A Podcast CEO Says Accountability Has "Slipped Through the Cracks."

Plus: Why Is Malcolm Gladwell Being Honored at On Air Fest?

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Hello Beautiful Audio People!

I miss you! Today I’m popping in quickly to share something that Ian Enright, CEO of Goat Rodeo, the production house behind shows like the The Retreat and Spy Valley, posted to a Slack group I’ve been part of for years. He wrote it while digesting the news that WAMU had laid off 15 staffers, and as he prepared to attend this weekend’s On Air Fest event in New York. Ian has generously agreed to let me share his words here:

Maybe we should be feeling more shame this year as audio employers?

I can’t help but feel an extreme sense of frustration coming into On Air Fest in NYC next week. I’m excited to see so many colleagues and as a team not headquartered in NY or LA it's one of the few times we get to share space with rooms full of people making great audio. But this year it feels off. And it clicked tonight on my walk home. There’s something lacking from all of us in the audio space. Contrition. There isn’t enough shame in the air. That should make us angry or at the very least uncomfortable.

There were an avalanche of layoffs in the audio industry. It hit public and private distributors alike. Sony Music, Gimlet, The Athletic, Vox, PRX, Vice, Stitcher, Pandora, Pushkin, iHeart, NPR, WNYC, and countless others all decimated their staffs and tanked their strategic visions. Thousands of jobs were lost. Some weeks I get more emails a week from individuals looking for opportunities than I get from my team. It has been awful to watch this unfold, but even deeper than that it has been disheartening to see what is being allowed to slip through the cracks. To me that is accountability. The real accountability for the choices we’ve made over the past 10 years.

At Goat Rodeo, we’ve been profitable. We’ve made other companies' productions profitable. We didn’t lay anyone off. We didn’t raise money underpinned by unrealistic projections and big ideas. We didn’t take large salaries. We didn’t chase pivots, “the rise of whatever,” micropods, smart speakers, whatever the hell live audio was supposed to be, exclusives, and whatever else. Those choices often came at a price. The biggest of which was stigma. We must not be doing those things because we can’t do those things. We spent years of feeling like the smallest dog at the bowl. We were seen as naive for not jumping on the rush. As a company we felt like we were going crazy. Now, it seems like every other audio studio just had to obliterate their strategies, and with it, the jobs of the people who believed them.

A refrain I’ve heard a lot in the last 12 months, “well we knew this day was coming.” That’s not what people said when interest rates were zero. That’s not what people said to the producers and staff that were convinced to develop in this career path. That’s not what people said when they were announcing layoffs at all hands.

Businesses are hard. The math isn’t. You sell a product. That product is sold for more than it costs to make it. For a good while people all over the industry tried extremely hard to sell us on the idea that wasn’t true. We can pretend that gravity doesn’t exist but eventually everything falls back to earth. The reality is we work in an industry that is still deeply unserious and deeply immature at its executive level.

They didn’t recognize or they didn’t care enough about solving the real problems. How do we make shows sustainably? How do audiences discover our work? How do we build closer relationships with audiences and not ad platforms?

This On Air Fest, I think we should be quiet and maybe listen a little more before we start allowing the same individuals that cited “unforeseen market downturns” suddenly hopping back on stage six months later to tell us they’ve figured it all out. Maybe they should ask the ones that build their strategy on resilience and process and not big ideas and hunches.

I’m excited to see everyone at On Air. I hope it's cathartic just as much as it is a collaborative celebration of great work in audio still on the horizon. But I think we should be wise to remind ourselves and others of the failures that got us here and urgent lessons being shouted from them.

That bit about putting the same people onstage hit me hard. That’s not just a knock on On Air Fest; it’s something I’ve observed since I began writing about the audio and podcast industry 5+ years ago.

— But since we’re talking about it (lol), why is On Air honoring Malcolm Gladwell with an “Audio Vanguard” award? Pushkin went through three painful rounds of layoffs last year! A third of the company was gutted and yet Gladwell took little responsibility, reportedly telling staffers that despite his position as co-founder and president, “I’m not an employee and I’m never going to be involved in the day-to-day decision making.”

This is who we’re honoring, above all others?

According to the website, Gretta Cohn, Pushkin’s CEO, will be interviewing him about his “creative career” onstage. It’s hard to imagine that this will be anything but a softball interview (who made the choice to let Malcolm take questions from his own colleague?), but if the conversation takes any unexpected turns, please do let me know. And if you return from On Air Fest with any tips or story ideas, you know where to find me.

Skye

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