The Toast – Nieman Lab

“A stately pleasure barge of a site”: For people who miss websites, there’s a new blog in town

Laura Hazard Owen — Wed, 03 May 2023 12:00:16 +0000

It’s been quite a week for people who like fun on the internet. First there was the sudden rise of Twitter competitor Bluesky, spurring headlines like “I regret to inform you that Bluesky is fun.” And now there’s The Stopgap, a new blog from writers Daniel M. Lavery (who cofounded, with Nicole Cliffe, the beloved and now-defunct The Toast and was Slate’s Dear Prudence) and Jo Livingstone (who previously wrote for The New Republic and Bookforum).

“I think anybody who has in the past enjoyed reading the internet purely for fun can see that there’s a real dearth of URLs to type into one’s address bar these days,” Livingstone told me in a chat with Lavery this week. We conducted the interview in a live Google Doc — my way of allowing both of their internet voices to operate at a maximum, and eliciting comparisons of The Stopgap to “a stately pleasure barge of a site” (Lavery) or “a burnish’d throne??” (Livingstone). The Stopgap launched Wednesday morning, and you can read it here.

Laura Hazard Owen: Hi both. How did you decide to launch The Stopgap, and how you are you envisioning it? Also, why did you call it “The Stopgap”?

Jo Livingstone: Danny texted me and asked if I wanted to make a website with him. Which is funny, because I had thought about it too, because it just seemed — obvious? Right? Inevitable?

Danny Lavery: This is incredible, because I would have sworn up and down that it was Jo’s idea. Was it seriously me who said something first?

Don't worry, no one's going to try to make money from this one. That lesson's been learnt! This one's just for fun, and per its tagline: "Better than nothing"

That's @The_Stopgap, remember. Accept no substitutes, and watch this space.

— Daniel M. Lavery (@daniel_m_lavery) April 27, 2023

Livingstone: Laura, clearly we haven’t conferred, so let’s say we thought of it instantaneously at the same time. I do take credit for the motto of “It’s better than nothing,” which seems to encapsulate a lot about why we came up with The Stopgap and what it’s for. And then the name went with the motto in a rhythmically satisfying way.

I think anybody who has in the past enjoyed reading the internet purely for fun can see that there’s a real dearth of URLs to type into one’s address bar these days.

Lavery: Two minds with but a single etc.! I certainly remember having conversations with Jo throughout the last year, often after news came out that Bookforum was closing, or Paper was laying off its staff — just along the lines of “We used to have so many websites. Who knew you could miss websites so much,” which eventually turned into joking about the idea of putting up something small and obviously inadequate just to sort of stem the tide. So the idea of a stopgap was there from the beginning. Obviously neither of us thought “Let’s resurrect Bookforum,” or anything like that. And like all the best decisions in my life, it sort of jumped over the “just kidding” line without my having realized it after a series of escalating dares. “We should do it,” “Someone should do it,” “Bring back websites,” “We have a meeting with two people, impossibly also named Daniel and Joe, on Thursday to start our website.” That felt like an omen, or at least a portent of some kind.

The Stopgap’s motto: “It’s better than nothing.”

This will be an old fashioned, general interest blog, mostly written by us. We’ll make no money, produce no podcasty newslettery bullshit, and pay nothing—although readers can donate direct to guest authors thru financial socials.

— jo livingstone (@Jo_Livingstone) April 27, 2023

Owen: You’re not going to pay writers, they’ll just have tip jars — which, in an everything-old-is-new-again way, feels innovative. You’re going into this without a business model or worries about scale or, like, how you’re going to monetize, and you’re not promising writers will be paid well or at all. There’s an implication that this is being done out of joy, which has been so lacking from basically all media recently! Tell me how you’re thinking about money for this from both your side and the writers’ side — like side gig, pleasure blog, etc.?

Lavery: Right, we’re not even paying ourselves. I think we’re both looking for day jobs at the moment, as it happens, so if you hear about anything either of us might be a good fit for, please let us know. It will be a stately pleasure barge of a site, is my hope. It might be possible to make money from a general-interest blog, but it’s very difficult, and if my own experience has taught me anything, it’s that I don’t know how to make money from a general-interest blog. And I’d rather do this and make money elsewhere.

So the idea is that the vast majority of the writing on the site will come from Jo and self, but we’ll be able to publish at a comfortable rate — since we’re not trying to keep to a publication schedule that attracts advertisers — and occasionally put up a post from anyone else who cares to join us. The tip jar was very much Jo’s idea. Maybe it will result in all our guest writers being able to buy themselves a stamp or a cup of hearty soup or something! Who can say.

Livingstone: So for me the barge is more like a burnish’d throne?? Danny’s subtly alluding there to the website he founded and co-ran with Nicole Cliffe, The Toast, which is legendary and the reason that nobody would ever hesitate for even a moment to become a co-proprietor with him on an internet concern.

The money stuff is interesting. Put together, Danny and I have sort of madly comprehensive experience working in different types of publishing, at different ends of the process. Danny has published 10,000 books and run a whole publication in the past, and I’ve worked business jobs at literary nonprofits and writer jobs at “regular” magazines, and events at NYC hotels, and…every kind of job you can think of. Not to brag, but if there was an obvious way to make money here I feel like I would know about it.

There’s only one way that people on the social internet feel comfortable and well-practiced in sending money to strangers: When they know the other person’s name, have some basis for independently assessing whether or not they want to give them money, and they’re already familiar with the process. For some people, maybe that context is typing in their credit card details manually into The New York Times’ website. For most people, it’s throwing a few bucks to somebody who has earned it or needs it via Venmo, CashApp, PayPal, etc.

The tip jar idea encapsulates a lot of what has changed in the topography of the internet since the “golden age of blogging.” Those are heavy irony quotation marks because obviously people have always pumped disgusting shit into the world. There are better free or cheap CMSes available. Small financial transactions are in a different universe.

In short, we pictured what we wanted and then took the absolute shortest route available towards creating it. Right now, for example, I’m playing with a complicated subscription model built into the product we’re using, because I want to turn on comments. But that’s oddly easy, because the product thinks I want to make my living from emails! It’s interesting — we’re just throwing our needs and wants at the internet and seeing what’s sticking. The thing we need and want the most is to enjoy ourselves.

Owen: Ha, yeah, so speaking of making your living from emails! Talk to me a little bit about Substack and also why Jo said The Stopgap would “produce no podcasty newslettery bullshit.” Really, just feel free to vomit out your thoughts on Substack.

Livingstone: I was kidding! Because there are so many incredible newsletters and podcasts out there. Not least Danny’s fabulous one, and all the ones I’ve guested on. However! When a new product shifts from being an exciting available option to feeling compulsory, it’s like you can hear a gigantic creak resounding through the world from all the joy going out of it. Does that make sense? A blog can be a blog, and it doesn’t need to be anything else. Commercial imperatives change from year to year or month to month, but if you don’t have commercial motives there’s no reason you have to take them into account at all. I guess I meant “bullshit” like “work I could be doing right now but am choosing not to.”

Lavery: I’ve made good money at Substack! I have no complaints about making money. “If you like your newsletter, you can keep your newsletter.” Which I’m still doing, to be clear. But writing a newsletter is very different from a website — I missed having colleagues, someone else to develop ideas with. And I take Jo’s line about “podcasty newslettery bullshit” not to mean “half of Daniel’s output over the last five years has been worthless garbage” so much as a charming, off-the-cuff way of making it clear from the jump that this was about blogging for blogging’s sake! I think both Jo and I are very interested in a similar kind of productive idleness, or idle business.

Besides which, sometimes I want to write more often, but I don’t want to email my newsletter subscribers six times a week. If I were to imagine the Platonic ideal of a Daniel Lavery “guy,” who is my biggest supporter in the world and reads every single thing I’ve ever written, I don’t think even he would want to get a newsletter email from me every single day. You can only email people so much!

Livingstone: Danny could not publish garbage or speak it with his mouth if he TRIED.

Owen: Awesome, OK. is there anything else that either of you want to add?

Livingstone: I wanted to note that, personally, this might seem like a big strategic decision or whatever, but really it’s just about what felt necessary to create in order to even keep going. I got laid off from The New Republic, where I’d worked for five years, a little over a year ago. Then my visa expired and I applied for a green card. That means I’ve been unable to work for months, supported by my incomparably excellent partner, bereft of my nice comfortable spot in the media landscape, and generally I kind of lost direction and had no idea what to do.

Now that my green card finally got approved (!!) I feel able to look up and around me suddenly, to realize that my wonderful friend Danny helped me get to make a website that could have gotten me through the last shitty year of my life with a little more ease, and maybe will help someone else. You need to have papers in order to “work” in journalism. You do not need papers to blog. And for that I am so very grateful.

Lavery: Yes, the idea of working together with Jo was something I really wanted to do! And would gladly do for free. I just think this will be pretty fun. And if it’s ever too much work, we’ll just work less on it! But there ought to be a little website. People ought to be able to type a little something into their address bar and get to look at something interesting, every once in a while, else what’s a heaven for!

The Stopgap’s logo is designed by Hallie Bateman.

Hot Pod: The podcast collective Radiotopia has a new leader

Nicholas Quah — Tue, 01 Sep 2015 13:30:26 +0000

Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is Issue Thirty-Nine, published September 1, 2015.

The new steward of Radiotopia. PRX has hired Julie Shapiro as the new executive producer of Radiotopia, the podcast ~collective~ that was formed in early February out of a partnership between the company and 99% Invisible’s Roman Mars.

Shapiro comes into the job with a tremendous street cred. In 2000, she cofounded the Third Coast Festival which, in case you didn’t know, is a big independent radio conference/summit/party in Chicago (“Third Coast,” get it?) where really talented and smart radio producers get really drunk together, play some really amazing stories, and have a really good time. She spent 13 years as Third Coast’s artistic director, where she firmly established herself as an incredibly influential figure in the independent radio community and beyond. She left the role in 2013, and has been spending the past couple of years kickin’ it with the wallabies down in Australia, where she served as the executive producer of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Creative Audio Unit.

Oh, and fun fact about Shapiro from the press release: “Julie originally coined the term ‘Radiotopia’ in a speech at the Third Coast Festival, describing it as a place where awesome stories live.” It was meant to be.

What will Shapiro do as Radiotopia’s new executive producer? A heck of a lot, PRX COO Kerri Hoffman told me over the phone last week. On a show level, she’s tasked with upping the game of every podcast under the Radiotopia banner, which will include (but will not be limited to): working with talent to raise and maintain the level of editorial quality, figuring out how to increase revenues, finding ways to foster deeper engagement with audiences, and developing robust strategies to help shows grow in general. On a network level, Shapiro will help define Radiotopia’s long-term strategic vision and articulate its narrative to the larger market, which, in my opinion, hasn’t always been very clear.1 She will also, I presume, play a huge role in sourcing new shows to add to the group, along with improving metrics, measurements, and standards both qualitative and quantitative.

That is, indeed, a crap ton of things to do, but Hoffman is confident she’s up to the challenge. And you know what? There’s nothing to suggest otherwise. Everything I’ve heard about Shapiro paints her as nothing less than a swashbuckling badass, and furthermore, ever since I started poking my nose around the radio world, I keep hearing stories about her being a great mentor to many a young fledgling producer. To me, that willingness to actively think about the next generation of producers is shorthand for proper leadership.

Also: “It’s super important to me that Radiotopia’s executive producer be a woman,” Hoffman said at some point during our conversation. You know what? It is important, particularly after seeing a parade of white dudes absolutely dominating executive-level positions in the blossoming for-profit on-demand audio industry. This is certainly encouraging stuff.

Also also: PRX CEO Jake Shapiro wrote me yesterday to clarify that, in fact, he is not related to Julie Shapiro. “However we do feel we’re part of a Shapiro mafia in public radio that includes Ben Shapiro and two Ari Shapiros (Ari Daniel and Ari at NPR),” he added. That is some Highlander business right there.

Shapiro starts work in November.

Anyway, let’s talk more about Radiotopia! It’s such a weird thing, and it’s in my top 10 of favorite things to think about.

So, in my mind, Radiotopia is the closest thing to the platonic ideal of a podcast network. Deeply committed to quality, the collective is also uniquely far-reaching in its thinking about genre, conventions, ideas. No two shows under the Radiotopia umbrella sound alike; in some ways, each show feels like a distinctly differentiated thesis, or some sort of gambit, like each show is placing a different bet on the way things should sound. There is boldness to the range of shows that are in Radiotopia: a range of voice, tone, genre, idea, ideal, vision, hope, limitations, trajectory. (Abstaining from using the word “diversity” here, lest I mishandle the political context of that word.)

Many folks have described Radiotopia as a hippie commune, no doubt due to its nonprofit, public media-minded origins and relative looseness with the concept of maximizing revenue. Being the raging, conniving capitalist that I am, I tend to agree with this characterization. And there’s something about the way it’s structured that compels me to be curious: I’m going to guess that not all shows perform equally — in fact, I’m going to rampantly speculate that the range of those performances are huge — and looking at how, well, spotty some of the show’s episode release schedules are, I wonder about financial resources are distributed across all the shows, and I wonder if there are any hangups when it comes to feelings of equity within the collective. But this is just me thinking out loud; there’s probably nothing to that.

Besides, I’m actually more partial to a metaphor given to me by an actual Radiotopian: that the collective is best thought of as an “indie record label” — where a tastemaking entity validates many autonomous visions by providing financial and technical backing. That’s a pretty cool way of looking at it.

Anyway, for the record: My all-time favorite Radiotopia show is most definitely Criminal. That show is so RIDICULOUSLY good it literally makes me angry. Like absolutely pissed. I punched a wall once I was so pissed. It’s crazy. (Song Exploder comes in as a tight No. 2, but docked points because Hrishikesh Hirway wasn’t able to bag the Bieber before The New York Times got their grubby hands on him.)

Gimlet president: We need a reliable third party to “set an industry standard.” Gimlet president and tallest-man-in-the-world Matt Lieber has that and plenty more things to say in this interview with the Tow Center at Columbia.

You should give the article your click, but two things to note:

Really enjoyed his response to the “Why would a successful show stick around a podcast network?” question. Money quote: “He hopes that by ‘super-serving’ the creators with editorial support and a sense of community they will be incentivized to remain within the network for the long term.” Of course, that works for some setups and not others, but that’s definitely one way to skin a cat.
Lieber’s point on initiating direct relationships with brands is absolutely essential to understanding the unique value-add that podcasting brings to advertisers. It’s also really interesting to think about the way host-read ads are typically baked into episodes in the context of the larger ad-blocking scare looming over the rest of digital media. (Assuming ad-blocking is a problem: Recode’s Peter Kafka remains skeptical, unless I’m reading him wrong.) Though, if you really think about it, once this whole dynamic ad-insertion thing kicks in, the race is theoretically on for ad-blocking tech to impact audio, perhaps even before the tech hits scale. Hmm.

Anyway, moving on.

BuzzFeed director of audio Jenna Weiss-Berman on Nieman Lab’s Press Publish podcast. This is good Weiss-Berman material. Probably not that user-friendly to link to an entire podcast episode, but the whole thing is most definitely worth a listen.

Highlights:

Young people listen more straight from SoundCloud, eh? Interesting.
“Co-optition.” Cute, but I totally dig it.
Note Jenna’s thinking that situates Another Round within a much larger multimedia — specifically, television — context. Question is not whether it will be successful (oh you know it probably will) but how the heck do you create that workflow?

NPR’s 10 years of podcasting. Tasty NPR Extra article here on the institution’s history with podcasting, complete with a timeline and a quick anecdote that sees National Public Media general manager Bryan Moffett, then a marketing analyst, crossing paths with the men who would go on to create (and fight over) Twitter. Anyway, check out the whole article, but here are some delicious numbers to take away:

“Between NPR and all of the public radio stations who contributed shows to those first collections in the directory, it took about a year and a half to reach 80 million downloads.” I’m guessing that’s total downloads across the whole network.
“Last month, we had 76 million downloads for just those programs NPR produces or distributes.” Daaayum.

“Wanting to be heard.” The Toast ran this article on podcasting and representation last week, and it’s a great read. Give the whole thing your attention, but here are some quotes that really stuck with me:

Nia King, host of We Want The Airwaves: “If I can self-publish a book and sell 1,000 copies, what is the incentive for me to have a press that’s not going to help me with touring? It’s just unclear whether I’m better off working within the system or without. Because at least now I have complete creative control.”
Stephanie Foo, This American Life: “I think that as the content has started to change, the listenership has started to change. We finally have podcasts that are made for younger people now.”

Audio fiction. So, uh, I’ve been working on an item about audio fiction for about, well, four weeks now, and I’m having a lot of trouble hammering down what I really think about the genre. Now, if you’ve been following this newsletter for a while, you’re probably acquainted with my largely negative feelings about most audio fiction that can be found on the market right now.

But here’s the thing: I actually believe that audio fiction is the growth market in on-demand audio. I just think that the genre hasn’t been done right, or has been done in a way that can compel non-partisan listeners to legitimately think that it’s up to par with most other forms of mainstream entertainment. (In fact, if I ever did work up the gastrointestinal fortitude to go solo and run my own ship — or marry rich and live off a spousal bonus, either way — a big part of what I’d do would be bankrolling very specific audio fiction projects.) I think about it quite a lot, and because I’ve been thinking about it quite a lot, I haven’t been able to settle on what I want to say.

Anyway, while I’ve been sitting here and twiddling my thumbs, these two things dropped and I really think that you should check them out ASAP:

Nieman Lab’s writeup of the Limetown podcast. Money quote: “They’re not purposely trying to fool anyone, but their background in film has given them a refreshing view on podcasts: Why can’t they be more like movies?”
The Pub podcast: Ann Heppermann on the rebirth of audio fiction.

Cool? Cool. I’m going to go back and work on this audio fiction item a little more, which is now about 2,500 words long and looks suspiciously like the Little Red Book, which is why I’m probably going to junk it and just do a 500-word rant instead.

Maybe next week.

An update on that SXSW panel I’m working on. So last week I mentioned that I’m trying to organize a panel at SXSW about podcast audience growth — strategies, philosophies, challenges, and so on. That’s still happening, but there’s been a change: the great Gretchen Rubin can’t do the panel, because she’s double-booked, so the third panelist will be Midroll’s vice president of business development Erik Diehn.

Before going to Midroll, Diehn was the senior director of business development at WNYC, and before that, he had stints at Bloomberg and the Boston Consulting Group. (You know who else did time at BCG? Matt Lieber. Small world.) Which is all to say, compared to the other two panelists — BuzzFeed’s Weiss-Berman and Longform’s Max Linsky — Diehn’s bringin’ the corporate game.

Should be fun, if we get enough votes, of course.

You can vote for the panel here. Please note that you’d have to create some sort of login to vote, which kinda sucks and I’m so sorry.

Oh man, that was a long one. All right, have a great week, see you next Tuesday!

Is this your first time reading Hot Pod? You can subscribe to the newsletter here, which mostly features irrelevant exclusive content (mostly different GIFs and stuff about what I had for lunch but whatever that’s the newsletter strategy I’m rolling with).

Nicholas Quah heads audience development at Panoply. Hot Pod is his weekly newsletter on the state of the podcast world; it appears on Nieman Lab on Tuesdays.

In fact, I’ve always wondered: What, exactly, is Radiotopia? Why the heck is it a “collective”? What makes a show Radiotopia-worthy? What does the network stand for? Who does it target? Does it dream of electric sheep?