The New Yorker:

The audio industry is in turmoil. But, at an event for “Death, Sex & Money,” voices were still keeping people together.

By Sarah Larson

On Saturday afternoon, a crowd gathered at Caveat, a subterranean space on the Lower East Side, for Four Interviews and a Funeral—an event mourning and celebrating “Death, Sex & Money,” Anna Sale’s long-running podcast from WNYC Studios, which, owing to steep budget cuts, will end in its current form this month. Attendees sat at little round tables, eating popcorn and drinking ginger beer. Many of them wore glasses and held giveaway tote bags. “This crowd feels very public radio,” a man at my table said. “But, in the spirit of podcasting, a little less geriatric.” Several attendees worked for companies that had recently had major layoffs, audio and otherwise, and who didn’t know what their own futures held. The mood was elegiac, anxious, appreciative. As the show began, the WNYC-affiliated Outer Borough Brass Band—saxophone, trumpet, trombone, tuba, drums—played New Orleans-style jazz, and Sale, forty-three, danced onstage, in a sleeveless navy dress and red shoes. The crowd’s cheering was intense.

“It’s O.K.!” Sale told the room, as the cheering settled down. “I’m not dead, the members of the ‘Death, Sex & Money’ team are not dead, and we don’t even know if the show is dead. However, we know something is ending.” In 2023, there were dramatic layoffs at New York Public Radio and WNYC, Pushkin, NPR, and many other media companies. Last week, Spotify, which had already dismantled much of what remained of the once-great podcast studio Gimlet, which it acquired, in 2019, for two hundred and thirty million dollars, essentially finished it off, cancelling two of podcasting’s most beloved shows: Connie Walker’s “Stolen,” which this year won both a Peabody and a Pulitzer, and Jonathan Goldstein’s “Heavyweight,” one of the best podcast series ever made. Around the same time, Tyler Goodson, the struggling small-town-Alabama protagonist of “Serial” ’s “S-Town,” from 2017, died after a shoot-out with police. In the podcasting community, the sense of loss was palpable. The “magical moment” of “expanded possibility, when audio exploded, about ten years ago”—the so-called podcast boom, when “Death, Sex & Money” began—“is closing,” Sale said. “Something new is coming up. We don’t know what that is yet. So we wanted to have a party that feels a little bit like a variety show and a little bit like a memorial service.”

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