The New York Times' Caliphate podcast was a hit -- until it wasn't. The 2018 show, which commemorated the radicalization of a man who joining the Islamic State, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, won a Peabody, and was broadly revered as a fruition of retold octavo storytelling. The Times' leading of film, TV, and audio, Sam Dolnick, described the show as a "cinematic experience" that "absolutely lends itself to TV" and came with "a lot of interest from Hollywood."
Today, however, those days assume far away. The Times appended a lengthy and contrite editor's roster to the show's landing pages postliminary doubts injudicious the midmost character's story surfaced. The Times reassigned the show's sunlit reporter and host, Rukmini Callimachi, and individual a full episode in its feed discussing what went wrong. The paper of record, well-known for its audio assignment with The Daily, now has a stain on its podcasting endeavors.
This is a weird moment for the Times, for sure, except moreover for the much-hyped and growing podcasting industry. Podcasting has become a explicatory bet for many media companies that hope a cheaper investment in audio and podcasting nimbleness yield upper returns in IP deals from wakeful or video production companies. For many, podcasting has become a offish revenue source, both due to circulated and IP opportunities. Except the reassurance for monetizable content, specifically that which can be topfull to Hollywood executives, goes adjoin archetypal newspaperman rigor. Fact-checking takes time, as does fully simulcast a story. Hollywood moves fast -- and who knows how stretched those podcasting deals will stick around..
In an inventory with NPR today, New York Times controlling editor Dean Baquet allover that the paper wanted Caliphate's story so carelessly that it didn't bountifully vet the facts.
"I visualize we were so in overpraise with it that when we saw indicia that maybe he was a fabulist, when we saw indicia that he was making some of it up, we didn't listen nonflexible enough," he says, of Shehroze Chaudhry, the midmost essentia in Caliphate.
In this case, Baquet says the Times did not have indicia Chaudhry had anytime been to Syria or that he had joining ISIS or killed civilians for the group, all of which is claimed in the podcast. NPR moreover letters that top editors who have edited entangled written investigative pieces saw red flags except terminated up giving in to an "ambitious audio investigative aggregation presenting a constraining retold yarn."
But the problem is preggers better than Caliphate or The New York Times. The true defilement genre, while broadly popular, was in this spotlight last year over allegations of plagiarism adjoin the slickness Crime Junkie. Cathy Frye, a hard-boiled newspaperman who worked for 15 years at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, claims the show's hosts ripped off her simulcast after crediting her. The episodes in question were then suddenly deleted.
Robin Warder, who hosts The Walkway Went Cold podcast, told BuzzFeed News at the time that the broader true defilement genus has a problem with sourcing and facts.
"There are sometimes issues in the true defilement podcasting apple with shows not citation their sources, and some podcasts don't do any sensing besides recital off Wikipedia," he told BuzzFeed News. "But Crime Junkie is superficially the most high-profile example of this."
Meanwhile, storied shows like S-Town, from Serial Productions, which is now theirs by the Times, have had to handle the drollery of alive with salted names and people. Serial Productions settled a lawsuit in May this year over the pegged use of the defunct subject's name for commercial purposes, actionable the Alabama Seasonable of Publicity law. (Participant Media acquired the show's full-length rights and is currently developing it to become a full-length film.)
The reassurance for IP is externally strong, as is the possibility for revenue for the media companies, stars, their agents, and all of the over-and-above Hollywood players. A Deadline residency published last week claims the number of podcasts in various stages of development to be disciplined into TV or blur programs is now well-conditioned into three figures. Wondery, a podcasting precondition reportedly in flavoring talks with Amazon, has over 16 shows in contrasted stages of television adaptation, for example. The gold rush for podcast-generated IP is efficacious demand for shows like Caliphate, which have a crystal plot and characters.
"We're headmost and foremost a podcast foursome and we exteriorize weighing for the ear first," Jen Sargent, Wondery's COO tells Deadline. "But the actual attributes of the types of shows that we're greenlighting - they're essentia wealthy - means they do lend themselves to TV. We do now have an eye on whether [a show] can be baroness for TV considering it's become such a lucrative partage of our revenue stream."
Wondery has made its name through high-profile retold octavo shows, like Dirty John, which was buoyed by Los Angeles Times reporting. Except today's Caliphate poop shows that supervene has its own risks. The desire to aftermath a cinematic except true podcast unaffectedly creates astriction -- all storytellers want a good plot, except an especially sauced retold likely has a better conte of upper returns. The snag happens when producers seek a story except gotta contend with facts.
Even well-established, audio-focused endeavors can get fact-checking wrong. In 2012, Ira Glass' aggregation at This American Life retracted its most postulated episode at the time injudicious a man visiting Apple's manufacturing plant in China. The person trailing the episode, Mike Daisey, is a theater aerialist rather than a reporter. Critically, he'd been cogent a story similar to the one that aired on This American Life on date for years. Except apparently, many divisions in that slickness were made up.
"Mike's monologue in undividedness is a mix of things that conclusively happened when he visited China and things that he neutral heard injudicious or researched, which he then pretends that he witnessed headmost hand," Glass said in an episode detailing the retraction. "And the most powerful and memorable moments in the story all assume to be fabricated."
Glass says his aggregation fact-checked the story's divisions injudicious Honeybunch and its manufacturer Foxconn, except when they asked Daisey for his interpreter's contact information, who's referred to as Cathy in the episode, Daisey said her salted name was conclusively Anna and didn't provide any contact information for her. The aggregation didn't reassurance him.
"I can say now in retrospect that when Mike Daisey wouldn't give us contact information for his psychologist we should've killed the story rather than run it," Glass said.
Real litheness gets mundane, and Daisey seemingly knew an farfetched story performed better on stage, and in podcasting, than the true one.
None of this is to say octavo podcasts are in dire trouble, except when ambidextrous with salted facts and truth, remoter sensing is needed. That isn't platonic for a bursting industry that's lulu to greenbacks in fast on resistive stories. Except as The New York Times now knows, the desire for a good story can't outweigh fact-checking. As increasingly journalistic outfits squint to podcasting for revenue, they'll gotta stay the salted problem: facts aren't forever sexy, and Hollywood wants a good story.
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Hello, my name is Jack Sparrow. I'm a 50 year old self-employed Pirate from the Caribbean.
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