‘Sampler’ wants to know what podcasts even are
MARCH 3RD, 2016 — POST 059
Anyone with a remote interest in podcasts will be aware of Gimlet Media. Helmed by Alex Blumberg, formerly of This American Life and Planet Money, Gimlet has grown in two year from its original show StartUp to a roster of six shows in 2016. The most recent of these is Sampler. Host Brittany Luse, also host of For Colored Nerds, takes a guest co-host through a series of podcast clips each week to showcase the best the medium has to offer.
I initially thought this was podcasts’ version of service journalism. I don’t mean this to sound derogatory, but rather that Sampler would uncover a few new things for me each week that I might look further into. The show certainly has utility in this regard, something beyond entertainment. Six episodes in, I’ve been exposed to a bunch of shows I never knew existed, only having heard two clips before. However, it’s not accurate to characterise Sampler simply as providing a discovery service. The problem with this is that podcasts require commitment. If I fall in love with any of the clips Luse selects each week, I could very easily be driven into the arms of that show and out of the Gimlet stable all together. My week only has so many hours after all. If Sampler was just about discovery, it wouldn’t make much business sense: it would actively be driving its listeners to the competition.
Which is why the show’s fifth episode was mission critical.
Entitled I Don’t Sweat, Luse invited her boss and Gimlet CEO Alex Blumberg into the studio for this episode. Blumberg’s self-imposed theme with his clip selection, even if he breaks theme in his wild card selection, is “Podcast’s Arrival”. Basically, this involves three clips in which some of the biggest voices in the world (Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Sonia Sotomajor) are interviewed inside the “Wayne’s World garage” that is podcast production. Basically, it’s Blumberg rejoicing in the final mainstream appeal of the medium he’s dedicated himself to.
Blumberg’s first clip, he acknowledges, has probably be heard by every listener of Sampler: Marc Maron interviewing Barack Obama on WTF with Marc Maron. Already, then, Blumberg’s contribution would seem to undermine the purpose of the show as I had initially seen it. What’s the point of a discovery service if it’s just going to throw out stuff I’ve already heard? But a stopper was put in the whining mouth of this thought within an instant. The interstitial banter between Luse and her co-host in this instance became about what Maron, sitting opposite Obama in his garage with only a few mics between them, was able to get from Obama because of the distinct qualities of podcasts as a medium. Protracted conversations in a hyper-quantised media landscape are a welcome anamoly and one that podcasts are uniquely equipped to deliver. For Blumberg it wasn’t simply that Obama, Clinton, or Sotomajor had stepped in the building Blumberg himself was helping to build, but rather that even guests such as these were unable to resist the intimate allure of the medium. To borrow a phrase from Season 1 of StartUp, Blumberg’s clip selection brought to light podcasts’ unfair advantage.
Maybe I’m a little slow but it took me five episodes to realise what Sampler was really doing. And it took Gimlet’s CEO explaining it to me to finally get it. Sampler is not about discovery of competitor content. It uses this content as the frame upon which to hang an ongoing conversation about the nature of the medium.
Sampler isn’t about what podcasts are out there.
Sampler is about why podcasts are out there.
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