Podcaster Brian Reed re-examines everything he thought he knew about journalism in Question Everything, a show launching Sept. 12 with biweekly episodes.
Reed, a former This American Life producer who co-created and hosted S-Town, asks existential questions about the industry he’s worked in for 15 years and his own decisions as a producer. “The show is me having a midlife career crisis as a journalist,” Reed tells Current.
Reed wonders if journalists are listening to the public and whether news coverage is “achieving what we as citizens want it to achieve,” Reed says. He begins by questioning his own work. The first episode of Question Everything includes an extended interview with Australian journalist Gay Alcorn, who called S-Town “morally indefensible” in a 2017 critique for the Guardian.
The broader examination of journalism’s role coincides with the comeback bid of former President Donald Trump, who poured accelerant on growing distrust of mainstream news organizations by popularizing the term “fake news.” Question Everything will include episodes on the 2024 election, the Republican Party and the fractured news environment.
Reed teamed up with fellow former This American Life producer Robyn Semien — who he’d worked with for over 10 years — to examine the nature and value of journalism. The pair then pitched Question Everything to potential partners, including KCRW, which launched its Podcast Audience Lab in 2022.
The station in Santa Monica, Calif., was “out there looking to invest in an ambitious project, which was exciting to us,” Reed says. “It felt like we were spiritually and editorially aligned.”
CCO Arnie Seipel immediately saw the appeal. “It’s important KCRW continues to champion this kind of high-quality storytelling and really gets to the root of the challenges our industry is facing,” Seipel said.
To make sure Question Everything reaches audiences beyond the podcast, KCRW is creating a multiplatform experience around its release. The series will also launch a series of YouTube videos that aim to spark two-way discussions over the podcast’s meaty topics. “YouTube is certainly becoming the dominant platform for podcasting, so pushing to find audiences that way is really exciting for us,” Seipel says.
Since Google Podcasts has morphed into YouTube Music, KCRW is “rolling out audio properties there, too,” he said. “We hope that can be another great channel of discovery.”
‘What is journalism?’
The seed of the idea for Question Everything germinated in Reed’s head shortly after the March 2017 release of S-Town, a Peabody Award–winning podcast produced for Serial. The limited series about horologist’s John B. McLemore’s hatred of his Alabama hometown was downloaded over 100 million times. But some journalists criticized Reed for exposing too much of McLemore’s life, especially as he died 21 months before S-Town’s release.
A group of Alabama lawyers partly used these critiques to sue Reed, claiming that the podcast wasn’t journalism. As Reed sought to prove that it was, he became obsessed with the question “What is journalism?”
After two years, the case was settled, with the lawyers admitting S-Town was made responsibly. The question still lingered in Reed’s head, though.
As he says in the opening episode of Question Everything, “Journalism is in a crisis, the public’s trust in [journalists] has plummeted.” As news organizations have downsized and shuttered from losses in ad and subscription revenues, people have turned to a variety of unreliable outlets and platforms for their news. “I personally feel troubled by the state of our industry,” Reed tells Current. “I personally feel confused. I personally take some responsibility for not having done this sooner. Those are the feelings I’m trying to lean into.”
That’s why Reed sees Question Everything as the first step in a new era of podcasting. He and Semien formed their own podcast production company, Placement Theory, to push the medium in a more creative and ambitious direction and rethink “the way we do journalism and tell stories,” he says. “We see it as a responsibility to do work that’s meaningful and that tries to have an impact.”
Question Everything is Placement Theory’s debut release. It also marks a change in pace for Reed. Unlike his previous podcasts, which he worked on for years before simultaneously releasing every meticulously made episode, Reed wants to be able to respond to topics in the news. “We want to kind of see what comes up. We’re putting some episodes in the can. But this is a show that we want to feel timely, that shifts and responds to the news.”
Track record of success
KCRW changed its approach to podcast creation two years ago when its board of directors invested in the Podcast Audience Lab. “Podcast consumption is still going strong,” says Seipel. He directed KCRW’s newsroom before his 2023 promotion to CCO.
Seipel describes KCRW’s strategy as focused on developing programs with specific “audience strategies squarely in mind.” This means aiming to work with exceptional talents who have proven track records of drawing large audiences.
It wasn’t just S-Town’s impressive numbers that made Reed a top recruit for KCRW, though. The Trojan Horse Affair, his 2022 Serial production for the New York Times, was downloaded over 13 million times in its opening month. The eight-episode podcast series, which Reed co-hosted and co-created with Hamza Syed, examined a fake plot by Islamic extremists to infiltrate British schools. Apple Podcasts ranked it fourth on its year-end list of the most popular new podcasts of 2022.
Reed hopes that Question Everything can have the same crossover appeal and “grow beyond” regular KCRW and public radio listeners. “I kind of trust that we’ll be able to reach different corners of America as well,” he says. “I’ve found with my work that I’ve been able to do that in the past.”
Pointing to public radio listeners’ interest in journalism and its place in democracy, Seipel sees alignment with KCRW’s goals. “A project so fiercely taking on and asking very, very deep questions about journalism and democracy, we believe will appeal strongly to our audience,” he says.
Having already made several episodes of Question Everything, Reed says he’s beginning to feel more positive about the future of journalism — mostly because he’s finally doing something about the issue with biweekly podcast episodes and the support of KCRW.
“I’ve seen how a member station can give a show and its creators the space to be inventive and to try and push things,” Reed says, pointing to the incubator roles that Chicago’s WBEZ and New York’s WNYC played in the launch and growth of This American Life and Radiolab. “Supporting that is a pretty special and an underappreciated thing. … That’s why I think we found our spiritual home.”