“I have a hook for your story,” a podcast producer told me as soon as I called her up earlier this summer. “Pineapple Street announced it’s going out of business today.”
I’d already been reporting on the collapse of the narrative podcast industry for several weeks, talking with executives and editors and producers. Everyone had pretty much the same thing to say: things were looking grim. But this news felt personal. I’d hosted and written two shows for Pineapple Street Studios. I had several close collaborators who were still on staff. Even when I was just a fan of podcasts, I knew the name Pineapple Street — it was a pioneering production company and industry leader. They’d made the mega-hit Missing Richard Simmons in 2017, then spent almost a decade churning out award-winning narrative shows like The Catch and Kill Podcast, Ghost Story, and Hysterical. A few years ago, Pineapple Street going out of business would have shocked me. But when I heard about its demise on that Thursday afternoon in June, it felt sad but inevitable.
If you haven’t been paying close attention, the idea that a segment of the podcast industry is existentially imperiled may seem counterintuitive. More people than ever are listening to podcasts and talking about podcasts and thinking about starting their own podcasts. Politicians trying to win elections are clamoring to go on podcasts. (When they lose, it is blamed, in part, on not going on the right podcasts.) A recent report from Edison Research estimates that 55 percent of Americans over the age of 12 consumed a podcast in the last month, an all-time high. But the podcasts that are thriving are talk shows — increasingly celebrity-driven talk shows — that are cheap to make, can easily be turned into streaming YouTube videos, and command big ad dollars. Narrative podcasts — the multi-episode, investigative journalism–fueled shows that boomed after the release of Serial in October 2014 — have followed an inverse trajectory.
For years, narrative podcasts were the buzziest segment of the industry. They were what many listeners thought of when they heard the word “podcast.” Many of these shows, following the lead of Serial, were true crime, while others, like Slow Burn, took a similar investigative approach to politics and history. But regardless of genre, most narrative shows shared a style — they were told through the perspective of a single reporter-host, who not only guided a listener through a story but invited them along on the reporting journey. Now, these shows seem increasingly like an artifact of history. Layoffs have hit nearly every organization that makes this kind of audio, from corporate behemoths like Spotify to successful start-ups like Pushkin Industries to the public-radio godfather of it all, This American Life. In early August, Amazon announced it was dismantling Wondery, one of the biggest and most commercially successful studios in the business, which had made its name on shows like Dr. Death and The Shrink Next Door. Amazon had acquired Wondery less than five years ago for $300 million. Now, the company was being broken up into parts and a reported 110 staffers were laid off.
“It feels like podcasts speed-ran the development of an industry to the decline of an industry,” the journalist and podcast host Evan Ratliff told me. “It went from people were making absolutely no money, to people were making fortunes big enough where they’d never have to work again, to ‘There’s not a budget for that’ in less than 10 years.” Now, even those reduced budgets have vanished.
The fall of the industry has been so vertiginous that it’s been hard to fully comprehend its decline. But in many ways, this collapse was baked into its spectacular rise, when a flood of dumb money, pollyannaish entrepreneurs, and hungry journalists rushed to build an industry that would soon turn into a house of cards.
YEARS BEFORE I STARTED MAKING podcasts, I thought I was already too late to get in on the craze. This was the mid-2010s, and after Serial, it felt like every other month brought another expertly crafted narrative series. There was the first season of In the Dark, and S-Town, and Missing Richard Simmons—podcasts that not only got millions of listeners but were covered in the mainstream media as events. They got picked over, debated on social media. They felt like they mattered. So when my friend Matthew Shaer asked me if I might be interested in making a podcast with him in the spring 2017, I leapt at the opportunity.
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Matt told me he’d happened upon a story about a Florida State University law professor named Dan Markel who had been shot to death outside his home in Tallahassee in 2014. Two alleged hitmen had been charged in the case, but authorities believed the masterminds behind the murder were family members of Markel’s ex-wife. Matt had tried to pitch it xas a magazine story, but he’d struck out, which turned out to be a lucky break. The Markel case was convoluted, had tons of backstory, and there was hours of archival audio from police wiretaps and stings. In other words, it was perfect for a podcast.
Matt and I spent months developing the idea, then we pitched it to Wondery, which was fresh off its first big hit, Dirty John. Within a couple weeks, we’d signed a contract to make a six-episode show. We wanted to call it Tallahassee. Wondery’s CEO Hernan Lopez, a shrewd former television executive, opted instead for the crass but grabby Over My Dead Body. He said he liked titles that were phrases people actually said.
In mid-February 2019, the night before Over My Dead Body was released, Wondery hosted a launch party at the Ace Hotel in New York. They billed it as the “exclusive world premiere of 2019’s next blockbuster.” Lopez, Wondery’s CEO served as master of ceremonies, insisting that all the attendees blindfold themselves while listening to the first episode. Afterward, Matt and I went to dinner with Marshall Lewy, Wondery’s chief content officer, who told us about his attempt to court an Oscar-nominated screenwriter to adapt Over My Dead Body. That particular screenwriter had declined, but it hardly mattered. The show hit number one on the Apple podcast charts and stayed there for weeks. That summer, the actress and director Elizabeth Banks optioned the show for development. In 2019, the movie and TV industry just couldn’t resist a good podcast.
“My friends in Hollywood would be like, ‘People don’t care about books anymore, people don’t care about graphic novels or comic books, they just want to make podcasts into movies,’” Jenna Weiss-Berman, the co-founder of Pineapple Street, tells me. “Then everyone was like, cool, this is going to be an amazing business.”
“People don’t care about books anymore, people don’t care about comic books, they just want to make podcasts into movies”
In truth, narrative podcasts had always been a strange business. Requiring months (and sometimes years) of reporting and an exhaustive writing and editing process, they were expensive to produce and struggled to attract enough advertising to pay for their budgets. (Weekly chat shows, with their consistent audiences and parasocial relationships between host and listener, were always a safer bet.) The Hollywood money could help close the gap, and when a show struck big like Wondery’s The Shrink Next Door — which had a purchase price of $1.25 million and numerous associated bonus fees — narrative podcasts could turn a tidy profit. But podcasting still seemed like a relatively modest offshoot of magazines and public radio. Then Big Tech changed the math entirely.
A week before the Over My Dead Body launch party, Spotify announced that it was acquiring the podcast studio Gimlet for a reported $230 million. Spotify had been looking to reduce its dependency on record labels while also becoming a one-stop shop audio company, and Gimlet — which made highly produced shows — was a key plank in that strategy.
To most people in the industry, Spotify buying Gimlet made sense, but Spotify buying Gimlet for $230 million seemed, to quote one longtime producer, “totally insane.” (As Brian Reed, the host of S-Town, noted to me, Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post for a similar sum in 2013. ”A five-year-old podcast company being valued at the same amount as one of the biggest legacy media brands ever — that, to me, encapsulates the bubble we were in,” Reed says.) Gimlet had routinely struggled with profitability. Now, their founders and investors had cashed out for a quarter-billion dollars. ”It was like Spotify dropped a wallet in the street and Gimlet picked it up — it could’ve been any of us,” one former podcast executive told me.
It wasn’t long before other wallets started dropping. In August 2019, Pineapple Street, a considerably smaller company than Gimlet, sold to Entercom (later rebranded Audacy) for $18 million. In July 2020, the New York Times bought Serial Productions for a reported $25 million. That December, Amazon announced its $300 million bet on Wondery. These companies weren’t buying narrative podcast shops because they thought narrative podcasts were a can’t-miss business. They saw them as part of their grand corporate maneuverings. One former Pineapple Street staffer tells me an Entercom executive had said during the acquisition, “We don’t need you to make money. We want you to make shows we can brag about.”
Soon, Sony, Apple TV+, and Amazon were aggressively commissioning narrative podcasts from independent producers, too. New companies like Campside Media (co-founded by my Over My Dead Body reporting partner Matthew Shaer) cropped up to feed the beast, churning out narrative series for the big players while hoping they might follow Pineapple Street and Serial Productions and get acquired for a spectacular fee.
As money swelled the ranks of the industry, it also gave it a sense of staying power. Narrative podcasts couldn’t be written off as a fad. They were a new medium, the savior of longform storytelling. A day after Spotify acquired Gimlet, the National Magazine Awards unveiled the finalists for their first-ever podcasting prize. Later that year, the Pulitzer Prizes announced they were adding an “audio reporting” category. Podcast hosts like Serial‘s Sarah Koenig and S-Town’s Brian Reed were going on late-night shows. Hulu was launching its Emmy-winning comedy series about true-crime podcasters, Only Murders in the Building. Big-time print journalists like The New Yorker’s Patrick Radden Keefe were jumping into the world of narrative podcasts and loving it. Keefe tells me that not only was making his show, Wind of Change, one of the “happiest, most creatively fulfilling experiences” of his career, but he saw audiences respond to it in a lasting way. “On book tour, there are always people who show up, having read none of my books, and want to talk about Wind of Change,” Keefe says.
I was feeling optimistic too. Over My Dead Body had been just the beginning for me. I made a campaign-trail podcast for Texas Monthly called Underdog: Beto v. Cruz; I was reporting and writing the investigative true-crime series Suspect and executive producing a story of drug-smuggling and police corruption called Witnessed: Borderlands. Then there was my show Project Unabom, about the 18-year manhunt to find Ted Kaczynski, which I’d gotten greenlit off a pitch that was barely a paragraph long. I was busier than I’d ever been, and I was already discussing new projects that would keep me occupied for the next 18 months. At the time, I was a staff writer for Texas Monthly, which had once seemed like a dream job. But in December 2020, I quit. I wanted to write and produce podcasts full time. I had caught the bug. I wasn’t the only one.
IN THE SUMMER OF 2016, Connie Walker was looking for a new way to tell stories. She was a television reporter at the CBC News in Toronto, where she specialized in covering indigenous issues. She had a big audience, but she also found that she was frustrated by the quick-hit nature of TV news. Walker is Cree and grew up in the Okanese First Nation in rural Saskatchewan, and she wanted to bring history and context into her stories. Almost always, she had to leave that on the cutting room floor.
Podcasts had been a revelation. She’d gotten hooked on Serial and was inspired by its immersive approach to storytelling. So she pitched her bosses on a podcast about the unsolved 1989 murder of Canadian woman from the Gitxsan nation. Walker’s bosses were television people. They’d never overseen a podcast before, but they cautiously agreed. She had a tight deadline and a tiny team, but plenty of editorial freedom to tell the story of an indigenous community in the way she wanted.
“I think for a long time there was just this feeling that our stories weren’t important or that Canadians wouldn’t care,” Walker tells me. “And it was finally our chance. So we just took it and ran with it.”
Missing & Murdered: Who Killed Alberta Williams? debuted that fall, and it quickly found an audience. Walker tracked the ins and outs of the case, but she was after something larger: “We started this story looking for answers about Alberta Williams’ unsolved murder, but the deeper we got into the story the more I thought about the bigger questions,” Walker says at the beginning of the fourth episode. “Why are there over 1,200 cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada? My hope in telling Alberta’s story is to begin to connect the dots.”
“For a long time there was this feeling that our stories weren’t important. And it was finally our chance. So we just took it and ran with it.”
Within a couple months of the show’s release, Walker was connecting even more dots, reporting a new season that tracked her search for a long-ago missing Cree girl named Cleopatra Semaganis Nicotine. But midway through production, Walker’s manager told her that it would be her last podcast.
“She was like, ‘This takes too long. It’s too expensive. This is it,’” Walker says. And I was like, ‘it hasn’t even come out yet.’ And she said, ‘management doesn’t support it.’
Missing & Murdered: Finding Cleo was a breakout hit, but the CBC stuck to its decision. Walker went back to making television, but soon she was looking for a new employer. In the summer of 2019, she was invited to meet with a few executives at Gimlet, which had just been acquired by Spotify. As soon as she walked into their Brooklyn offices, she was wide-eyed. The CBC offices looked like what you’d expect from a public broadcaster — drab carpeting, dated computers, refrigerators full of sad office lunch. Gimlet’s offices were all start-up pizzazz — designer furniture, gleaming cutting-edge equipment, break rooms stocked with free sparkling water and a cornucopia of snacks. Even better, Gimlet offered Walker its full editorial backing.
“I was begging at the CBC, like ‘Please let me,’ and with Gimlet it was like, ‘What can we do to support you and your vision of the podcast?” Walker says. “It really was like a dream come true.”
Walker’s Gimlet show, Stolen, continued the work she’d started with Missing & Murdered. In the first season, she investigated the recent disappearance of a young mother named Jermain Charlo, but in the second season, Walker broke the mold, focusing on a mystery involving her own father, Howard Cameron, and the abuse he and his peers suffered at the St. Michael’s Residential School, which had been established as part of a government policy of forced assimilation. It was a dark, personal story, and Gimlet gave Walker the time and the team to pursue the most ambitious work of her career. Gimlet’s largesse was worth it. Stolen: Surviving St. Michael’s won nearly every award for which it was nominated, including the Peabody and the Pulitzer.
Stolen: Surviving St. Michael’s was one of the strongest cases imaginable for the existence of narrative podcasts. The resources at Gimlet had allowed a reporter to investigate a deeply personal story, then broaden the scope until she’d crafted a furious indictment of institutional abuse and racism. Just as importantly, the behind-the-scenes transparency of the medium had taken what could have been a dry exercise in accountability journalism and injected it with the sizzle and suspense of a police procedural. And the voices of the survivors themselves gave it an intimacy and force that would have been almost impossible in another medium. But when Stolen: Surviving St. Michael’s was winning the biggest awards in audio journalism, Walker’s triumph was tempered by the fact that Gimlet itself was a husk of its former self.
The problems had burst into public view two years earlier with accusations that one of Gimlet’s flagship shows, Reply All, had created a hostile work environment for non-white staffers. That had led to a reckoning inside the company and, within a little over a year, the end of Reply All. Other longtime Gimlet shows, which were siloed as “Spotify exclusives” and unavailable on other platforms, started bleeding their audiences. New shows had trouble gaining traction. In October 2022, Spotify, under pressure from investors to reduce costs, began culling its original podcast offerings, cancelling several Gimlet shows and laying off dozens of staffers. By the end of that year, Gimlet’s managing director, Lydia Polgren, and its co-founders, Alex Blumberg and Matt Leiber, had all departed the company. Then in June 2023, less than a month after Walker’s Pulitzer and Peabody wins, Spotify shut down Gimlet and put its few remaining shows under the mantle of Spotify Studios. In just four years, Spotify had turned $230 million into zero dollars.
Spotify spared Stolen for a few months, but that December, it too was cancelled. The news wasn’t a surprise to Walker. “I feel like we knew kind of before we knew,” she says. She and her team were allowed to stay on and finish their third season, Stolen: Trouble in Sweetwater, but when its final episode was released in April 2024, they were all out of work.
In some ways, this was familiar terrain for Walker, echoing her experience with the CBC. But the podcast industry was in a vastly different place in the summer of 2024 than it had been in the summer of 2019. Gone were the days when studios like Gimlet were flush with cash and hungry to buy up new talent. When Spotify cancelled Stolen and another former Gimlet show, Heavyweight, a company spokesperson said they would “work with the show creators to ensure a smooth transition for wherever these series go next.” But there was nowhere to go next for Stolen. When Walker reached out to podcast studios and media companies, they didn’t try to woo her at their venture capital-funded offices. She couldn’t get anyone to make her an offer at all. Stolen: Surviving St. Michael’s had felt like undeniable proof of what she’d been trying to convince people of for her entire career — “that these stories are important, that there’s an audience, and that they can have an impact.” But that moment had faded. Two months after Spotify cancelled Stolen, the company signed a new $250 million deal with Joe Rogan.
THE NARRATIVE PODCAST INDUSTRY HAD always been an awkward mash-up of characters — public-radio true believers, Hollywood producers, magazine refugees, and eventually tech executives — and it had always been a little unclear what the goal of making these shows really was. Were they entertainment or journalism? Should their success be measured in awards and social impact, or by their ability to turn a buck? Did these podcasts exist principally for their listening audiences, or were they really, when you got down to it, just proof of concept for film and television development? The different segments of the industry always had different answers to these questions, but for a time, while the money was flowing, it felt like podcasts could be everything to everyone. The precious journalists could strive for their Pulitzers, and the wannabe Ari Golds could have their Hollywood deals. The answer to every binary choice was “yes.”
But then the money started to go away. The tech and media giants that had funded the podcast boom had learned that narrative journalism was hard to scale. In 2019, it might have been enough for them to make shows that “we can brag about,” but a few years later, as recession fears grew, losing money on prestige programming no longer seemed like a good idea. “Podcasting has been a drag on the gross margin side,” Spotify CEO Daniel Ek said in January 2023, “Some shows worked, some didn’t perform as we expected. And that is a sign of maturing. You go for growth first and then you seek efficiency.” As 2023 went on, Ek and his competitors tacked hard toward efficiency.
“Places that were buying these shows for $1 million started to say, ‘How about $500,000?’” Weiss-Berman, the Pineapple Street co-founder, told me. “Then it was, ‘How about $400,000?’ Then, ‘How about $300,000?’”
For years, the industry had been building itself up on the premise that the demand would only grow for prestige TV-like narrative shows and budgets would remain robust. When the big tech companies cut back, the first solution for the production companies that depended on them was mass layoffs. The second was closing up shop entirely. For anyone making a living in podcasting, the future started to look like finding a new line of work.
“Places that were buying shows for $1 million started to say, ‘How about $500,000? Then it was, ‘How about $400,000?’ Then, ‘How about $300,000?’”
At the beginning of this year, that’s how it was looking to me. I’d spent much of the previous two years writing and producing two shows that had both been killed by their commissioning companies. They weren’t bad. I’m pretty sure they were good. But they didn’t sound exactly like something that had come before, which meant they weren’t easily slotted into a pre-existing feed. By then, a conservatism had set in. The industry of “yes” was now beginning to resemble the worst of Hollywood. Creative executives, under pressure to churn out hits, were increasingly micromanaging the process, engaging in what one award-winning host described to me as a “firing line approach to editing.”
In February, I finished up a show that actually got released, the Wondery podcast Death County, PA, which had showcased the high-impact prison reporting of the journalist Joshua Vaughn. Then, for the first time since 2018, I faced a world in which I had no offers for new podcast work.
But I don’t know if I’m done with podcasts, even if a certain kind of corporate-backed, lavishly budgeted narrative show appears to be extinct. My favorite podcast from the last 12 months is called Shell Game, and in many ways it’s a playbook for what might come next. Hosted and reported by Evan Ratliff, a longtime tech journalist and one of the hosts of the Longform podcast, Shell Game is an experimental series about artificial intelligence, and in many ways, it’s a rejection of the compromises that had become baked into making shows for Big Podcast.
“I knew it was going to weird,” Ratliff says. “And I wanted to be as weird as possible. I didn’t want to be forced into analytic conclusions about AI, the kind of places you get pushed by people who are trying to sell your show.”
Of course, by the spring of 2024, when Ratliff started making Shell Game, he probably wouldn’t have found anyone to fund it anyway. But that was fine. Ratliff figured he could do it cheaply with a small team. He hired Sophie Bridges, a producer he’d worked with previously, and leaned on the expertise of his wife, Samantha Henig, who had founded and led the audio division of the New York Times.
The tiny team didn’t diminish the quality of the show. And part of what’s so wonderful about Shell Game is it’s a story that could only exist as a podcast. Ratliff created an AI voice clone of himself and set it loose in the world. In the show, we hear AI Evan interact on the phone, often hilariously, with a series of interlocutors, starting with customer service representatives and scammers and building to two sessions with an unwitting human therapist via the online platform Better Help.
Shell Game made several best-of-the-year lists, and Ratliff says it broke even. (The revenue came almost entirely from subscriptions to an affiliated Substack.) Then, it won a $50,000 prize from the Independent Media Initiative, which made it profitable. But breaking even is a tough business model, and prize money isn’t something you can count on. For Season Two of Shell Game, Ratliff is collaborating with the independent podcast studio Kaleidoscope, which has given him more a financial cushion while still allowing him to make the show he wants to make. “They’re into telling a story that sounds as far from any formula as possible and helping us try to do that,” Ratliff said. That’s how the future might look: smaller, more independent, more experimental, but also with fewer shows being made and basically no hope of striking rich.
But that future is hard to see from the present. At the moment, the narrative podcasts that are making it to the top of the Apple charts are tabloid-y true-crime, often affiliated with TV shows like Dateline and 20/20. Pineapple Street has vanished, Wondery has been gutted, and many of the surviving production companies are trying desperately to pivot to weekly chat shows. Nearly every producer and editor I worked with in podcasting — across seven years and 12 shows — is struggling to find work. Some are piecing together freelance gigs doing field reporting for news-radio outlets. A few are staffing chat shows. One talented producer I know is now working for a fly-fishing magazine. Another started a successful food Substack. An entire generation of journalists who started in podcasting are leaving and are unlikely to return. And many of the most respected and experienced producers, editors, and reporters in the industry are out in the cold too. Connie Walker is one of them.
When I spoke to Walker in late June, she was about to start a new job as a journalism professor at Toronto Metropolitan University. There, she’d be continuing the work she began in Stolen: Surviving St. Michael’s, collecting the testimony of residential school survivors and building out an archive of the abuses that took place. That work is certainly worthwhile, but when we spoke, Walker was open about the fact that her “new dream” was to turn that work into another podcast.
In retrospect, the boom years of narrative podcasting were always a kind of dream. When she went to Gimlet, Connie Walker felt like she’d won the lottery. Sometimes I felt like I had, too. Now, that era is definitively over. A few people got rich. Many more came out the other side with no job, and if they were lucky, a few months severance. Whatever comes next will be built up in the shadow of that history — that it all looked so good and that so many of us bought into the mirage.
From Rolling Stone US
