Which Way Will The Peabody Awards Go This Year?

And how this all might have changed after 2018

Last week the Peabody Awards Nominations were announced, for the ceremony that will be held on May 9, 2023.

Here’s a playlist for the ones available on Spotify:

Here’s some links to the others that don’t appear on Spotify:

• Stories of the Stalked (Audible Original)

• Nine Days in a Michigan Abortion Clinic (Michigan Radio)

• The Pink House at the Center of the World (TAL - they only allow a few recent eps to live there)

What About Us? Said the Radio World in 1938

The literary world has the Pulitzer…founded by newspaperman Joseph Pulitzer with the first awards handed out in 1917 (it also honours drama and music, and now education, as well).

But as the radio industry grew in the 1930s, it became clear there was no equivalent to honour the best works of radio each year.

Lessie Smithgall, a graduate of Georgia University, approached her then-boss, the manager of the WSB Radio, in Atlanta, Georgia, back in 1938, who in turn raised it with the dean of the University of Georgia’s Grady School of Journalism: What about creating an equivalent honor for radio?

Which then led to The National Association of Broadcasters forming a committee to decide how to do this. Three years later, in 1941, the first Peabody Awards were handed out for work completed in 1940.

Until 2013, these awards were given out every year. The awards have adapted with the times; what began as just radio in 1938 then added Television in 1948, Cable TV in 1981, and Websites/series in 2003. But the awards weren’t grouped under industry headings; they were all just Peabody Awards.

Then in 2014, they made the change to organize the awards into categories…which made way for podcasts to be added to the list. Note that prior to this, shows that we now call “podcasts,” which were also “radio” shows, like Reveal and This American Life, and Radiolab had previously won awards.

No huge surprise that the first-ever actual “Podcast” Peabody went to Serial, awarded in 2015, for their inaugural series, about Adnan Syed. Since then the list has produced a listening queue of surprising, important, and often ground-breaking audio work.

There are lots of things to love about the Peabody Awards. It’s never a list of who lobbied the most, nor had the most press coverage, nor had the biggest celebrity involved.

“You count your Emmys, you cherish your Peabodys” ~ Walter Cronkite

The Awards have maintained their independent, rigorous, and sometimes even abrasive roots, to elevate stories about social justice and impact.

“The Peabody Awards elevate stories that defend the public interest, encourage empathy with others, and teach us to expand our understanding of the world around us.”

Past winners of the Peabody Award

It’s hard to imagine which way the awards will go this year. In the past, the awards have been given to gold-chipped, industry-backed power-house production teams.

2014 - Serial, Season 1

• The groundbreaking podcast that needs no introduction here

2015 - This American Life episode The Problem We All Live With

• A two-episode look at desegregation by Nikole Hannah-Jones (now with the NYTimes, whose work 1619 is on my OG narrative podcast list)

2016 - In The Dark (Season 1)

• Serial investigative journalism was originally published by APM Reports, with host Madeleine Baran and a team of reporters. Season 1 looked at the abduction of Jacob Wetterling (Baran and her team have just moved shop to The New Yorker, which is kind of a big deal in this industry for a few reasons I hope to explore later)

2017 - S-Town

• The Southern gothic novel-meets-podcast, and also the second individual series put out by Serial Productions.

2018 - Caliphate (which was subsequently returned by the New York Times when this story was discredited)

This was the year things started to look a bit different

Perhaps it was on the heels of the explosive realization that the award had been given to a show that turned out to be a fake….the New York Times’s debut podcast series Caliphate was supposed to be the story of “Abu Huzayfah,” and ISIS extremist who offered lurid accounts his days performing executions.

Except that he wasn’t some ISIS dark opp. He wasn’t any of those things. He was a sad, pathetic guy living somewhere in suburban Ontario, and was later arrested by Canadian Armed Forces, under the hoax law.

It seems, to me, that since then, the Peabody Jury has gone in different directions.

In 2019, the award went to The Refuge - Season 3, produced by the independent Threshold podcast, a non-profit founded by Amy Martin in 2016, in Missoula, Montana.

This 5+ episode series is about the decade-long divide about how to manage drilling rights in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. It remains the first and only balanced and fair journalism I’ve seen dive into the complex world of Indigenous Rights, climate change and politics.

If you’ve spent any time in this world, or are familiar with how politics fall, there are no easy lines to draw between what is best for the people, the land, and the animals that inhabit this space. The Refuge dives into that place of discomfort and leaves that decision up to you.

In 2020, the award went to Floodlines, an 8-part series about the “unnatural” disaster of Katrina in New Orleans. Hosted by Vann R. Newkirk II, that was published by The Atlantic Magazine.

Foodlines was a beautiful, narrative, musical, but still hard-hitting look at this disaster. It was deeply personal without diving into trauma. This series helped to cement and prove that longform narrative podcasts can find a publishing home with magazines (and that it can go well for both the magazine and the show).

And then, in 2021, all the rules were broken, and the award went to the dark horse candidate. A 34-minute story, produced by a one-woman shop out of Vermont, “Finn and the Bell” by Rumblestrip, produced by Erica Heilman (who remains one of my favourite narrators working today). It’s a gorgeous, but challenging, short story about a teen named Finn Rooney.

Where will the Peabody Awards go this year? The nomination pool is very strong, and offers a range of indie, small-to-medium-sized companies, public radio, a perennial TAL piece…

This newsletter has already done a Two Part deep dive with Sold a Story.

Review of Sold A Story, Part 1

Sold A Story, Part 2: Review and Discussion

For my money, the Peabody Awards tend to drive into the oncoming traffic of what our culture puts on the road in front of us.

The list of issues that these stories tackle has no shortage of weight and heft: North Korea, income disparity, indigenous reconciliation, Roe vs Wade, the waning abortion rights for some American women, cyber-stalking, Afghanistan, why the test scores for reading are well below average...

And gun violence.

Last December marked 10 years since the horrific day at Sandy Hook Elementary School, when six adults and 20 children were killed while at their school.

This is a story that I find difficult to navigate. I can barely read a headline without bursting into tears. Last year when the headlines surfaced about Alex Jones filing for bankruptcy after he was ordered to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to the families who lost children at Sandy Hook (which he had called a hoax and a whack conspiracy), they made me smile, but I could barely engage with them.

I wondered if Still Newtown, a series that goes back to the town where this horrific event happened, an event which continues to happen randomly at other locations in the world, could find a way to share this story in a way that holds the impact that it needs to have, without falling off the cliff into a puddle of random fluff.

Could it bring me back to this story without making me either dive into a depression, make me want to scream, or put me on edge for the rest of the day and order my children not to leave the house?

I also wondered if this is the way Peabody will go…given the recurring reality of places like Uvalde, Texas. So I plugged in.

What I love most about this series is that they proudly say their Media Partner is the Newtown Bee, which is the newspaper founded in that town in 1877, and still publishes and thrives as a local newspaper.

I love that this is even possible in the world of the Peabody Awards, and that they equally consider series backed by The New York Times, Spotify, Crooked Media…alongside Transmitter Media & The Center for Public Integrity…and the Newtwon Bee and WSHU, a small public radio station in Connecticut.

The series is published over 11 episodes, each of them varying degrees of length. What works for me about this series is that it doesn’t dive deep into the trauma of the event. The first episode, which gives the obligatory back story to the event, is a refreshing eight minutes.

But it talks to the parents, to the survivors, to the pastor, to the fireman, to the person who realized that he knew where the empty warehouse was in the city that could accommodate the massive amounts of donations and offerings sent from around the world (9 semi-trucks of cutout snowflakes; tens of thousands of stuffed animals; palates of cooked hams, batteries and Kleenexes, all sent to Newtown in the days and weeks after the event).

By now, the tragedy has been over for longer than most of these children lived. As the host and producer Davis Dunavin explains, it’s a story of resiliency. He manages to strike a tone of honest reporter and empathetic listener at the same time.

He tells a rounded, softened (but not spoogey) story about how a town that’s, still, there. And how the families who lost a child still live there, and how the children who survived are now heading off to college.

What struck me was how much of the legacy of this place is built in the way that 6-year-old children would want: by founding puppet shows that help children overcome their emotions, founding an animal shelter for unwanted animals…an annual town event that dumps hundreds of rubber ducks into the river for a race to the finish line. I love that these details tell me more about this place than any of the difficult details that I don’t really want to hear anyway would.

I never thought that I would ever want to visit this place…and yet this series reminds me of how much hope and inspiration can be found in the ashes of difficulty, and how that can also sometimes be a reason to exist. And even thrive.

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NEXT WEEK! Get ready with your ears for some more amazing climate journalism with Threshold Podcast and Time to 1.5 :