Slate's Executive Producer of Podcasts Mia Lobel on Sustainability and Innovation in Podcasting

Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription software error

[00:00:05] Jeff Umbro: This week on Podcast Perspectives, 

Mia Lobel: And as somebody who's been in this industry for such a long time, I find it really fun and interesting to get to learn new skills. 

Jeff Umbro: Welcome to Podcast Perspectives, a show about the podcast industry and the people behind it. 

I'm your host, Jeff Umbro, founder and CEO of the Podglomerate.

Today's guest on the show is Mia Lobel, a veteran audio producer with over 20 years of experience in podcast production, storytelling and leadership. Initially, she joined Panoply where she was one of the first employees hired to produce Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist History. In 2018, Mia was laid off from Panoply along with the rest of the editorial team, only to be offered a job the following week from Malcolm Gladwell at his new company, Pushkin Industries.

At Pushkin, she led development production for shows including Revisionist History, Broken Record, and Against the Rules with Michael Lewis among many, many others. Eventually bringing the slate up to 26 shows with over 60 employees. After four years at Pushkin, Mia decided to leave the company due to burnout.

We covered a lot of the topics that she discusses in her essay, “Why I Left” on her Substack Freelance Cafe. It went viral in the podcasting world back in 2023. About a year ago, Mia took a job as executive producer of podcasts at Slate, and she talks to us about what that actually means and what she hopes to achieve moving forward.

Let's get right to it. Welcome to the show, Mia. 

Mia Lobel:Thank you so much. It's good to be here.

Jeff Umbro: I wanna start at the beginning. What was the first podcast that you remember listening to? 

Mia Lobel: That I remember listening to. So I was making podcasts before I was actually listening to other people's podcasts. So I think my answer to that has to be B Side Radio, which is a podcast that I made with Tamara Keith and a handful of other friends of mine from grad school that started out as a radio show and in very, very early days, Tamara's brother who knew how to write code.

[00:02:05] Put our show on the internet before there was really a podcast landscape. So I was, I was both making it and listening to it way, way early days. This is like somewhere between 2001 and 2003. 

Jeff Umbro: This changes the entire ethos of my next question, like, when did you know that you wanted to work in this space?

Mia Lobel: I knew I wanted to work in this space pretty early on when I was in grad school because I felt very restricted. I was studying radio, which for me meant public radio, NPR style, reporting, writing, all of that, and I felt very restricted by the broadcast clock. I did an internship at KQED and I was kind of learning how to tell stories in like four and a half minute chunks, and I just hated that.

You know, I had an internship and I was sent out to a press conference and I had to, you know, I spent a few hours, you know, reporting out a story, and then I had to come back and consolidate the story into like this tiny little sliver of a clock. And I just didn't like that. So I was like, oh, if there was just another way, you know, if there was a way I could tell a story and make it as long as I want it to be.

And that was around the same time that we were making this radio show, which actually was a half hour show, and we were like, what if we could kind of break the bounds of that and make it as long as we wanted? And that's where, you know, that's where podcasting came in. So it was like as early as could be as, as early as the technology was available, I wanted to be in it.

[00:03:32] Jeff Umbro: I love that and, and it's so funny because so many people, when you ask about their origin stories, it's just like. I wanna do this thing, and this was the only vehicle that let me do that thing. It was total creative freedom back then. I mean, it was really, it was amazing. It was so, it was so freeing And so fun.

[00:03:48] Mia Lobel: And so like, I mean, it's still sort of the wild west, but it felt especially so back then. Yeah. I mean, I thought I was early, but I came very late compared to you. I made my first show in 2012 and, uh, same deal. It was like. You know, nobody told me no. So I just did it and uh, and I loved every second of it, but then, you know.

[00:04:09] Jeff Umbro: I don't know how you feel about B side radio, but when I go back and listen to my first show, I'm like, nope, not doing that. 

Mia Lobel:So I would actually go back to B side in a heartbeat. We had so much fun. We were, we created all these interstitials where we would do, we would go on an adventure. So one of them was we were gonna change the oil in a friend's car, we were gonna figure out how to do it ourselves.

[00:04:30] And we used that as the through line to tell all these other stories, all these other sort of shorter stories. And it was just, it was really, it was, it was amazing. I wish we could do it now. It was way ahead of its time. I think it's very, This American Life esque. It was very much inspired by that. For sure.

[00:04:46] Jeff Umbro: I love it. So you eventually made your way to Panoply and that's kind of like the Shangri-La of podcasting for a lot of people. You know, you had Laura Mayer, Andy Bowers, a lot of other people that we all look up to today, including you a lot of the time, uh, that you spent there was actually kinda memorialized in Laura's podcast, shameless Acquisition Target.

You've been very public with your conversations there and you actually wrote a little bit about your time there and your Substack Freelance Cafe. Can you talk about what podcasting was like at Panoply as kind of like the beginning of the time where you saw a corporate presence in podcasting?

[00:05:29] Mia Lobel: Yeah, I mean, I love talking about this 'cause it was really, I mean, it did really feel like early days and I, so Laura Mayer hired me in 2016 and I went in, well, Malcolm Gladwell hired me, but Laura kind of brought me in the door through a mutual friend of ours and I didn't know Malcolm and he was brand new to audio.

He had done you know, he'd read his own audio books and done countless speeches, you know, speaking engagements. But he hadn't done anything in the. radio or podcast landscape, And so. I actually did the first season of Revisionist History as a freelancer, so I wasn't full-time at Panoply until the second season in 2017.

So in 2016 I came in as a freelancer and we really were operating like our own little unit. You know, no one on the show was on staff. We were all just kind of making our own little, we were this very siloed organization within Panoply and we launched the show and obviously it did really well and the second season, Andy Bowers came to me and said like, we'd love for you to make another season, and if you want to do that, you're gonna have to come and work here full time. 'cause. I was paid very well as a freelancer and anyone who's gone from freelance to staff knows that that typically comes with a savings for the company to bring somebody on and you get benefits et cetera, but you also earn a little bit less.

So I, that was a deal I had to take. And so I then joined sort of big podcasting officially at that time, and I became a manager. At that time, I was making the second season of Revisionist History. That's when we started working on Against the Rules, which was actually a Slate project to begin with and then, eventually got pulled over into Pushkin, which we can get to later. But that was not a Panoply project to start with. And we were also in the very, very early stages of making Broken Record at that time. I mean, we also made a bunch of other really great shows. Family Ghosts with Sam Dingman we made By the Book with Kristen Meinzer and Jolenta Greenberg.

We made The Grift with Maria Konnikova. Why Oh Why with Andrea Silenzi. Yeah. Yeah. And it was really, you know, it was, we were having a lot of fun. It really was exciting times and everything was. You know, it was just a really, really creative bunch of people. I managed something called the Panoply Pilot Project back then, which was basically this opportunity to launch a, it was the way that we launched new shows, and that's where Family Ghost and By the Book came out of.

We had two other shows that didn't get made. One was with Awkward Family Photos. The team that makes Awkward Family Photos. We piloted something with them. Fourth one, I'm blanking. It was a sports show. I can't remember who was behind it at the moment, but we made pilots, but they didn't get green lit and it was really fun and exciting and creative.

[00:08:14] Jeff Umbro: How many employees were there at Panoply at that point? Like at its peak? 

Mia Lobel: I think, if I remember correctly, there were about. Between 15 and 20, I wanna say, on the podcast team. And then there was a separate team who worked for Slate. They were sister companies, and Slate had its own podcasts and Panoply had its podcasts.

Jeff Umbro: And for anybody who doesn't know, Slate and Panoply were owned by Graham Holdings, which is the family that owns the Washington, used to own The Washington Post, along with Panoply. They had created a company called Megaphone, which was later sold to Spotify. And around 2018, I think Panoply decided that they were going to stop making or.

Original content and focus exclusively on Megaphone, which was a hosting platform and an ad sales platform, which we all know very well today, but at the time it was owned by Graham Holdings. And so that was around the time that you decided to go to Pushkin? 

Mia Lobel: I didn't decide I got laid off. So me and all of my colleagues, everyone who made content for Panoply got laid off and actually the night before that happened.

[00:09:21] We could all sense that something was going down. It was a very strange time. There's, in the offices, it's the same office that slate's in now. There are, there is this glass box, these glass offices, and all of these business, business people would meet in the glass boxes and they would be having these secretive meetings and all the producers would just kind of wander around the outside being like, what is going on in there?

What, like, what's gonna happen? So I was pretty certain I was getting fired, but I had no idea that everyone was gonna get laid off. I thought I had. I don't know. Who knows? I thought I'd done something wrong. I don't know. I always feel like I walk this line between like, you know, making really great stuff and like pushing myself to the brink of like being let go, you know?

[00:10:01] Jeff Umbro: Well, you, you make truly great stuff. And, and I just wanna underline this, like Mia is like one of the best in the biz at making truly memorable podcasts that make an impact. And if you just look at your portfolio like. Some of the best podcasts in the world that people still listen to every day, like you had a huge hand in so.

And true. And so I just wanna, I just wanna underline that like as a through line for this conversation. So thank you. 

Mia Lobel: No, I appreciate that. And it's really fun. And I liked, I like pushing boundaries and I like trying to, you know, I, I, it, it's all very exciting and I love working with creative people, so I sense that something was going on along with everyone else.

[00:10:42] And the night before, they let everybody go, Malcolm called me and I don't remember the conversation exactly, but it was something like. Whatever happens, I want you to come with me, is sort of the message. It was. And I was like, come with you. Where like, what is going on? You know, like the whole thing was a mystery.

So sure enough, we all, you know, were brought into this room. This is after Laura had already left, but those of us who were left were brought into this room. We were told that Panoply would no longer be making custom content or content of any kind. They were basically gonna just become Megaphone a distribution platform.

And we were all gonna be laid off. And it was very dramatic. And you know, I had. I was a manager, so I was really trying to like help some more junior people kind of like get through this and we're all gonna be okay. And I had the promise of knowing that Malcolm wanted me to come do this other thing, even though I didn't really know what it was.

So this would've happened in, I wanna say October of 2018. And right around that time I found out that, so then, okay, I don't know, some amount of time. Went a, a week or maybe two. And Malcolm tells me about this new company, it didn't have a name yet. He was gonna be making it with Jacob Weissberg. And we were, they were gonna bring against the rules, revisionist history and the yet to be released, broken record with them.

We had just been piloting Broken Record. It was not ready for liftoff yet. And. They were not gonna be able to put that. It was slated to be launched in November of 2018 and. This was, so this was actually, no, it was September that I, that I got laid off September 15th. So they needed to launch this in November.

And I was like, well, we can't launch it. I mean, we have to put this all on pause and we have to recoup and whatever. And he's like, no, we have ads. Like we've already sold ads, it's gonna launch. And I was like, what now? Like how? Like how exactly are we gonna do that? So I basically signed a three month contract with Malcolm to get that out the door.

And then I was like, then we'll see what happens next. 'cause I wasn't ready to sign on for this brand new thing. I had just been laid off after three and a half years of working for. UN company and I just, I didn't know what this other thing was. So we, we ultimately got broken record out the door. By the end of the year, Malcolm and Jacob basically convinced me that this was gonna be great, and I signed on full-time with this new company in January of 2019.

And then, yeah. 

 Jeff Umbro: So tell us about your time there, and just for anybody who is curious and wants more than what we're gonna be able to dive into in the next couple minutes. You wrote a fantastic essay. Called Why I left. It's on your substack, Freelance Cafe. And, and I encourage everyone to read it. It kind of went viral a few years ago within our community.

[00:13:29] Anyway, you were there for approximately four years and- 

Mia Lobel: it was exactly four years actually. I like nice round numbers. So it was exactly four years. Yeah. 

 Jeff Umbro: Perfect. Three and a half years. Four years. Uh, so, so tell us about kind of. Uh, you were one of the first four employees, or I guess the first employee, 'cause everybody else was a different structure.

You saw this, this big boom bust cycle happen in front of you and, uh, and made a lot of decisions. So like, walk us through what that was like. 

Mia Lobel: Yeah, I mean, listen, the beginning of Pushkin was so exciting. It was so much fun. You know, Malcolm is absolutely wonderful to work with. We have such a great relationship.

[00:14:06]: Jacob was all, it was all ideas. You know, everything was a yes. Heather Fain is the other person. It was the four of us, me, Jacob, Heather and Malcolm. And you know, we would have meetings at Jacob's house and we would go to this, you know, we would have little rental spaces that we would work out of and do all this big brainstorming and we had two successful shows that we were, or was it one?

Maybe Against the Rules maybe hadn't launched yet. I think it hadn't. And we were building a thing and building a thing is so exciting and I loved it. I loved it. And I got to, you know, I, I basically was, you know, I was paying people from my personal Venmo in those early days before we even had a bank.

I mean, it was really nuts. But it was also, you know, again, it was just so exciting. And we had a hit show. That we were building it off of, we were building it off the back of revisionist history and we were making season four. Yeah. Yeah. And we were well established. You know, the same team worked on that show for seven years.

The exact same team with a, we had a couple people kind of rotate in and out, but the same core team, that was the start. So those were the people I first hired. Jacob Smith. Julia Barton. Forgive me if I'm gonna, I'm gonna forget some of the names. It's been a while now. But those, you know, we, I brought them on full time.

Ryan Dilley came over from Panoply. He's based in the UK. He was making The Happiness Lab. We ultimately made Cautionary Tales with him. And then. And you know, we grew from four to, I forget, this is probably the numbers are are in my substack, I'm sure. But we grew from four to about 50 in the first two years, and that was.

Good. It was really, really good. We were making great stuff. And then there was this tipping point, you know, not to borrow a phrase, um, and it accident. Um, yes, exactly. Um, and it just, you know, and I've, I've read a lot about this, that like 50 is, you can still know everyone when you're 50 people and you can still have like retreats and you can still, you know, you can, you can just feel a little more connected.

And I thought that was a good spot, good spot to maybe stop, you know, and kind of like dig in. And the industry was still, you know, doing a lot of this. And some of the shows did really, really well. We were so lucky that, that, you know, our first, you know, we had maybe five, 10 poll shows. Oh, the last archive was another one that we, um, built up in that time and it did really well.

And it was like, all right, let's sit back and like. Focus on our core properties and like see what more we could do with those. Maybe we can do spinoffs and maybe we can do live shows. And we wanted to make this thing called Push Fest that was like a, you know, this is kind of before live shows had really taken off in a big way.

I think Radio Lab had done their big tour. Oh my God. The big history show that does amazingly well and The Rest is History. You know, they've had incredibly successful tours and all the rest before YouTube certainly, and we wanted to do all that, but instead. We just kept adding more and more and more shows.

[00:16:57] Jeff Umbro: You've seen this over and over again where you have companies that just continue to expand and grow and bring on more team members. And when the good times are good, they're great. And then as soon as they're not, like the first thing to go is the employees is like anything that is considered, expendable.

Which could be like some of the newer shows or the things that aren't making a lot of money and, and you all like as, as employees and producers and the creative brains behind all of this stuff. It just put in like a lot of time and energy to make all of this stuff. Well, and to launch a brand new show, it just takes a lot of work and a lot of time.

[00:17:37] Mia Lobel: You know, development takes a long time and it should because you have to get used to working with a new talent. You have to figure out what the right balance on the team is. You have to figure out the right cadence, the right production schedule. I mean, there's a million things to figure out, not to mention the content.

Those are all just like the business side things you have to figure out. And once you figure that out, it take, you gotta build your audience and that also takes time. So you can't do that over and over and over again and have them all be successful. You just can't. And if you're gonna go through all that trouble, you've gotta really put a bunch of years into it.

It's not, it's not something that you can just snap your fingers and like have a hit. And there was sort of this impression that that was possible because in those early days there were a bunch of hits that were, you know, including Revisionist History that like just everybody, you know. Just everybody seemed to wanna listen to, and you all in, in large part because of you and the team that you put together.

[00:18:29] Jeff Umbro: Like, you know, we're definitely punching above your weight in terms of like. Whatever you put out people wanted to listen to. There was a lot less competition back then too. Also, like there was a handful of companies at that point in time where it's like whatever they published, people would give it a chance.

Uh, and you, and you were definitely one of them, so exactly four years later you decided to leave. What, what was the impetus for that? Like, you, you didn't want to keep going on the hamster wheel. Is that basically it? 

Mia Lobel: Yeah. You know, I stepped away in like year three. I stepped away from production by necessity.

[00:19:01] I was the, what was my title? VP of Content and Production, I think was my, so I was really in charge, you know, and, and again, at that time we were making. 26 or 28 shows, something like that. So I was ultimately responsible for all of them. I wasn't what I, I love producing, like I love getting my hands in it.

I love mixing, I love scoring, I love all of that stuff. And I wasn't doing any of that anymore. I was really just managing. And I like being a manager. That's mainly what I do now, and I'm good with it now, but back then I was still in this transition period where I was letting go. Some of the stuff I really loved handing that off to other people and taking on all these sort of big, intractable problems and.

In this growth moment, we were doing things that I didn't really believe in and things that weren't going well, and I could see it, and I felt like there was nothing I could really do about it. There was a branded project that we were working on that never got off the ground. It, it still never happened.

It just, it just. It just fell apart. There was another project, another branded project that like ultimately did come out and did it, it, you know, and was good. Like the content was good in the end, but for me, there was no joy in anymore. I just, I was just, it was just a constant struggle and I was so far away from the stuff that I loved and way too deep in the stuff that I didn't love.

And I felt like I lost connection with everyone and sort of, I, I, you know, I don't know if you've ever experienced burnout, but it really, I just wasn't taking no joy in anything I was doing, and it was affecting my personal life. And I was exhausted and angry all the time, and I just was like, I sort of stepped back and was like.

Actually what happened was the summer before I left, I asked for a leave of absence. I was gonna be taking a three week vacation anyway, and I asked for, uh, some extended period of time. So I took some unpaid time off. I took about six weeks off, kind of recharged my batteries and when I came back. It was okay for like another month and then I was like, you know what?

I think it's time to call it. So that's, so I, I had a sort of a long goodbye. I didn't wanna leave anybody in the lurch, but I think I decided I would leave around October, November and I left in dec in the end of December, exactly four years from when I started. But it was hard. It was a really, really hard decision.

I mean, I, I, you know, at the holiday party, they gave me a really nice send off. I, I have maintained really good close relationships with almost everyone that I worked with there, because it wasn't, it wasn't personal. It was really about. Me and how I was feeling in the role. And Pushkin is going gangbusters.

Like they are doing great, 

Jeff Umbro: We interviewed, Greta Cohn 

Mia Lobel:I know I watched it. 

Jeff Umbro:Oh, amazing. so for anybody who wants to know kind of how Pushkin has been doing since then, give that episode a listen. She's amazing. 

Mia Lobel: She is amazing. And she, they, every time when they added heavyweight, I was like, oh my God.

Like, I wish I could be there for that. They just added, Drilled with Amy Westervelt. Amazing. They're doing, they're just, oh, they just announced this partnership with The BBC, which we had started trying, we started talking about that in the very early revisionist days. Malcolm wanted to get into The BBC archives and we were trying to figure out a way, ma, a way to make it happen and we couldn't quite do it.

So 10 years later they finally got the deal done, which is amazing. So I have nothing but admiration for her and yeah, it's, it's really great. 

Jeff Umbro: The reason I bring this up is mainly because of what happened after you published your essay? 'cause there's a few things I've, I've wanted to follow up with you on for like three years now.

[00:22:23] So one is, do you feel that the company and, and by proxy the industry have been making more strides towards sustainability? So I'll, I'll stop there with that question. It's a great question. I mean, you know, when I watched all the layoffs at the Post recently, it like, including. All the podcasting, most of the podcast team, I, I am not totally sure.

[00:22:47] Mia Lobel: It, it breaks my heart to kind of watch not just what's happening in podcasting, but in journalism more generally, and it doesn't feel sustainable at all. I do not think journalism should be a for-profit venture ever. The, the reason the New York Times can make it work is because of games, right? Like that is, that is basically like a known thing, and it's amazing that they have all the resources to do it and games that I pay for and everyone I know pays for and like, that's really, really great.

Most journalistic entities don't have that. And so they rely on advertising still, which is not great. Uh, and we have no control over it. It is, it is. You know, and I wrote about the CPM model being broken in my substack, and I still believe that to be true subscription based. Right? Which is super, super important.

But uh, you know, it's also got its limits. There are only so many things, you know, everyone's got this sort of like substack fatigue, right? Like, how many of these can I actually pay for? How many Patreons can I actually subscribe to, you know. That's also really, really hard. There's nonprofit and Phil, Phil philanthropic support and grant funded support, and that's the place where I see potential.

But we're not anywhere close to there yet. And companies like Slate and Company, like other for-profit companies, I think, I don't know exactly how the business works, but for the most part, they can't get money from those entities. But independents can, independent creators can. We distributed a project at Slate called When We All Get To Heaven, which was a grant funded project.

They had spent 10 years working on it. The production team called Eureka Street Productions. They spent 10 years working on it and all they needed. In the end was distribution and we at Slate were able to provide that and that was, that is the kind of thing that gives me hope. That pro, you know, that places like Slate can pair and partner with organizations that get, get funding from other entities and we can use our reach to get a story out to multiple people.

'cause launching a brand new show these days is like near impossible. And there are, I know there are still, you know, there are, there are a few co-ops starting and there are some interesting things happening in that space, but it's just a, it's a brutal landscape. 

Jeff Umbro: Well, I guess yes, to push back a little bit and just to like play devil's advocate.

[00:25:03] I don't know how sustainable it is to have like an entire industry based on the idea of, of like patronage. There has to be some kind of happy medium there. Yeah. I think it's a mix. I, it's never one, it's never just one thing. It has to be a mix. But with advertising, if you don't get, you know what a minimum, I mean the minimum keeps changing, but like it used to be 50,000 downloads an episode, right?

[00:25:22] Mia Lobel: That was the bare minimum to be able to get advertising dollars. I think it's come down pretty significantly recently with, you know, Apple making its big shift, uh, away from automatic downloads. I think, I don't know, it's somewhere in the 20 to 25,000 I think. Now, maybe that's wrong. 

Jeff Umbro: Mostly just depends on like what the person’s goals are, and sustainability is gonna be different depending on who you talk to. 

Mia Lobel: Yes. No, that's true. And how big is your team and what does success look like for you? And every individual has to, I mean, I do a lot of consulting still, and I always start with that question of like, what's your goal?

[00:25:58] How, like, what, what, what does success look like for you? And maybe that just means putting your show, just getting the show made and putting it out there. And you can do that on your own time, right? You don't need a whole big team and lots of funding to do it. But if you're really trying to sustain yourself on this.

Then you have to either get the patronage or the, or the sponsorship or the downloads, the advertising revenue. 

Jeff Umbro: I think this has been like one of the big pieces of the, it's been the linchpin of the conversation around like the CPB funding and everything happening in public media. And I know this is a much larger conversation and like a lot of organizations are only getting a fraction of their funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

[00:26:37]: And some organizations are getting a much larger percentage of their funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting or they were, um, and, uh. And the idea is really like, uh, should these entities be considered like, you know, essentially a public utility and get money from the government and or should they be required to come out with a business model that makes 'em more sustainable And, uh.

And the answer is always gonna be like something in between. That's a conversation for a different episode. Well, it also depends what you're trying to make, right? If you're trying to do non-fiction storytelling or narrative non-fiction storytelling, there's a difference between journalistic content and just like influencer content, right?

[00:27:21] Mia Lobel: Like if you're just trying to raise your profile as an influencer or a, or a content creator that's different from the bones of journalism. And that's where I come from. I have a journalism degree. Is what I really believe in. It's non-fiction storytelling, and that needs to be funded differently.

And probably not through advertising, or at least not entirely through advertising than just people who are trying to build up their brand. It's just a different beast. And I really see, and they're, they're really conflated right now. 

Jeff Umbro: Yes. Like this show in particular, this show you're on right now is mainly meant for lead generation for the business, content marketing for the company.

[00:27:58] I know that I'm never selling ads on this 'cause we're never gonna hit like a critical scale where anybody's gonna be really interested in that. If we're doing some kind of big investigative piece that like New Hampshire Public Radio may want to put out maybe there's a world where they can hit the kind of scale that may be intriguing for advertisers.

But also, this is the kind of thing where it's like they are demonstrating the value that they can bring to their community through the journalism that they put out in the world. And thus, like they should probably be able to get funding from the community that they're serving. And not just their community, though.

[00:28:30] Mia Lobel: It's not just the New Hampshire community that benefits, right. They make shows that, I mean, that's a great example because they make shows that have a really broad reach and they're created by their in-house talent, but they have these, you know, they have these very sort of. Wider appeal. That is so amazing and I love that it can be supported the same way as like support your local public radio station and here's exactly what you're supporting and that it, and that it can benefit far beyond that.

Jeff Umbro: I love that. I love that model. So you joined Slate in May, 2025. As we discussed earlier, same owner as the previous company that you worked at Panoply, or owner is Graham Hollings. We spoke on this show to the slate, VP of Audio, Alicia Montgomery, back in April of 2024. She's no longer at Slate and we talked to her about what was at the time Slate's best year yet in their 27 year history.

[00:29:21] Jeff Umbro: So you just joined. What was appealing to you about Slate after your experience of Pushkin and after your research into community operated companies? So Slate's an old, relatively old organization. They're 30 years old and there are some people there who have been there, you know, 15 and 20 years, which is kind of amazing to me that people would stick around an organization for that long.

[00:29:43] Mia Lobel: I, prior to that, had really worked in a lot of startups, like startup type landscapes, and there's something very appealing about coming to a company that like had a history and that, you know, I also was a bit lonely. You know, I freelanced for the two years after I left Pushkin and before I started at Slate and I, I do love freelancing. I'm, I think I'm, I think I'm pretty good at it. I'm pretty scrappy, but I didn't have consistent colleagues. I love working with a team, And so, and I love just slate as an entity. I mean, I love its style. I love it, I love its content. I just find it really amusing and smart.

The editor in chief, Hillary Frey is amazing and I didn't know her previously. A friend of mine who makes Amicus suggested that I have a conversation with Hillary and she's just like, I was a little wary of, you know, of going back full time just because of my prior experience. And she's like, no pressure.

Just have a conversation with Hillary and see how it goes. And we had such a great. First conversation. It wasn't even, I hadn't even applied for the job yet. It was just an informational meeting and I just love the way she thinks. I love her approach and. I wouldn't say she convinced me to apply, but that conversation convinced me that it was, that I should at least go through the process.

And it was, it was quite a long process. Honestly. I had many, many interviews over, over a few months, and every conversation I had was a good one. Every single conversation, It really just solidified my belief that slate was a good fit for me, and it's got a lot of flexibility. You know, there's no at, there's no mandate to be in the office.

Which is good for me because I live, I don't live near a city, so there were a lot of sort of logistical things. And I mean, to be totally honest, I have a son who's going to college next year. I, I'm pretty good at freelancing, but the idea of a steady paycheck for a while was, was also very appealing. So that combination, you know, that combination of stuff really convinced me to when they offered me the job to go ahead and take it.

[00:31:47] Jeff Umbro: Nice. Yeah. And there's probably a lot of similarities between a community owned company and a company where the community has stayed for a long time. So that's huge. I mean, it's huge. That speaks volumes to me that people stick around for a long time. Yeah, it's my dream at Podglomerate.

I don't want to jinx it, but more than half the company has been here for nearly five years, and we literally hired our first employees six years ago, so, wow, that's amazing. That's amazing. And that means you run a good shop, right? Because people don't, you know, I mean, it's not, you know, the market is tough right now.

[00:32:25] Mia Lobel: Yeah. The market's tough right now, so people aren't, so, you know, it's not like there's a, back in the, you know, back in the early days, there were so many jobs to be had, And so people would really come and go more. But I still think that if, if you're in a good place and you're, yeah. Being respected and you're able to work on interesting stuff.

There's, you know, you'll stick around for a long time. I think that's really true. You said that you really respect a lot of what Hillary Frey is doing at Slate. Walk us through that and like, what is Slate doing on, in like the audio context of it all? I mean, they have shows that have been on for a very long time.

You know, Political Gabfest just celebrated its 20th anniversary. You know, a lot of the things they make, what next has been around for, I might get this wrong, six or seven years at least. You know, they just, these are, they really are staying the course. You know, they're, they're really. Committed to the shows that they have been making for a very long time and thinking about ways to keep them sustainable.

So they have a really, active plus, you know, Slate Plus program that has been around since I was there the first time 10 years ago, they were getting into the video space. That is, you know, we, we, that was one of the first things that I had to do when I got there is basically convince these audio only shops, you know, this audio only shop to get onto YouTube. And that's new for me too. And it's been, you know, it's been quite an adventure, but we're doing it and it's been, it's been fun. We've had some, some successes and you know, some challenges there. Focusing on all the three things that we talked about, right?

We're focusing on, on getting into this new discovery space of YouTube, focusing on advertising revenue and focusing on, on plus and subscriptions. So they're doing all the things that need to be done. It feels like they're doing it. I mean, sustainability is so hard, right? It's not it, it is very volatile market, and there are only so many things that we can control, but I feel like they're, they're, they're fighting a good fight. You know, they're, they're doing the best they can in the market that, that, that they have. 

Jeff Umbro: Are you enjoying the job? I know it's, it's been a year, but is it, is it everything you wanted?

Mia Lobel: It's been great. It's great. There are such wonderful people there. And listen, I am an optimist, like, I'm not gonna say it's not hard, you know, it is a really tough market and there are always really tough decisions that get, that have to get made. But I feel like I am trusted there. I feel like I have really good partners that I'm working with, both at the show level and the management level, and we're really just doing some interesting stuff and I feel like, you know, getting into video, we should talk again. Like I am learning so much about video and, and it's not a one-to-one. It's not just like, put your podcast on, especially these audio first podcasts. You can't just like. Add, you know, add a Riverside recording and make it work.

It's a completely different way of putting shows out there, and thumbnails and the whole thing. And it's really, it's been fascinating and I'm learning so much. And as somebody who's been in this industry for such a long time, I find it really fun and interesting to get to learn new skills. So, you know, whether it'll be successful or not, we'll see.

But I, we're really trying and, and I've got a lot of buy-in from my team, my teams, about making it happen and, and really trying to experiment in that space, which is fun. 

Jeff Umbro: I love it. Well, thank you so much Mia. This has been really, really great. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Podcast Perspectives.

[00:35:49] Jeff Umbro: If you'd like to learn more about Mia, check out mialobel.com, M-I-A-L-O-B-E-L.com. Find her on LinkedIn or check out her Substack, Freelance Cafe, which has a lot of stories that go much deeper into the conversation than we did today. If you'd like to learn more about Pushkin, check out our episode with Greta Cohn, and if you'd like to learn more about Slate, check out our previous episode with Alicia Montgomery.

For more podcast related news info and takes, you can follow me on LinkedIn at Jeff Umbro. Podcast Perspectives is a production of the Podglomerate. If you're looking for help producing marketing or monetizing your podcast, you can find us at Podglomerate dot com. Shoot us an email at Listen at the Podglomerate dot com or follow us on all socials at Podglomeratepods.

This episode was produced by Chris Boniello and myself, Jeff Umbro. And thank you so much to the marketing team, Joni Deutsch, Madison Richards, Morgan Swift, Erin Weiss, and Sheeba Joseph, and a special thank you to Dan Christo. Thank you all for listening, and I'll catch you all in a few weeks.