Podcast awards aim to matter
Some big players in podcasting hope new Ambies will avoid predecessors’ pitfalls.
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On Sunday night in Los Angeles, the growing, ascendant but still-unruly podcast industry will livestream its most serious collective attempt at an awards ceremony. The Ambies, hosted in its inaugural run by comedian and podcaster Cameron Esposito, aspires to be for podcasts what the Emmys and the Oscars are for TV and movies: a recognition of the industry’s best by the industry’s best and a guide for would-be fans who just want a recommendation for something good.
The show is the brainchild of the newly created Podcast Academy, whose board of governors includes industry independents as well as executives from heavy hitters such as Amazon, Spotify, iHeartMedia (which runs its own iHeartRadio podcast awards) and NPR, which also contributed funding. The Ambie trophy, a genderless figure in headphones holding up a microphone, has that heft associated with prestigious awards and dangerous blunt weapons.
“We definitely wanted something that winners would feel proud displaying on their shelves,” said Hernan Lopez, founder and former CEO of Wondery, a Podcast Academy board member and the committee chair for the Ambies, after unboxing a trophy during an interview at a Soho Works conference room in West Hollywood. “It’s plated with gold.”
But these are troubled times for awards ceremo
nies. Ratings for the major televised awards shows are down. The Golden Globes’ host organization, the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn., has been riddled with so many allegations of ethical improprieties, unfairness and lack of racial representation that NBC won’t even air the show in 2022. The Oscars ended in humiliation this year when the ceremony shifted the final order of its awards to set up a potentially climactic posthumous lead actor win by deceased “Black Panther” star Chadwick Boseman, only for the award to go to Anthony Hopkins, who was not present.
America loves to hate awards shows, especially when they go wrong, and they seem to go wrong a lot. Why create a new one?
The simplest explanation is that the podcast industry has finally gotten big enough, prominent enough and prestigious enough to risk the kind of trouble that can come with a big award show. It’s a marker not solely of industry maturity but of industry ambition.
“What we see in the research is that once people start listening to podcasts, they start listening to more and more, and they replace their radio listening experience. It’s just a matter of getting people exposed, and that’s what the Ambies can help with,” said Rob Greenlee, vice president of content and partnerships for podcasting company Libsyn, and one of the academy’s founding members and its first chairperson.
Steve Wilson, chief strategy officer at podcasting company QCODE and one of the Podcast Academy’s nearly 1,000 members, said critical validation is a virtuous circle: “With that sort of mainstream credibility comes consumer audience, and with audience comes revenue opportunities for creators and revenue brings better and better content.”
After early conversations in 2019, Lopez and other industry players started laying the groundwork for the awards and academy. Then came the unglamorous but critical work of organization-building.
“I’m glad we launched the organization in 2020, so we were able to start an organization already knowing that diversity was something we need to address head-on,” Lopez said.
Most entertainment consumers don’t spend their time worrying about the ways an awards show can go wrong on diversity and representation. There are a lot. The board making the rules could be disproportionately white or male. The artists creating work deemed eligible could be disproportionately white or male. The judges who select nominees could be disproportionately white or male. The voters eligible to pick the winners could be disproportionately white or male. Add it all up, and the winner is...
The academy hired a diversity, equity and inclusion consultant before it even settled on a logo. Podcast consultant Rekha Murthy said the group was “intentional from the beginning of [ensuring] a diversity of background and professional expertise for the board.”
Having not been part of a similar association before, Donald Albright, president and co-founder of the independent podcasting company Tenderfoot TV in Atlanta, agreed to join the board of governors. He became chairperson in 2021.
“What I was thinking was, at least my voice would be represented, not just as an independent podcaster, but as a Black male as well, making sure that underrepresented voices were heard,” Albright said. And then he set about recruiting members, even sponsoring memberships for some. “Because the Black community is looking at award shows like, ‘Oh, here goes another [one] where we won’t be represented.’ Or, ‘We have to have our own awards show because they don’t understand what’s important to us.’ ”
The academy also recruited more than 100 “blueribbon” judges from the industry, who are also Podcast Academy members, to each listen to an average of more than 30 hours of award entrants to select nominees in 23 different categories, such as best interview podcast, best sports podcast, best true-crime podcast and best fiction podcast, with the winners to be voted on by academy members, according to Lopez.
“I’ll tell you about my fears — when we sent all the entries to the blue-ribbon panelists and were waiting really anxiously to see which shows got nominated,” Lopez said. “Fortunately, when the nominees came out, fully one-third of the shows had at least one host who was a person of color, and so we were really proud.”
One of those nominees, for podcast of the year, is “Say Their Name” from DCP Entertainment, a Blackowned independent production company, which tells the stories of Black people killed by police and fundraising for their families.
“Just even being nominated is huge. We’re up against some of the top companies not only in podcasting but media at large — iHeartRadio, Wondery, L.A. Times,” said Chris Colbert, CEO and Founder at DCP Entertainment. (The Times’ “Chasing Cosby” podcast is also nominated for podcast of the year.)
One of the biggest tensions of the whole Ambies project, however, was about maintaining a balance of power between the independent podcast shows and companies who built the industry and the major corporate players who have started gobbling up talent, shows and companies and who seem poised to dominate the medium’s future.
And not everyone was satisfied by the roster of nominees. Independent podcast producer, audio editor and voice actor Ned Donovan of New York thought too many of the finalists came from companies who were among the founding financial sponsors of the creation of the Podcast Academy. But he didn’t think the outcome was due to favoritism or malfeasance.
“Are those the best shows in the world? They might be,” Donovan said. “I do think that the optics of it are really not great for a company that wants to represent all podcasters, not just the top of the top.”
Donovan also thought the academy’s rule of creating a $100 fee to enter each award category disfavored independent shows.
Podcast Academy executive director Michele Cobb rejected those criticisms. “We got over 1,000 entries,” she said. “There’s 2 million podcasts out there. So there is a little barrier to entry in part because this is thousands and thousands of submitted hours to be judged. ”
The Podcast Academy also has a rule in its bylaws to try to prevent the industry’s biggest companies from completely dominating the organization: The board of governors “must be composed of at least 40% by individuals who represent themselves as independent podcasting professionals.” The Times was unable to locate records indicating whether the organization was registered as a 501(c)(6) not-forprofit with the Internal Revenue Service.
Once the awards pass this weekend, Murthy is looking forward to later in the year when some of the terms for the academy’s hand-picked founding governors start expiring and members start democratically electing the next generation of leaders, and the organization starts taking on a life of its own.