Alumni create genre-spanning podcasts.
Throughout the past few years, podcasts have become more popular than ever: According to Statista, there are an estimated 88 million listeners, as of 2019. Read about five alumni in the world of podcasts, and discover new shows to stream on your drive to work (or as you work from home).
Young, Black & Brave
Portia Flowers ’02
In 10 words or fewer: Hosts rate how movies portray Black women
Behind the podcast: During a transition from a research career to science policy work, Portia Flowers ’02 took a break and started ruminating on all of the things she wanted to do but previously didn’t have time for. Podcasting was one of those longed-for hobbies, so she started Young, Black & Brave with her graduate school friend Cynthia Dorsey. (Additionally, Flowers hosts the podcast Hillman Class Reunion about the sitcom A Different World.) With a shared interest in film, specifically how Black women are portrayed in Hollywood, the pair discusses a different movie each episode and rates its level of inclusivity using their Dorsey/Flowers test. Based on the Bechdel test, which measures the representation of women in fiction, the Dorsey/Flowers test looks for attributes like whether a Black woman has a speaking role and whether she lives until the end of the film. “[It’s] so basic, [but] you wouldn’t believe how many films don’t pass with flying colors,” Flowers says.
One of those low-scoring films? Boomerang, starring Eddie Murphy and Halle Berry. “In a lot of these films that are considered to be excellent ‘Black movies,’ the men tend to be a little more fleshed out … if we’re going to call it a Black movie classic, who’s it a classic for?”
Son of a Hitman
Jason Cavanagh ’04
In 10 words or fewer: Journalist travels through Texas researching notorious hitman
Behind the podcast: Though Son of a Hitman is his first podcast, Jason Cavanagh ’04 is no stranger to building a show. A longtime nonfiction TV producer who worked on projects like Moonshiners, The Real Housewives of Atlanta,and several shows for the History Channel, MTV, and CBS, he’s a skilled interviewer familiar with what it takes to produce a compelling piece of entertainment. So, when a colleague mentioned the storied Charles Harrelson, a hitman who claimed to be involved in the JFK assassination (and who happened to be actor Woody Harrelson’s dad), Cavanagh knew he had a good story on his hands. “He’s this larger-than-life villain,” Cavanagh says. “Hitmen capture the popular imagination in fiction all the time, whether it’s Pulp Fiction or No Country for Old Men.” (Woody coincidentally plays in the latter.)
The Murders at White House Farm
Lauren Bright Pacheco ’90
In 10 words or fewer: A family is murdered in England. Who did it?
Behind the podcast: The story, with many twists and turns, focuses on a family killed in their home near Essex, England. Lauren Bright Pacheco ’90 narrates and interviews guests for each episode of the show, a companion piece to the HBO special of the same name.
Bright didn’t need to cross the Atlantic to make the podcast happen. “There’s been this huge push of technology in the field of remote interviewing,” she says. With the technology they used for The Murders at White House Farm, it sounds as if two people are sitting in the same room — even though they were actually in different countries.
A self-described recovering TV producer, Bright was the special features producer for the Dr. Oz Show for years before moving into the podcast space. That’s also where her true crime focus began. “There was a voracious appetite for true crime, and [Oz’s] show ended up focusing a lot on the mental health aspects of crime. So I started doing more and more of it.” In addition to The Murders at White House Farm, Bright has produced other true crime shows for iHeartRadio, like Murder in Oregon and Happy Face.
She says she wasn’t podcast savvy when she started out, and because of that, Bright didn’t feel pressured to recreate other successful shows. Instead, she relied on her interviewing know-how and years of production experience to create compelling stories. “I’ve been forced for so many years to condense stories into small packages and condense people into little sound bites. [So this has been] really liberating for me.”
Aron and His Dad
Larry Goldman ’76
A feel-good father-son podcast with hosts Larry Goldman ’76 (father) and Aron (son), in which they discuss musical tastes and chat with fun guests. Not to be missed: Each host has an episode with his high school pals.
Pod115
Adam Paul ’89
As a director, an actor, and a writer, Adam Paul ’89 knows a thing or two about creating. Now, he’s brought that knowledge to higher education as a theater instructor at University of Nevada, Las Vegas, creating Pod115 with students in his podcasting class. The show, a thrilling story of college students whose podcast is taken over by an alien in the Nevada desert, was inspired by Paul’s love of Orson Welles.