'Prestige' is a better term than the 'annoying American ones with the constant music and ads every three minutes narrated by a smug twat' term I've been using.
Personally I love any investigative podcast where there’s 3 minutes of audio about how people didn’t get back to them. Bonus if we’re treated to hold music!
I have such mixed & apprehensive feelings about this! & I will have no resolution because I can’t currently afford any bonus content!
Sometimes NPR does stuff where I’m like “I wish I could blare this directly into everyone else’s heads!” & then other times I’m like WHAT THE FUCK is wrong with you?
I’m still waiting on the 4 hour episode where you just scream about Elon. I feel like it would be incredibly healing for all of us during these trying times 🤣
I think about this every single day. And yet I *do* it every single day.
I'm not punching down, I just yearn for the days when NPR was not only news and LCD panel comedy shows. Nowadays if you hear something funny or weird it comes with a ten minute setup apologizing for it.
I almost never listen to 'prestige' podcasts anymore because they all use the same hollowed-out, time-wastey tropes and tomorrow I am NAMING NAMES. Can't wait
The Maintenance Phase trope of "Hey you know this interesting story? Well wait until the twist when everything gets so much more fucked up than you could have imagined!" sincerely never gets old.
if i subscribe to the MP patreon, can i listen to all the previous bonus content as well? love your work so much, so healing - always so so grateful for you and aubrey ♥
Long Form Journalism™ in general is so grating. Imo every journalist needs to be forced to write in nothing but bullets for a year to train out all the writerly impulses before being trusted with sentences
So much this. A lot of very good reporting gets buried in pages of backstory and asides. Ah yes, happy to learn this judge has been selling kids into prison labor and get the supporting evidence on page 17 of this exposé.
I’m a longtime newspaper journo, and this is actually a brilliant idea that would improve reporting in so many ways. Most importantly it would ensure reporters understand what they’re writing about and what the news peg is.
I had a social theory prof who wanted us to distill hundreds of pages of theory into a few sentences. Bottom line it. Sum it up. What’s the main idea? This is a valuable skill I think. Helped me teach basic theory to undergrads succinctly
Every article people send me is headlined "Here's the key to everything wrong with our society" and then starts "When Janie Jones was nine, her parents, elite lawyers who as children had fled the dust bowl, had a saying..."
The podcasts I love the most make me feel like I’m doing dishes while people I like are having an interesting conversation next to me. NPR storytelling feels like being cornered at the chips table by the most obnoxious dude at a party and he’s making relentless eye contact the whole time.
Yes! I also gave up on these a couple of years ago, thinking I didn’t have the necessary attention span anymore. But I recently realized I can listen to an 18-hour audiobook without issue…
Ira Glass is, by all accounts, a perfectly decent guy. But years ago, without meaning to, he started something that would become… bigger than him. Bigger than This American Life. Bigger than anyone on public radio could have ever predicted…
The funny thing too is that I absolutely agree with you about this but also never felt this way about your and Sarah's series on the OJ trial. There's a way to go deep that doesn't fall into the NPR trap imo
Episode 14: What does this minor anecdote we stretched out to 13 episodes teach us about the human condition, life, and the fabric of the universe itself?
I both kind of like this format and feel it is absolutely rife for dunking upon.
I do wonder how much of me liking this format is just that I have a moderately shitty commute. Because yes I DO want 14 episodes of a minor anecdote, and it's because I need something to listen to on my way to work.
"prestige" podcasts are terrible time-stretchers; podcasts are for stuff like interviews, or tech news, or people reading issue by issue through old comic books. They're repeat viewing, not "longform"
sick of @npr.org pretending to be progressive & with us. They are worse than Fox News because they normalize Trump but pretend to be with us. Fuck them and who cares if they get defunded?
Oh I was ranting about something similar with friends. In every interview they insist on recreating the vibe of talking to your rich friends liberal parent at a college graduation party. Playing it dumb with the questions that are so so clearly contrived. Feels so condescending.
Same. Morning edition had been my ritual foreverever, but I just couldn't handle them delivering the sanded-down horrors of tr*mp in that dulcet NPR style.
They spent the 2022 midterms basically repeating the (false) GOP talking point that the GOP was better for the economy & thus the House Dems were doomed. I was so frustrated with them.
Ugh, of course they did. I love NPR but they have the same problem as a lot of library institutions, which is they have this idea that they a) need to be strictly neutral & b) that neutrality means including both viewpoints on everything even if they’re false or bigoted.
I was listening to my local NPR station this morning and someone said "I don't suppose there's a human being in Earth who hasn't read David Foster Wallace's commencement address," which made me think they haven't met many human beings.
Comments
Sometimes NPR does stuff where I’m like “I wish I could blare this directly into everyone else’s heads!” & then other times I’m like WHAT THE FUCK is wrong with you?
Right now I legit do not even have the $4 or whatever that it would cost to subscribe.
One day. …One day…
I'm not punching down, I just yearn for the days when NPR was not only news and LCD panel comedy shows. Nowadays if you hear something funny or weird it comes with a ten minute setup apologizing for it.
What HAPPENED.
can't wait. going straight to the top of the listening queue.
That’s why it’s always so exciting for me to find a podcast with a novel format or voice that doesn’t just try to copy what the ‘prestige’ shows do.
Very useful skill
Most prestige podcasters also don’t read the books written by their guests.
I actually want a IBCK where you literally judge the book by its cover. One of you plays the podbro and the other the author.
https://youtube.com/shorts/rSoJ_d7ZCOw?si=4hCltTSsZdNh2iZ0
"Hi, I'm Sarah Koenig. This is one ring tone...told over the course of several rings. And the story it's telling you...is to answer your phone."
Do we!? How far back, exactly? Why? So you can pad a third of the runtime?
I do wonder how much of me liking this format is just that I have a moderately shitty commute. Because yes I DO want 14 episodes of a minor anecdote, and it's because I need something to listen to on my way to work.
I love it in some stories, but far less in others....
He’s been doing the same war for 15 year, chronologically, It’s amazing how he draws it all out.