potent local–national bundle elsewhere.
Currently, we seem to be in an awkward transition phase where public radio feels like it has one foot in the door, one foot out. NPR still isn’t distributing its flagship broadcast programs, Morning Edition and All Things Considered, as on-demand audio products. But NPR also publishes Up First, which was probably developed with the assumption that podcast audiences are just a different species of audience, but is nonetheless functioning within the reality that a good portion of audience its attracts may not return to linear broadcast ever again.
Under these changing conditions, how should stations and NPR newly relate to each other?
First things first: I don’t think NPR shouldn’t be held back from expanding its podcast assets, growing its podcast revenue, and generally strengthening its podcast position. You don’t move forward by holding another back. Instead, the more relevant question is this: Can you create a more explicit win-win scenario? Can you find an arrangement in which the public radio system as a whole can proportionally benefit from, and contribute to, NPR’s podcast gains?
The answer to those questions lies in a more procedural concern: Is it possible to recreate the local-national bundle in the on-demand audio distribution model?
I think it’s possible. Indeed, I think we already have the means to do it: dynamic insertion technology.
Dynamic insertion is usually discussed in the context of advertising, for good reason, as it originally developed within podcasting as a way to make it easier for publishers to swap out host-reads and ad spots without having to directly alter the podcast episode. Before, ads were “baked into” produced episodes — in that they were recorded as embedded contiguous portions of one big MP3 file. If you want to change the baked-in ad in an episode, you have to resplice the new ads into the MP3 and then manually replace it on your hosting platform.
In contrast, dynamic insertion technology allows publishers to make those swaps more easily and at the time of download, which gives them more capacity to re-monetize their back catalogs and sell timelier ads across more of their content. Dynamic insertion also allows for the possibility of geo-targeting, which gives publishers the ability to deliver ads based on specific location-based audience considerations. A listener in London gets a different ad than a listener in Louisville. (For a more general explainer on dynamic insertion and podcasts, check out this FT writeup from 2015.)
But the application of dynamic insertion tech shouldn’t be limited to advertising. By virtue of what it literally allows you to do — easily swap out content chunks within episodes, based on need and context — the tool also opens up a whole world of editorial opportunities to explore.
Night Vale’s experiment didn’t push the technology much. Because the swap-outs were randomized, there was no targeting involved, and there were only three possible variations. But even with this basic construction, there were hints of something potentially powerful. “[Dynamic insertion] is a fascinating technology to me — that different people can download different versions of an episode,” Night Vale co-creator Joseph Fink told me at the time. “It’s kind of baffling that nobody’s tried this before.”
Near the end of my piece on the Night Vale experiment, I sketched out the following:
You can see how other editorial dynamic insertion frameworks can be designed and executed. For example, in theory, the tech allows for better targeting, and as such, if you could reliably identify the location of a listener, you could deliver editorial programming or journalistic information to that person specific to her city, town, or state…I’ve long suspected that NPR’s Up First could make for a fascinating vessel for local podcasts in the way that Morning Edition’s broadcasts are reliable vessels for interspersed station spots.
That, in a nutshell, is the backbone of what I’m outlining today.
Consider a scenario in which NPR’s podcasts — whether it’s a news product like Up First or a magazine show like Hidden Brain — were recomposed to structurally replicate the national-local bundle of your basic public radio broadcast bloc. Put another way: What if you took the programming logic of the Broadcast Clock and applied it to NPR’s podcasts, using the technical affordances provided by dynamic insertion?
Take your standard, say, Planet Money episode, where along with the content you can expect to get two or three brief chunks of an ad spot, a funding credit, or some call-to-action. What if those ancillary chunks were expanded to include localized information or donation prompts? What if you brought editorial considerations into the mix, in which a short locally produced segment is dynamically added onto the tail end of each Planet Money episode?
There are, of course, a number components that need ironing out. To name a few:
But perhaps the most crucial wrinkle has to do with audience ownership, and how the money would flow.
In the broadcast context, the station is the entity that owns the audience, while NPR functions as the content supplier riding the station’s airwaves. The station pays NPR for the rights to broadcast its various programs; on the other end, the station makes good chunks of its revenue from listeners who donate, in large part, based on the value generated by those programs.
Let’s see if I can represent this visually (prepare for some MS Paint action):
Graphic design is my passion, y’all.
But in the podcast context, NPR owns those podcast audiences. Maybe the value for stations here is a sort of trickle-down effect. Maybe consumers of the Fresh Air podcast would become more likely to listen to Fresh Air off the radio, or whatever. Sure, totally, fine, okay.
But why not just go ahead and build direct value? Why not flip the structure upside down?
Why not assume that NPR will move forward in owning the podcast audience — with which it can continue to deeply monetize through ads via National Public Media, and anything else it eventually comes up with — and then position local stations as the content suppliers for NPR, which buys localized content to dynamically inject into delivered episodes? Why not make NPR into the revenue source for local stations, as far as podcasts are concerned?
Why not position NPR as the moat for stations? #Whynot? #Whynot?
Let’s run the Comic Sans back:
Maybe you don’t buy into any of this. Maybe you really do believe that broadcast radio will remain strong and robust and beautiful forever. Maybe you think all this is just pearl-clutching, that all this podcast stuff is a fad that goes away, and that I’m just full of shit. I get it. You would be far from the first.
But…what if you’re wrong? Why not hedge off a little Pascal’s Wager?
If you want to start small, we can start small. What if we just took one show — say, the NPR Politics podcast — and used it as a platform to start testing out a complete local-national podcast bundle? There’s an election coming up, right? Lots of people are complaining about being too focused on the presidential campaign to the detriment of local races, right? Why not pull together an experiment in which stations across the country each contribute five-minute spots on their own local races to be dynamically inserted as mid-episode segments?
Anyway, all this is just a speculative proposal. Would love to know what you think, if you care about this kind of stuff.
