An Opportunity for Public Radio with NHPR's Rebecca Lavoie

Jeff Umbro: Hey everyone, this is Jeff Umbro, I am the host of Podcast Perspectives, brought to you by the Podglomerate. We are an agency that produces, distributes and monetizes podcasts, and this podcast is all about bringing you conversations with leaders in the podcast space, as well as panel discussions surrounding news stories of the day.

Today on the show we have Rebecca Lavoie. Rebecca is the director of On-Demand Audio at New Hampshire Public Radio, where she is a 10 year veteran. I'm biased during this interview - I live in New Hampshire. It is my local public radio station. I'm very proud of the work that they do, including the production very recently of the 13th Step, and the second season of Bear Brook.

NHPR punches way above their weight, driving millions of downloads to these shows, driving real conversation and journalism around the issues that they cover, and leading the way in the podcast industry for how a non-profit or public radio station can publish real journalism that moves the needle both financially and meaningfully with the quality of what they're putting out in the world.

Rebecca was recently interviewed in an article for Current by writer Jenna Spinelle, and one of the things that Rebecca mentions in the article is that public radio stations currently have an opportunity to publish really high quality narrative journalism in the midst of all of the pullback and layoffs that we're seeing across the rest of the industry. We spend a lot of time talking about the different revenue streams from commercial and public radio stations on the show today and we really dive into some of the themes that were talked about in the article.

As a disclaimer, Podglomerate works with New Hampshire Public Radio on audience development initiatives across several of their shows. So we have an existing relationship with the station and with Rebecca. Let's get to the show.

Hey, Rebecca, welcome to Podcast Perspectives. How's it going?

Rebecca Lavoie: Thank you so much for having me. I am very excited to be here and it's going great.

Jeff Umbro: I want to just start by hopefully clearing up something that is, I think, a little bit mysterious to a lot of potential listeners and folks out in the world. What is the public radio ecosystem and how does it operate?

Rebecca Lavoie: Okay, so New Hampshire Public Radio and the public radio station that you listen to is not NPR. That's probably the most commonly misunderstood thing. People think I work at NPR. People think that every podcast or every program they hear on public radio is NPR. It's not.

NPR essentially, it's not like a mothership, we don't report to them. They're more like our biggest, for lack of a better word, vendor. So they basically make a bunch of stuff that we license or buy from them to air on our local network. But we also license and buy stuff from American Public Media, like Marketplace, which also airs on our local network. And we also make stuff ourselves, like from our local newsroom and stations have local talk shows that they air. So public radio stations are local radio stations that can brand themselves as NPR stations because they carry NPR content.

Now, NPR is usually the flagship content, like Morning Edition, All Things Considered, Weekend Edition and so forth. That's sort of the anchor content that's primary to the public radio brand. But your member station is not NPR. That's a thing to know.

Jeff Umbro: I'm also under the impression that there are university stations and local stations.

Rebecca Lavoie: Yes.

Jeff Umbro: And they both kind of operate in a similar way, but they're a little bit different in the funding model and everything?

Rebecca Lavoie: They're actually very different.

So there's actually three kinds of stations. There's university stations, there's dual licensees, which is both stations that are television and radio. So Vermont Public, which used to be Vermont Public Radio, is now a dual licensee. It's Vermont Public Television and what was formerly VPR.

But university licensees, like WBUR in Boston, are university licensees and have some oversight by that college or university. So some of their funding comes through there. That's been in the news a little bit lately because there have been stations where there's been journalism conflicts related to the college or university, which I'd recommend people look up because it's actually kind of an interesting story. There's more constraints there in terms of the kinds of innovations and sort of rapidity of development, movement, fundraising and stuff that stations like that can do because they're more dependent on the university ecosystem, and they're not independent organizations.

But a lot of stations like mine, they're independent non-profits. So we sort of have the ability to move, grow, innovate, make stuff... within, of course, the non-profit world confines.

Jeff Umbro: And I want to come back to this because there's been some interesting things happening over the last few years when it comes to like the mothership of NPR and how they're trying to integrate with a lot of the member stations and that kind of thing.

But we skipped over a really important piece. It was intentional, everybody. But Rebecca, who are you? What is your role at NHPR and what do you do every day?

Rebecca Lavoie: So right now at NHPR, I run the podcast team, so I'm technically the Director of On-Demand Audio, so I oversee all of the podcasts that we make - Outside/In, Civics 101 - in terms of the editorial, so our regularly published podcasts. And then all the podcasts that are connected to the newsroom journalism, like the Document team, which makes Bear Brook, the 13th step, I work with them closely on strategy, the podcast product itself. So I do work with them on editorial. I'm in late stage edits and sort of helping shape the show, but I also work with them kind of on the business marketing strategy launch side.

So I basically oversee everything at NHPR that has to do with on-demand audio in terms of editorial, the business footprint, monetization, kind of like the whole shebang. So I'm sort of the head of our sort of podcast company within our company.

Jeff Umbro: We work together on a few different projects and NHPR is by my measure - I'm also a local to New Hampshire, so I'm biased - one of the premier stations when it comes to being able to do this and do this well. And you have some very unique experience just in general and then through NHPR because you get to see this from the top down. And the bottom up in terms of actually producing the shows and coming up with the ideas and conception, the production, the whole nine yards. And then you also get to see like, how does this get made? How does it get funded? How do we hire the people that do it?

And then in addition to that, you also have a few other roles. So do you want to talk about that a little bit?

Rebecca Lavoie: Sure. So I do have a whole podcasting life outside of NHPR. So for a while I actually wasn't the head of the podcast unit. I actually worked in digital in the newsroom, but I worked very closely with our podcasts and helped make a lot of them while I was doing that. And so I've always been very much involved in our podcasting and NHPR.

But on the outside of NHPR, I have a podcast called Crime Writers On where we actually review, like Siskel and Ebert style, other podcasts. My husband and I have a little podcasting company. We make a couple of shows: that one and another one called These are Their Stories, which is about Law and Order and SVU. And then I also host a podcast for Netflix where I interview directors of documentaries on the service.

And so I sort of have this very solid foot in the commercial podcasting space - I have for about eight or nine years - which has really been a very interesting thing that I've been able to do both of these things at the same time, because my leg in the commercial space has very much informed the decisions that I've made at NHPR in terms of growth, in terms of monetization, in terms of even what we make, how we make it, how to scale, how not to scale, and how to think of ourselves as being a player in the industry, which I think a lot of public radio stations haven't necessarily done.

And it's been an interesting mix, I think, to the benefit of both sides of my career, frankly.

Jeff Umbro: I couldn't agree more. I've known you for a few years and I've been able to kind of see it in action and it's very cool and impressive to see that you're bringing in all of these different layers from all over the industry.

And I'm glad that you brought that up. I wanted to look at the different business models of how a commercial podcast makes money, and then I want to shift a little bit to how a non-profit such as NHPR does that. So let's start with commercial, and I know there's a few different levels here, so feel free to talk through any of them.

Rebecca Lavoie: Sure. So it used to be just ads, right? So like when I started Crime Writers On, for instance, and we first signed up with Stitcher, which was Midroll at that point in 2015-16, basically the way podcasts made money was by the placement of ads that hosts read on shows. That was pretty much it back then. And so if you had a regularly published show or a serialized show, you'd hear an ad on that show. That ad was attached to money. It used to be baked-in, meaning that it was actually audio that was attached to the program itself. And if you ever had to change it, you actually had to edit your audio file and re-upload it. It was a whole thing.

So that was like, there's like level one of podcast advertising. That evolved over time. Until now, most ads are actually dynamically inserted digital files, so they can be switched out automatically. So that's one way that shows can monetize.

Another way that commercial shows can monetize, which was stolen completely from public radio, very smartly, was through the membership model. A very common platform for this is Patreon, where creators have a show - because podcast audiences are so engaged with creators, if creators are smart about it - they then will create paywall content, often, or some sort of bonuses, you know, stickers, engagement opportunities like live events or the ability to show up for tapings or something like that. And a small percentage of their listeners will pay $5 or $10 a month to join their Patreon. And then sort of directly monetize the show that way.

So a lot of shows, like my show for instance, we sort of do both. We both have...

Jeff Umbro: and this is Crime Writers On?

Rebecca Lavoie: Yeah, so we sort of have a combination of both advertising and Patreon as sort of our pie of monetization.

There are some shows that primarily do Patreon and there are some podcasts that are only paywall shows, which is very interesting to me. And those shows, some of those shows make bank.

Jeff Umbro: Yeah.

Rebecca Lavoie: What's interesting to me is the shows that put like the crappy version of their show out in the public sphere and the good version of their show behind the Patreon firewall. Like that's how they scaled it. They like, designed it that way.

In the last few years, of course, there's a whole new model where commercial podcast production companies, in particular with serialized shows - stories that are in chapters, like eight episodes, 10 episodes - they are now creating these stories and selling them as a package to a distributor like Wondery, Amazon. So they'll basically pitch the show, sell it out of the gate for a determined amount of money, $500,000 - that's just a sample, they're not always going for that - with the idea that that production company gets that money, with the potential upside of an IP deal, ad money, other kinds of revenue on the back end of it.

But that money that they're getting initially for the sale of the show also often goes to producing the show. So they'll sell the concept, they'll get that big hunk of money. That big hunk of money also goes toward the production. Maybe they'll make some money off of that initial sale.

So there's like a bunch of things at play right now. And the sort of pot of gold - one of them - that has unfortunately really driven a lot of what we're hearing in podcasting right now, is that IP potential for the end of the rainbow for some of these serialized shows. And that unfortunately has driven a lot of what has happened in the industry in terms of corporate takeovers, consolidations, people getting into the industry who have no audio background, that kind of thing. Because it has been seen as this big development space for stories, for talk shows, for sort of celebrity monetization.

And we now have this glut of just content that's just like, not as high quality as those great pieces of journalism that first brought us to the serialized podcast to begin with.

Jeff Umbro: Marc Andreessen wrote a thing years ago called like, "The Eight Ways That Media Can Make Money" - I'm sure I'm butchering that title. I think all of them apply to podcasting, and the idea is: subscription, premium tiers, ad monetization, grant writing and funding from your community, live events, micropayments - which does exist in podcasting, but in a funny way. But the idea is that there's a lot of different ways to make money.

Most publishers are making their money in the same few ways. The most popular and the most accessible is ad sales. If you have a strong community, then it is some kind of premium or crowdsourced model. And to Rebecca's point about selling a package to produce for a larger organization - that's generally reserved, not always, but generally reserved for a more professionalized production company that has the connections, the resources and the talent to really pull that off.

Rebecca Lavoie: There is one other weird way that I'm also fascinated by that I love to mention.

There is this sort of growing niche of like... a lot of them are B2B podcasts or like very specialty small audience podcasts, where the size of the audience is less important than who it's for. And I've met people like this at conferences who are making a podcast that might be intended for like 100 listeners, but those 100 listeners are either willing to pay to listen to it, or there is a specific advertiser who's willing to pay a huge premium to reach those 100 listeners.

And I call that sort of like the micro-niche podcasting, and it's sort of a dream. Like I met this woman at Podcast Movement who was making this surveying podcast with her husband - this road surveying and mapping podcast. They literally have like a hundred downloads and they have somebody paying $10,000 per ad spot on their show, because they're reaching those people. If you could find that, man... Do that.

Jeff Umbro: It's bananas. We produced a show for a SaaS company and one of their selling points was that they would do their thing and make you 1% better at doing that thing, which makes a massive difference for an organization with like 50,000 employees. So we produced two years of this podcast and their entire goal was like, "we don't care what happens. We need to make one sale of this software, and that software costs $50,000 a month."

But yes, there's a lot of different ways in which folks make money by podcasting commercially. But when it comes to a public radio station, they're non-profits and they have legal rules that are written down that they have to comply with. So we'll start with NHPR because that's, I presume, what you know best. But how does NHPR make money?

Rebecca Lavoie: So it's very interesting because we actually have FCC regulations that apply on the radio side that don't apply on the on-demand side.

So for instance, when you hear a public radio, we'll just call it an ad spot - it's actually called an underwriting spot technically - what you can't hear and what you will never hear is a call to action. So you'll hear an ad for a law firm and what you won't hear is: "The Jeff Umbro law firm, the very best at writing wills and trusts since 1985. Call them now at 1-800-555-5555." You'll never hear that call to action: "Call them now at," "The very best at." That sort of sales pitch, that's called a call to action. Like, "Do this and you'll get this." You'll never hear that. That is against the rules in the public radio non-profit underwriting space.

So in the on-demand space, that is not true. We can operate like a commercial podcast. None of the FCC, non-profit, public radio rules apply to podcasts produced by public radio stations. They just don't.

Which kind of gets me to something that has kind of made me crazy about public radio podcasting for years, can I talk about that?

Jeff Umbro: Yeah, please.

Rebecca Lavoie: So for years and years and years, and still to this day, public radio podcasts, including NPR’s, do not sound like they are just podcasts in the regular podcast space. For some reason, a lot of public radio stations and NPR have made the conscious decision to bring their public radio sensibility, in terms of how they'll deliver, for instance, their advertising to the podcast space.

So the best example of this is hosts reading ads. A lot of public radio outlets will not do that. They won't do it because they believe that it somehow taints the journalism or the integrity of the content if the host is reading an ad for HelloFresh. I think that is limiting and ridiculous. I have worked with ad agencies at NHPR. I've been in meetings with ad agencies before I had this job at NHPR, where I happen to know that we have left a lot of money on the table...

And at this point, I mean our hosts don't care. They're like, "Gimme the Casper copy, just give it to me. Gimme the Indeed copy. It's fine." Our audience is smart enough to know that an Indeed ad is not journalism. Podcast audiences are trained for this. They've been listening to the radio forever. They've been listening to podcasts forever. This precious idea that somehow reading an ad negates the value of the other stuff you're talking about... it is bizarre to me. It's bizarre. And public radio is leaving money on the table by refusing to do it, and they have been for years.

Jeff Umbro: I think, though, at the core of this, the idea is that there are restrictions that are placed on public radio stations and their ad sales that are not placed on other commercial entities.

Rebecca Lavoie: That public radio stations have put on themselves.

Jeff Umbro: Yeah.

Rebecca Lavoie: They're not actually restricted, they're self-limiting. Yeah.

Jeff Umbro: Yeah. In addition to ad sales, how do public radio stations make money?

Rebecca Lavoie: Alright, so this is where we have the huge advantage because we are not wholly reliant on ad sales to make our podcasts. Our podcasts are simply another platform on which we're doing journalism.

We already do journalism on the radio. We already do journalism on our websites, in our newsletters, and we already have this incredibly robust funding model for all that stuff. We do fund drives, we get grant money, we have major donors, and we basically use that same pile to fund our podcasts.

So at NHPR, we have made the very conscious decision - and I cannot speak for other stations because I know other stations, this is not the case - we have made the very conscious decision to not engage in this situation where we are saying our podcasts have to be self-funding. I know a lot of places that are doing that and I don't understand why. It is just another platform on which we are doing journalism. That's how we view it. And we are funding it the same way we fund all of our stuff.

We've had specific luck in the podcast space with major donors because we found that major donors really are interested in investing in long form journalism, in journalism that has a broader reach. They see it as very innovative that we're in this on-demand audio space. Civics 101 in particular really excites people, Outside/In really excites people because it has the environmental bent to it.

But our long form serial stories - Bear Brook, The 13th Step - donors are really interested in supporting investigative, enterprise, long-form journalism, and we just talk about the journalism. We're not saying "you are helping us pay for podcasts." We're saying "you're helping pay for this long form journalism that no one else in the state is doing." And we just see it as another thing that we are doing on another platform, not a product that has to be self-sustaining.

So we're hugely advantaged. Our ad sales are a little piece of our podcast revenue, but they do not have to sustain the whole thing.

Jeff Umbro: I wanted to ask you about that because - and I wanna get into the content itself in a second, or the journalism itself - because I think that you guys have done literally industry leading work there.

But when it comes to the breakdown - and I don't know how much you can share here of the revenue that's coming in from the station or from the podcasts specifically - do you guys have any way of tracking how many donors are coming from the podcast itself versus, I'm positive you have ways to track this, but like how much revenue you're earning on the ads from the podcast versus the broadcast?

Rebecca Lavoie: Yes and no. I mean, the ad revenue from the podcast, you get your report every month. So it's easy. It's very small compared to our ads with the radio. It's very small, but, you know, it's not nothing. 

Jeff Umbro: Is it the same team selling it?

Rebecca Lavoie: No, we work with Stitcher for our podcast radio ads.

We actually, a couple years ago, signed up with an outside agency, which I pushed for, frankly. We had been with PRX previously. Before that we were with another outside agent. But I was the one who sort of pushed for outside agency representation because I believe, as you know, Jeff, that when you have a product like podcasting that has a national reach, that is a different kind of platform than a local radio station. You should be working with people who know how to work with that product.

So that's why I work with a podcast marketing agency, and I think that people who have podcasts with a national reach should be working with a national sales team to sell their stuff. I really strongly believe that.

Jeff Umbro: I am 100% with you on that. We at Podglomerate work with an outside team to sell our stuff and we do this every day.

That said, I do think that it's very easy for me to understand why an organization who sells ads for broadcast might think that it's the same thing.

Rebecca Lavoie: It's not.

Jeff Umbro: Yeah.

Rebecca Lavoie: Especially when you get the copy and you're like, "this doesn't sound like a podcast ad." Or like, "I don't think a Bear Brook listener wants to hear a Toyota of Nashua ad necessarily," but, okay, cool.

No, I mean it's just not a fit. It's also just not a good listener experience, because ads are content, so you gotta think about that too.

Jeff Umbro: Well, for years, I don't know if you remember this, I'm sure you do, but whenever somebody would talk about a bad advertisement on a podcast, they would just call it a "radio ad." And I haven't heard that very much lately because I think a lot of people have learned and are just doing better. But like that was kind of an insult for a long time.

What we've learned so far is that public radio stations, in some cases, have a leg up because they have run these membership drives for a long time and are also - the smart ones and the ones that are forward thinking - are kind of bringing in outside resources to help them to grow their shows, and to sell ads, and monetize the shows in ways in which they should be monetized.

And so how are you thinking about actually producing these things? Like on its surface, when you guys come up with a new idea to produce a podcast, how do you decide if it's a podcast as opposed to like an episode of The Exchange or something?

Rebecca Lavoie: That's a really interesting question.

So we have two regularly published shows right now: Civics 101 and Outside/In. I really believe that if a station has an opportunity to have a regularly published show, they should stick with it. I mean, Outside/In and Civics 101 are like eight years old and their listenership is still growing, which is amazing. Honestly, those are old ass shows. They are old shows at this point, but we believe in them and we act like we believe in them, which I think is the reason why the listenership is still growing.

But the regularly published show is your opportunity for steady revenue, both on the advertising side, and on the major donor side, on the asking for gifts side, on the membership side. If you have something that you're making all the time, you can always talk about it and you can always innovate in that space. We made a huge editorial shift in Civics 101 since I took over on the team and we've grown our audience by something like 70% in the last two years.

We always have something new to talk about. If we're doing a series on Reconstruction or if we're responding to the Supreme Court, we can now go to the next donor event and talk about our Supreme Court stuff, we can talk about the latest thing that Outside/In did. So I really believe that if a station has an opportunity to do a regularly published show, which is within kind of the silo of the public radio "area of interest," like an area that we know inspires curiosity, that's very much within the journalistic mission - in our case, it's civics and the environment - a station should do that.

When it comes to the long-form narrative journalism, that decision is purely editorial. Bear Brook was supposed to be a series of three, four minute radio features.

Jeff Umbro: Oh wow.

Rebecca Lavoie: I heard Jason in 2016 having this conversation with our news director at the time about this story about isotope science and about the bodies in the Bear Brook State Park. I knew about the bodies because it was adjacent to a thing that I had written about a long time ago, and I just yelled over from my desk "That's a true crime podcast!" And that was how Bear Brook became a true crime podcast. Like it's purely editorial.

Just like anything else at NHPR, we don't come up with a story to be a podcast. We, when we hear a story, find the right platform for it.

Jeff Umbro: I love that. And it shows for the listener. We won't spend tons of time diving into this, but NHPR is publishing series that are receiving millions of downloads because of the quality of the journalism and often making real life changes because of this journalism.

But Rebecca, I wanted to chat because you were interviewed for an article for Current from Janice Pinelle, where you identified something that I've kind of heard rumblings of over the last few weeks from some of the NPR stations. But you articulated it for the first time in a way that really made me go like, "Oh wow."

Rebecca Lavoie: What did I say?!

Jeff Umbro: Well, ultimately you said that these smaller NPR stations have an opportunity right now to fill a void that these larger organizations - like the Spotify’s of the world - are leaving when they are cutting back on their production, laying off some of their staff members. It was funny, I didn't quite realize this - I was rereading the article today, on the same day that Spotify released 200 folks from their team, you all published The 13th Step. And like I was aware of both, but it wasn't until the second read that I realized it was the same day.

So ultimately, like what you were saying in the article is that these local radio stations are already producing this kind of content and they have a really unique superpower to do so because they're funded by the broader organization, and the umbrella of that organization, and are not as reliant on the ad sales of some of these bigger organizations like a Spotify, or a Pushkin, or something.

Rebecca Lavoie: That's right.

Jeff Umbro: So can you break that down a little bit? Like what makes you guys uniquely qualified to do this and why do the shows that you all make resonate with listeners to the extent that they do?

Rebecca Lavoie: Well, they're good. This is just true - that our shows are good.

There used to be a time when almost everything that was being published was like an event, right? Because it was all either good or it was new. You know? You couldn't wait. Like, remember when Gimlet used to make a show? We were like, “Ooh, Gimlet has a new show!”

Jeff Umbro: Every episode of Reply All was destination listening.

Rebecca Lavoie: Yeah.

Jeff Umbro: When Gimlet produced something new, like it didn't matter if I cared, I would listen. And I wouldn't always make it past the first episode, but I would always hit play.

Rebecca Lavoie: You'd always wait for it, right. I mean that really hasn't been a thing in quite a while.

Right now we're at a point though, where people have to really hunt and discover great stuff. But there also just isn't a lot of great stuff being made. I'm sorry. I know that people might contradict me, but, there are great things being made, but just not to the extent where the great stuff is dominating the way that it used to, because there's so much mediocre stuff being made and there's so much money behind the mediocre stuff that's being made, that that's mostly what you see. Right?

What we're seeing now with things like the sale of Kast and the collapse of the Spotify narrative, the consolidation - you know, like last year it was Sony, right, that like spun off all of those little shops, or closed all those little shops that were making narrative. I think we're gonna be seeing more of that kind of thing.

We have a couple of really good shops still: we've got Campside, we've got Pineapple, that's owned by Audacy. We've got Lemonada consistently making good stuff. But not too many, right?

Jeff Umbro: Yeah.

Rebecca Lavoie: All of those shops, still though, are reliant on commercial revenue sources - except for that one show Lemonada just put out that had a grant funder, which is very exciting for me.

Jeff Umbro: But on that note though, Lemonada has venture funding.

Rebecca Lavoie: Exactly.

Jeff Umbro: A lot of these organizations are dependent on other sources of capital.

Rebecca Lavoie: We are not.

Jeff Umbro: Yeah.

Rebecca Lavoie: We are not.

Jeff Umbro: There are very few that are not. And it's funny, I would never have put NHPR in that bucket, but you're completely right.

Rebecca Lavoie: So here's the thing. Every public radio station goes on the air during their fund drives and says, and I know this, because I've said it myself 10 million times: “The difference about public radio journalism is that your funding, your money gives us the time and space to do the kind of quality journalism that you rely on that you can't get anywhere else. That is why you listen to public radio. That's why you read stories on our website because you know that you can rely on the news you get here. You know that it's gonna be better than the news you get anywhere else, and that is why you're a public radio person."

We should be using that same money we are raising on the radio, and that we are raising at other fundraisers, to pay for podcasts, which are journalism. Period.

And we have this huge opportunity because we have all these incredible audio makers - yeah, a bunch of them left to work for the podcast industry, but guess what? A bunch of them are also now available to hire back.

We should be taking advantage of this opportunity. To do what we do best, which is making audio journalism and using the funding that we are raising to make other things and thinking of this as a platform for journalism. Period.

And don't worry about whether or not it's gonna be ad supported. You don't think about whether or not your political reporting is gonna be self-sustaining. You don't think about whether or not your new Spanish language unit is gonna be self-sustaining. You don't think about anything else you make that way.

So don't think about your podcasts that way. Period. That's it.

Jeff Umbro: I, and I don't know the answer to this, but I imagine that each public radio station has a different war chest of budget. It's coming from different governments, places, contributors...

Rebecca Lavoie: Not governments. It's like 3% of every public radio station comes from a CPB grant. Like that is it.

Jeff Umbro: Well I guess my point here is more than anything like - fake numbers, I'm making this up - but Station A may have a million dollars in the bank and station B may have $10 million in the bank. And obviously that's a different starting point for each of them if they're going to embrace this strategy. It's interesting to think about because you cannot expect the same kind of output from each of these different organizations, right? The quality at many of them are going to be consistent, and some of them they won't be.

But I guess one question that I have, and this is related to NHPR and - I'm hoping you can frame this in a way that might be applicable to some of the smaller or larger organizations - but what constitutes success? Like when you put out Bear Brook, what are you looking for? What makes it good? What makes it work?

Rebecca Lavoie: Okay. So the thing people need to understand is how few people made Bear Brook. Alright, so there's this idea - and podcast people are gonna hate me for saying this, they're gonna hate me - because the other thing that I see all the time, people are like, "Oh, it's horrible that all these non-audio people have gotten into the podcast space, because they don't understand that it actually takes like 15 people to make a narrative podcast." It sure can take 15 people, but at a public radio station it does not.

Granted, Jason Moon is a bit of a savant - he did write all the music, and score, and mix the podcast himself, which not everybody does.

But let's even take The 13th Step: Lauren Chooljian was the primary reporter on it. She worked with one contract editor. Jason did the scoring, mixing, production, and co-reporting. And then we brought together, for edits, a team of journalists from the newsroom and people around the organization, podcast unit, and newsroom, to participate in group edits for feedback.

That is our process to make our narrative shows: tiny teams doing the work for a long period of time, and then bringing in groups collaboratively from other teams for editing feedback. It is an incredible process that works really, really well for us.

We also find that [with] these tiny independent teams the journalism is better, because when you're not doing things with a huge group of people involved and you have a real process in place - a process of trust, a process where people feel heard, where you're getting like real listeners, giving you like real feedback as listeners - the journalism is sharper. It's better, it's not watered down. That has really, really worked for us.

And success... Sure, it's measured in audience size sometimes. For The 13th Step that was not our aim. Our aim was not audience size. Our aim was reaching the right people.

Jeff Umbro: Can you give a 30 second explanation of the show?

Rebecca Lavoie: Sure. So The 13th Step is about abuse, in particular sexual abuse within the alcohol and drug recovery industry, through the lens of a particular person who ran a set of recovery centers in New Hampshire. So it's sort of the allegations against him, and then a broader look at what's called "13th stepping" in the industry, where very vulnerable people are preyed upon by people in power, in recovery. So that's sort of the broad strokes of it.

But then the secondary story in it is that during the course of the reporting, there were actual physical vandalism attacks against Lauren Chooljian, the reporter on the story, our news director, Lauren Chooljian's parents - their houses were attacked, in Lauren and her parents' cases multiple times with graffiti and rocks and bricks. So that's also a sub-story within the story: what happens when you challenge power in this kind of situation?

So success in that case, sure, we definitely want there to be an audience - a big reason why we hired you guys. But we also wanted the impact of the story, which is basically that we want people to understand, we want the right people to understand, that this is happening and that it is common. This doesn't mean bringing in tons of ad dollars. This means making women, even if it's five women, understand that they are not the only people that this has happened to. If that was the only outcome of this podcast, that would be a success story for this podcast.

Jeff Umbro: Yeah, I love that. And as someone who's familiar with the show and what went into it, it was a risky production in the sense [that] there were potentially real consequences for putting this out, financially, legally, and otherwise.

Rebecca Lavoie: Yep.

Jeff Umbro: And I think that it's a testament to NHPR and the ethics of their journalism for doing this. But from a very callous way of saying it, you guys have to pay for this somehow.

Rebecca Lavoie: I have a question for you though, Jeff...

Jeff Umbro: Please.

Rebecca Lavoie: Please understand this, because this isn't just true about The 13th Step, it's literally true about every piece of work we do: it's true about Civics 101 and Outside/In... Do you think that a donor is going to be moved by the story?

Jeff Umbro: Oh, a hundred percent. Yes.

Rebecca Lavoie: Of course they will. They'll be incredibly inspired because, are other local journalism outlets able to do this kind of work? Because they are facing this kind of challenge, and going up against it anyway? We just are at it. We are at it all the time. And then we are able to make the case that it is worth doing.

I'll say the one differentiator that I think our station has, one of the reasons why we've been successful, is that we haven't taken this story and then said, oh, we need to make 50 podcasts now, and try to replicate this 50 times, and then get 50 times the donors... No. We are staying in our lane, which is telling stories that matter at a scale we can manage and making sure that we are trying to reach the people that are important for us to reach.

Jeff Umbro: And I think that is the perfect place for us to end. Rebecca, where can our listeners find you?

Rebecca Lavoie: I'm all over social media @reblavoie, and please listen to every podcast that NHPR makes. I'd really appreciate it.

Jeff Umbro: I can vouch. I think you'll enjoy. Thank you so much, and we'll talk to you next time.

Rebecca Lavoie: Thanks, Jeff.

Jeff Umbro: Thanks again to Rebecca Lavoie for joining me on this episode of Podcast Perspectives. Anyone listening to this should check out The 13th Step and both seasons of Bear Brook, along with Civics 101 and Outside/In from NHPR. Really anything that they publish is great - broadcast and podcast.

Thank you to our production team, Chris Boniello, Jordan Aaron and Henry Lavoie, as well as Tom Grillo for creating the art for this episode. The music that you hear in this episode comes from Epidemic Sound.

I also want to thank our marketing team, Joni Deutsch, Madison Richards, Morgan Swift, Matt Keeley, Annabella Pena, and a special thank you to Dan Christo. Thank you for listening, and I will catch you next week.