the fall of the king of content

“It’s time,” Emmanuel Dzotsi chirps into the microphone as if delivering the punchline to a joke begun over a year ago. He and Alex Goldman just guffaw away as though they aren’t somehow the backdrop to the set piece of Act V: the head of Gimlet, once King of Content, displayed for all of us to mock or mourn. 

Reply All, the flagship podcast of Gimlet Media is finally calling it quits. And Dzotsi, bless his heart, is right. It’s time. Past time, probably. In the wake of Test Kitchen-gate last year, Reply All and Gimlet never really managed to set things right and this past year has been little but the creeping petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time, which will transpire in June of 2022, at least for Reply All. 

For those of you who need a primer on Test Kitchen-gate, P.J. Voyt, co-founder of Reply All and one of the earliest hires at Gimlet, and Sruthi Pinnamaneni, longtime producer at Reply All, reported what was to be four-part series on Bon Appetit’s 2020 public crash and burn. Pinnamaneni’s reporting centered the experiences of chefs of color who joined Bon Appetit and the Test Kitchen and how their perspectives were often co-opted and/or minimized, even while their white counterparts made more money and did all of the Asian cooking. I listened to the first two episodes of the series (Reply All did not air the final two after Test Kitchen-gate went down), and they are excellent reporting. Pinnamaneni bonds with her interviewees over shared experiences as people of color, and she explores the institution of Condé Naste. Even though she did interview white executives, she doesn’t include any clips, and I love that choice. 

But. At the end of part 2, Pinnamaneni does the kind of self-reflection that Gimlet Media is known for. She wonders about her own experiences with race and the institution of Gimlet. Before I talk more about how this choice spiraled into Test Kitchen-gate, let me offer some additional context about this reflective tone, what some might uncharitably call navel-gazing. 

In 2014, the world of podcasting was nothing short of exhilarating. A little something called Serial happened that year, and suddenly people who had never uttered the word “podcast” were gushing over This American Life’s work. And Alex Blumberg was riding that wave, founding Gimlet Media with its first show StartUp. The first season of StartUp tells the story of… Gimlet Media and how Blumberg got the company off the ground. It’s pretty compelling listening honestly and is confessional in a way that typfies hosts like Blumberg and Sarah Koenig from Serial. Blumberg’s anxiety over his business idea and Koenig’s vacillation over her murder mystery were versions of the same type of work. Highly produced (both Blumberg and Koenig come from backgrounds in radio) but personal, providing a perspective into the mind of the host that a lot of journalism avoids. 

These narrative podcasts also offered another element of perspective that folks remarked on at the time, too: they were very, very white. Koenig’s lines about small bags of cannibis on city stoops and Pakistani-born Adnan Syed’s cow-like eyes communicated her white woman point of view very clearly, even to me, a fellow white woman. Blumberg, too, tells a compelling story about starting this company that is only possible because of his access to money and connections, his proximity to whiteness and media power. 

StartUp did at least tertiarily examine issues of race, gender, and power in their early days. During the second season of StartUp, which aired in 2015, one of their episodes is titled “Diversity Report,” and they dig in on the issue of why 24 out of 27 employees at Gimlet are white. They ask questions about diversity in a big picture sense. In the same way that no one settles down to a showing of Macbeth thinking, great, this is going to turn out swell for everyone, there was no element of Gimlet’s self-reporting that suggested anything but tragedy in the long-run. 

And so ‘twas with Gimlet.

Self-awareness isn’t sufficient. Macbeth himself knows his fatal flaw in Act I: “I have no spur to prick the sides of my intent, but only vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself and fall on th’other.” He sees the bloody dagger leading him to commit the murder that he knows good and well is a mistake. He is fully aware that if his “assassiation could trammel up the consequence,” he’d commit murder without remorse. Lack of self-awareness can be a problem, but self-awareness not a virtue of itself. And so ‘twas with Gimlet. Oh, they gazed in their mirrors and studied themselves. They were eager to report on their own warts. It was a part of the business model. 

In 2017, Gimlet developed another show, The Nod, hosted by Eric Eddings and Brittany Luse, both Black creators. That show ended in 2020, and a more detailed story of the parting of these two hosts emerged in 2021 when Sruthi Pinnamaneni, engaging in some Gimlet-style self-reflection, contemplated her own role in the unionization attempts at Gimlet and how those interactions intersected with race and power. Pinnamaneni’s reflections conclude the fateful second episode of the “The Test Kitchen” series. But Pinnamaneni planned additional reporting on the matter and wrote to Eddings, who had since left Gimlet, to ask him if he would be willing to review her reporting on Gimlet itself and how the company was navigating these fraught waters.

Eddings, as he revealed himself in a series of Tweets, was involved in that labor movement at Gimlet. This work, he contends (and Pinnamaneni seems to corroborate in her comments at the end of the second Bon Appetit episode), was opposed by Pinnamaneni and Vogt, who who worried over how labor power might impact their own access to power at the company. For Eddings, these issues were never resolved, and he wondered why Pinnamaneni would wait so long to speak with him. Within days of Eddings’s revelations and the public comments of other former Gimlet employees supporting Eddings, both Vogt and Pinnamaneni had stepped away from Reply All. Dzotsi, who is Black and had already come on board as a co-host of the show, continued to host the show with Alex Goldman remaining in his role. And in May 2022, the announcement came down, a denouement that we all saw coming. Reply All is over. 

In happy news, Eddings and Luse are doing great work on their non-Gimlet podcast at Stitcher: For Colored Nerds. Support them by checking it out!

As another coda, I’ll note that Blumberg sold Gimlet to Spotify in 2019, and there is some evidence that Gimlet shows are not doing all that well in their new context anyway. Vogt is still making podcasts independently; his new series is on, naturally, crypto (not going to link it, fam). The end of Reply All probably represents the end of Gimlet Media, at least in the form in which it existed for these past eight years. 

Rather than pointing and laughing at the decapitated head that we’re left with, I’ll end by saying that I’ve loved Reply All. Their super tech support bits were always marvelous, resulting in what is probably the most frequently recommended single episode of a podcast: “The Case of the Missing Hit.” And though it was derivative of Serial in some pretty obvious ways, I loved Pinnamaneni’s series “On the Inside.” I’ll mourn Gimlet, too, at least a bit. Though it’s long gone and host Starlee Kine was one of the earliest folks to sound the alarm about Gimlet, Mystery Show was an ephemeral and perfect delight. 

There’s a real lesson for those of us who engage with critical work here, too. There was something revelatory about the early days of Gimlet Media, the way Blumberg, Goldman, and Vogt put (what seemed to be) their whole hearts out there on the interwebs. They aired their anxieties and dreams in ways that seemed innovative and even meaningful. I’ll never forget listening to “Shine On You Crazy Goldman,” about Vogt’s experience with microdosing LSD and thinking that he was demonstrating a kind of radical vulnerability. 

It may have been vulnerable, but it wasn’t radical in the end. Becoming aware and developing a critical consciousness is an important first step in critical work, but there is a point when action is necessary, too. It’s not enough to desire the kingship and provide all of the solilioquys detailing your quest for power. What do you want to do with that power? What stories do you want to tell, and why do they matter? Gimlet never offered a coherent answer to those questions outside of increasing listenship. The Bard can tell us: self-aware power trips are nothing new. And it’s no shame to those of us who want more. 

I’ll listen to the final episode in June, and, if I’m so moved, I’ll write about it here. 

Out, out, brief candle!