Nieman Foundation at Harvard
When the podcast S-Town came out in 2017, it rode into the audio world on the crest of a wave that had been created by its sister podcast Serial just three years earlier. If you worked in audio, spirits were high: money was pouring in, and podcast studios — divorced from the public radio stations that had launched heavy-hitters like Radiolab and This American Life — were popping up around the country. The most well-known of those studios was Gimlet Media, which had launched in 2014, the same year as Serial.
And there was Brian Reed, host of S-Town, surfing onto the podcast charts (it had more than 10 million downloads in the first four days) with exactly the sort of moving, twisty, highly produced, bingeable show that people pointed to as an example of audio’s power as both a storytelling and market force. Audio, I was told emphatically later that year, during my first semester of a journalism graduate program, was the future. It was a rich future, too: in February 2019, a few months before I left journalism school and got my first audio job, Gimlet sold to Spotify for $230 million.
Seven years later, things are very different. Last year NPR laid off 10% of its workforce, its biggest cuts since the 2008 financial crisis, cutting four podcasts in the process — including the shows Invisibilia, Louder than a Riot, and Rough Translation. NPR member stations across the country, which had hopped onto the podcast train along with the national organization, cut staff as well; New York Public Radio, my former employer and the home of Radiolab, laid off 8.5% of its staff this September, less than a year after a similar round of cuts that led to the cancelation of the podcasts La Brega and More Perfect. And Gimlet Media, as Alex Sujong Laughlin wrote for Defector, practically died when Spotify laid off 200 workers and combined Gimlet and Parcast into one studio last June, in the process canceling both audio darling Heavyweight and the podcast Stolen, which won a Pulitzer Prize that same year.
That’s not to say there isn’t still money in audio; Joe Rogan renewed his deal with Spotify for more than the entire value of Gimlet Media — $250 million — earlier this year, and Call Her Daddy host Alex Cooper signed a $125 million deal with SiriusXM in August. But those podcasts, which are largely talk shows driven by the engine of a celebrity host, are very different from the narrative podcasts that defined the early podcast boom. The money for the sound-rich, years-long documentary projects seems to be mostly gone, though some exceptions remain: Apple Podcasts recently introduced a chart specifically for serialized podcasts and Serial Productions itself, which is now part of the New York Times, is still going strong.
Much has changed for Reed in the seven years since S-Town came out. He had to contend with a lawsuit from the estate of John B. McLemore, the podcast’s main subject. (The parties settled in 2020.) Reed then went on to co-host The Trojan Horse Affair, which came out in 2022. Later that year he and fellow This American Life producer Robyn Semien left their jobs to start a new audio production company, Placement Theory.
Question Everything is Placement Theory’s first project, and in some ways its origin story feels like something out of the olden days of radio, before the podcast boom. It’s a joint production of Placement Theory and KCRW, the NPR member station in Los Angeles, with KCRW providing the main funding and business support while Reed and his colleagues at Placement Theory maintain editorial ownership and control — something they wouldn’t have gotten from other potential business partners who presented undeniably enticing financial offers. “I feel so grateful and totally confident with that decision every day, even though it was not an easy decision at the time,” Reed told me. “I couldn’t imagine a better setup.”
Placement Theory now has a full-time team of four, and additionally brought on fellow This American Life alums Neil Drumming and Jonathan Goldstein, who was most recently the host of Heavyweight, as contributing editors. Question Everything isn’t the only project Reed is working on nowadays — there’s also an S-Town show in the works from Apple TV+ — but it is the most immediate; he’s putting out a new episode every two weeks, the first three of which are already out.
I spoke with Reed about the origin story of Question Everything and his plans for the future. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
But, you know, as I mentioned in the first episode, this lawsuit that I experienced over S-Town, the argument behind it was that what I created wasn’t journalism. I believed that it was. But that debate over whether something is journalism or not became a kind of helpful lens for me. I started seeing a lot of the cultural, political, and factual fights going on in our society through that lens, and that’s what I’m hoping to bring to the show. We don’t even agree on what journalism is as a society, or what its goals are. We don’t agree within our profession. We don’t agree with the public. The public doesn’t agree with each other.
So it was kind of a concurrent experience where I was both fighting these external [people] and then debating constantly with my closest collaborator over the nature of journalism, and then just looking at the world and just seeing that we really don’t have a consensus.
Journalism is how we understand the world. It’s how we understand the decisions that are being made in our name, the decisions that we have to make as citizens. It’s how we understand who our fellow citizens are and what they’re worried about, what they’re thinking about. It’s how we understand what policies are or aren’t working. It’s how we understand the threats that are or aren’t facing us. It’s just so fundamental to our existence as humans. The fact that it’s in such crisis, I think it underlies so many of the problems we’re facing. If I had to think of the two things that probably really underlie everything else, it’s inequality and information, you know? So we’re tackling the information side with this show.
I think it’s a fascinating book, but the evidence in her book doesn’t support that first line. She’s making a sweeping statement about all journalists, but then goes on to make a really good case that this specific journalist, Joe McGinnis, was a con man and betrayed the murderer. But to do that, she’s talking to other journalists who are saying “This is beyond the pale. This is really bad.” So to me, it disproves that first line.
I would say it’s in the last year, year and a half that I’ve really reconnected with the story in a real way. And that came in a couple of ways. Initially, last summer, an exhibit opened in rural Pennsylvania, where they happen to have the largest collection of watches and clocks — a horology collection — in America. It’s called the National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors. It’s in Pennsylvania Dutch country, a really beautiful collection. One of John’s clients and friends from Alabama is on the board, and for years he’s wanted to put up an exhibit of John’s clock restoration work, and it got delayed because of the lawsuit and then also because of the pandemic, but it finally went up . Another friend of John’s from Alabama donated his entire collection of clocks that John had worked on, a very beautiful collection.
I was there for the opening, and a bunch of people from John’s life and from the podcast came from all over the world. His cousins drove up from Florida. His college professor drove up from South Carolina with his wife and hand-delivered the sundial that John had made for him because he didn’t trust it going any other way. A fellow horologist from England who actually never met John in person, but they had a very lengthy correspondence and phone relationship for years, flew in from England with his brother and brought boxes of diagrams and books and manuals that John had written about clocks. And then friends from Woodstock as well the former town clerk [came] and we all, just before looking at the exhibit, gathered in the morning in a room there, and people just shared memories of John for like an hour.
It was cool — it was very special, actually, to see how the story and the existence of the podcast kind of helped people grieve in different ways, and to kind of share in that grief. Like, his professor had emails printed out where he’s reading subject lines about “buttfucksville” and everybody was laughing and then we all went and looked at the clocks. The people in the group who knew about clocks were telling us all about what John would have had to do to restore the gold on this one, or to restore the movement on this one.
It brought the podcast back to life for me. And then six months later, Tyler Goodson [the other main subject of the show, a local man in his 20s at the time who was very close with John] died. He was shot by police at his house in November last year. He has, I believe, five kids. He was maybe 32, [it was] just a really terrible, senseless tragedy. And so that just reconnected me in another way.
I went down for his memorial, and people had been dealing with the grief of that. It reminded me of the reality of this community, this story, this place, or at least what John was trying to say. It’s incredibly high and incredibly low, dark and light at the same time.
I’m really curious about your plan for the show. I know you want to make it biweekly; is the plan to react to the news, or have a longer-tail series, or something else? Walk me through the vision.
We also talked about the idea of “Is the role of journalists just to document and is that enough?” And the next episode picks up exactly there, with Barton Gellman. He says something about a kind of calculation he’s made about truth that I was very surprised by. And by the end of that conversation, it kicks us to the next episode, which is about a news organization called Tangle that’s run by a journalist named Isaac Saul, who is doing an experiment with how to distribute news and factual information in a way that is trusted by people across the political spectrum. We found a number of people who say they’re using Tangle to bridge divides in their own personal relationships.
We founded Placement Theory because we were both at a point in our careers where we were looking for the next place to go make ambitious projects, and the way that the industry has shifted and consolidated, we didn’t see a place that really made sense for us. There’s so many new entrants to the space, and there was money coming in, but it was hard to find a place that would give [creators] the resources and allow them to have an ownership stake in their work, but also understood the work we do and how to support it specifically. The work we do is not TV, and it’s not film. It is its own medium with its own needs and its own strengths and its own specific creative and editorial environment. That’s why we founded Placement Theory, and this is our first show.
To launch this we partnered with KCRW, and it’s been just a great fit. I’m grateful that we found them. It feels like a rare kind of innovative partnership at a time when so many media organizations, and specifically public radio organizations, are contracting. But it also feels kind of familiar and tested. There’s a pretty strong tradition of major-market public radio stations incubating some of the most exciting and innovative legacy programs in journalism, and that’s kind of the spirit in which we’re operating with KCRW.
I think [the show] is for anybody who’s felt frustrated with the news, or confused by social media. I believe this kind of philosophically, but also I think it’s borne out by my reporting: Most people have a desire to feel informed about [things like] their government and their town and their country. That desire is unfortunately sometimes being misdirected or preyed upon by bad actors. But the desire underneath it is pure, I think, and I think people are interested in figuring out how to get more trustworthy information and better understand the world. So that’s who this show is for. I’m expecting to be surprised by who we engage with. I got a text from a pretty right-wing state politician who’s a fan, and he was engaging with the questions in the first episode about privacy and public figures and who can be reported on.
