Alex Blumberg of Gimlet Media
Maybe the best place to start is which, seemingly, was the most common question. Mm-hmm. Rowe asked it, and a couple other people on Twitter: How do you source stories? That's a really good question, and it's one that we are sort of working to answer more systematically.
So right now, stories have come like sort of like, well, store it like. So part of it, part of it's like we're not sourcing stories; we're sourcing podcasts. Uh-huh. So, on one level, the people who are sourcing stories are the actual teams themselves. So like their nod, one of our podcasts, it has a whole editorial process around finding stories that they're going to do.
And Startup has a whole editorial process, and Reply-All has a whole process. So, that's not team by team, and those teams know sort of like what their shows are about and what their audiences are into. So, they have a process by doing that, and it's sort of a normal process of just sort of like reading widely, talking to people on the phone, going out, hearing stories at cocktail parties, whatever it is, you know.
And it's sort of like finding something in the news that piques your interest and making some phone calls. Like, that's always, that's the way stories are sort of like. There's no magic formula to it; you just, you sort of try to be curious to the world.
So then, thinking about sourcing podcasts, are people pitching you? So sourcing podcasts is a very different thing because you need it needs to be sort of like, it's like, it's not the actual plotline; it's that it's this sort of like, I remember this. Somebody, for a while, like somebody at This American Life was friends with one of the people who started Friends, the TV show, phones.
Yeah, and Alexa, there was her name, and she was like, she was on the show a couple times, she did a couple episodes. And I remember, I think somebody was telling me a secondhand story about like how she talked about like sort of coming up with the idea for Friends. She was like, starting a TV show is like, you want it to be just specific enough so that there's something that you can remember about it, but then also very, very open.
And basically, you always need a couch. [Laughter] It's sort of like where action can happen, you know. And uh, and so I feel like sourcing a podcast is sort of similar to that, you know. Like, what's it needs to be about something, but it can't be, the concept can't be too binding, otherwise you're not gonna be able to find enough stories to sort of keep it going.
Yeah, now sometimes it can be sort of a limited series, and we do a couple of those, and we're and like we're, we go back and forth and sort of like what the model is for that and can they, you know, can they be profitable or not. So some of it goes back to economics.
But if like the basic unit is this is the regularly occurring sort of weekly or almost weekly podcast, like I would say, that's the basic sort of like template of podcasting. Those come to us a couple different ways. Sometimes people inside the company have ideas; we'll sort of do a piloting process to try to see if we can sort of make it; we'll make it and see how it sounds.
People pitch us from the outside; sometimes we will acquire shows that already exist out in the world, and we've done that. And we've done it a bunch of different ways, yeah, because it's sort of, it's not all that different from, you know, someone interested in doing a start-up sizing a market.
And so when someone pitches you an idea, are you like, "Hmm, intuitively this feels like it has legs," or do you do any kind of like analytical process around picking a show? We don't do any kind of analytical process around it, and partly because it's not like, it's like we don't right now.
The main, the capital that we need to start a show is human capital. Uh-huh. Right? We need somebody who has a vision, has expertise, and can sort of make it happen. So we need somebody who can sort of like take it and run. And so a lot of times, what we're looking for is somebody who has a vision.