An ambitious network of local podcasts is scheduled to debut in Chicago
Jacoby Cochran, a storyteller and communications instructor from the South Side, will be hosting a new podcast starting next month focusing on local news, culture and personalities.
This would ordinarily not be particularly newsworthy — so many people have podcasts these days that it would seem more startling if Cochran had instead renounced the medium — except that Cochran’s show, “City Cast Chicago,” is the first in what backers hope will become an extensive national network of daily, personality-driven local podcasts.
City Cast “will combine essential local news with smart, delightful perspective,” as CEO David Plotz has explained. The shows “will be the passionate, curious, connecting voice of your city and mine — framing and explaining the news.”
Exactly what this will sound like in roughly 20-minute chunks every weekday morning is still a little unclear to me after long conversations with Cochran and Plotz. But the involvement of Plotz, the Washington, D.C.-based former top editor of Slate and host for the last 15 years of the magazine’s pioneering “Political Gabfest” podcast, gives the initiative significant heft, as does the financial backing of the Graham Holdings Co., a firm that owns numerous TV, online and print media outlets as well as car dealerships, nursing homes and a variety of industrial concerns.
City Cast has hired veteran WBEZ-FM reporter and editor Carrie Shepherd to produce the Chicago show and former public radio executive Andi McDaniel, a native of Schaumburg, to serve as its chief creative officer. Last year, McDaniel was named president and CEO of WBEZ’s parent organization, Chicago Public Media, but she withdrew before taking over due to a controversy over how she’d handled sexual harassment allegations and complaints about workplace culture in her previous job as chief content officer at WAMU-FM in Washington.
Plotz has yet to announce the hiring of a writer for the show’s companion daily email newsletter, which he said won’t simply be a digest of top stories — Chicago is already well served by those — but also an excursion through “stories like you’d hear about from your back-fence neighbor.”
The show is likely to start with a quick
of locally important stories followed by an interview or conversation focusing on the topic of the day.
“Our vision is malleable,” said Cochran, 29, who was the pre-pandemic host for local storytelling events sponsored by The Moth and is a teacher of communications classes at Harold Washington College and DePaul University. “We want to provide a little more context to events by hearing from people who have not always been part of the conversation, yet are yearning to be heard,” he said. “People who love this place and also people who hate it.”
He added, “I want to meet you where you are and teach you something you need to know.”
“The main act is that single interview,” Plotz told me. “Sometimes it’ll be with a newsmaker, a journalist, a local politician, a furious neighbor, an inspired activist, an exasperated local entrepreneur — probably guests not unlike those on radio shows.” He said he expected Cochran to be “significantly more personal and passionate than public radio” hosts. “In some ways, it may be closer to the spirit of conservative talk radio, though obviously totally different kinds of subjects and point of view.”
This inchoate vision sounds to me like a local combination of “The Daily,” The New York Times’ morning podcast that debriefs listeners on one major story and adds a dollop of headlines, and “The Gist with Mike Pesca,” Slate’s evening podcast featuring news interviews and commentary driven by the host’s relentless intelligence.
But Plotz told me the model is in many ways much older — an attempt to employ the intimacy of the podcast medium to re-create the days when singular figures in local media such as TV, radio or newspaper personalities, loomed as “de facto ambassadors” by embodying the “passion, enthusiasm and personality” of their cities.
Plotz said he selected the relatively unknown Cochran because of his “amazing warmth and humanity” as well as his storytelling skills. “He’s not a traditional journalist, and that’s OK with us,” he said.
City Cast’s choice to host the Denver iteration, which will debut very shortly after Chicago in mid-March, is a bit more traditional — Bree Davies, 40, a self-described “television and podcast host and producer; writer, reporter, festival and events organizer; urban planning professional and artist advocate” — but still sigrundown nals a departure from the mainstream voices (like mine and Plotz’s) that have tended to occupy such positions.
A lot is riding on the ability of these voices to make a connection with listeners, who already have their choice of scores of high-quality podcasts (insert “Mincing Rascals” promo here) as well as traditional radio offerings. Plotz said his business plan envisions “dozens and dozens” of City Cast shows around the country, funded at first by advertising but ultimately also through paid subscriptions.
“If we build something people love and better connects them to their community, they will pay for it,” he said.
I love the dream and look forward to hearing the reality.
For ‘The Crown’ nerds
Speaking of podcasts and things people love, if you’re hooked on the Netflix series “The Crown,” as I am, you are likely to enjoy, as I do, “The Crown: The Official Podcast,” a companion offering to the docudrama about the British royal family that “follows the show episode by episode, diving deep into the stories and taking listeners behind the scenes with insights from many of the people involved in making the show,” as the description says.
The podcast also frequently answers the question many viewers ask themselves, “Did that really happen?” (The answer is usually, “Well, not exactly.”)
Re: Tweets
The winner of this week’s reader poll to select the funniest tweet was “Conspiracy theories are what happen when people have more imagination than intelligence,” by @lloydrang. Very close behind in second place was the similarly timely “‘Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ sounds like something your grandmother yells instead of swear words” by @louisvirtel.
The poll appears at chicagotribune. com/zorn, where you can read all the finalists. For an early alert when each new poll is posted, sign up for the Change of Subject email newsletter at chicago tribune.com/newsletters.