Sale
New York’s WNYC is expanding its podcast lineup with three shows announced Wednesday, including two shows hosted by women and supported by a CPB grant for gender diversity in programming.
The station launched its own biweekly podcast Death, Sex & Money Wednesday and signed on as a co-producer for two podcasts produced by independents, The Sporkful and The Longest Shortest Time. CPB is providing financial support for Death, Sex & Money and The Longest Shortest Time, both hosted by women, as part of an effort to bring more women’s voices into public media, according to a WNYC spokesperson.
Death, Sex & Money, hosted by former WNYC politics reporter Anna Sale, features “intimate chats with both boldface names and everyday people about issues often left out of ‘polite’ conversation,” according to a WNYC release. In the first episode, Sale interviews Sen. Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.) about sex and intimacy; Sale’s boyfriend had asked Simpson to intervene when he and Sale were breaking up. The episode will air as a segment on this weekend’s episode of This American Life.
The Sporkful is a humorous show about eating hosted by Dan Pashman, who also hosts web series for the Cooking Channel. Recent episodes have included discussions about folding pizza and the science of matzoh. Pashman launched his podcast in 2010 and has interviewed guests including Rachel Maddow, “Weird Al” Yankovic and Radiolab’s Robert Krulwich; he will also appear on WNYC’s The Takeaway and The Leonard Lopate Show.
Hillary Frank, a contributor to TAL, Marketplace and other programs, hosts The Longest Shortest Time, a podcast about parenting. Frank launched the show in 2010 as a means of coping with her own difficult pregnancy and began collecting parenting stories to share with her audience. She held a successful Kickstarter campaign last year for the program’s second season and has made episodes available to stations via Public Radio Exchange.
CPB is contributing $150,000 to WNYC in the form of a “Women’s Voices” grant, which is also supporting production of WNYC podcast and broadcast program New Tech City, hosted by Manoush Zomorodi. WNYC will raise additional funds to support the podcasts.