The Irrelevant Musings of a Factotum

The Ambies Nomination List is Embarrassing for the Podcasting Medium

3/8/2021

This article also appears on Medium and Linkedin.

ambies.com | The Podcast Academy

I'm gonna preface this article by acknowledging that I come off as bitter. I accept that interpretation of these words if you so choose. Because honestly? I am. I'm bitter on behalf of every single independent content creator who continuously hopes that industries will start to make space for them. The barrier to entry has never been lower for creators, except for the barriers towards acceptance and being viewed legitimately by those in power.

It should also be said that I'm the head of the Fiction Podcast Planning committee at the New Jersey Web Festival. I am also an independent content creator, but I acknowledge that I am potentially speaking out of both sides of my mouth here, optically.

The final caveat I have to make here is that I'm a member of The Podcast Academy (you can see the logo in the lower right of my website) and I'm very happy to be one. Paying my annual fee has given me access to networking, events, and a mentor/mentee system that has been extremely beneficial to my own growth as a podcaster. When the Academy was announced, I saw many threads in the independent podcaster community of people who were skeptical that it wasn't going to turn into just another gatekeeper. I truly believe the founding goal and mission of The Podcast Academy is positive and altruistic. However color me now one of the skeptics that they will be good for podcasters at large rather than for only the established industry.

Last week The Podcast Academy announced the official nominations for the first ever "Ambie" awards. The Ambies promise to "celebrate excellence in podcasting and elevate awareness and status of podcasts as a unique and personal medium for entertainment, information, storytelling and expression." While I would like to believe them, I'm skeptical these awards hold true to those values.

A quick glance through the nominees show an immediate bias to celebrity and multi-million dollar organizations. Now are multi-million dollar organizations releasing incredible content? Yes. Do many people achieve celebrity status due to being insanely talented? Absolutely. However, I don't trust that these nominations were conducted in good faith.

The Podcast Academy lists the following organizations as offering founding support:

Amazon Music
iHeart Media
Libsyn
NPR
On Being
Pineapple Street Media
PRX
Sony Music
Spotify
Stitcher
Tenderfoot
United Talent Agency (UTA)
Wondery

There are 164 individual nominations (including those nominated multiple times). A search and cursory glance at cover art on their Nominations page for those companies or their parent companies brings up 81 results. Libsyn and UTA don't actively create content so that means 11 of their 13 founding partners hold over 49% of the nominations. I'd be curious to know what percentage of the nominated shows / individuals are represented by UTA as well. How many host their shows on Libsyn? Does this number go up?

Additionally here's a list of some of the other companies nominated

Los Angeles Times
Pushkin Industries (Malcolm Gladwell's company)
BBC / PBS
The Athletic (co-produced with Wondery)
The Ringer (co-produced with Spotify)
SiriusXM (shares a controlling company with iHeart)
CBC
Business Insider
Vox
Atlassian
QCode
Slate
Radiotopia (owned by PRX)
WarnerMedia
Sony Pictures Television
Turner Classic Movies
HBO
National Geographic
NBC

Plus we have individual nominations for Matthew McConaughey, Willem Dafoe, Tessa Thompson, Mo Rocca, Malcolm Gladwell, Whitney Cummings, and more.

These are extremely talented individuals and some of the biggest corporations in podcasting full of some of the top talent and storytellers in the medium. It is not surprising that many of their shows are nominated. However, in my humble opinion it's laughable to say that in the WIDE landscape of podcasting, that only massive media conglomerates and celebrities are making the best content out there. Statistically almost 50% of it going by The Ambies nomination list. It could not be less representational.

And let's talk about multiple nominations. The Ambies require you to pay $100 for every category you're hoping to be considered for. $100 is already a massive barrier to entry for the vast majority of podcast creators, let alone who then have to decide to submit for specific categories even when their shows are more than qualified to be considered in multiple options. Some of these companies are dropping hundreds or thousands of dollars for just the shows they're actually nominated for. Imagine how much they were able to spend to nominate in every category? In performance categories multiple times, even. It could not be less equitable.

To be clear. I'm not accusing The Podcast Academy OR the companies who funded the foundation of the academy of putting their thumb on the scale here. However I do think they created an awards system that is unfairly weighted against indie content creators and towards those very corporations. I think the individuals at those companies have made absolutely incredible shows, and those shows also received a massively unfair advantage in the submission process that is entirely by design. That could, and should have been called out and rectified both for optical and bias reasons prior to the submission process.

I've spent time in the world of awards shows as a creator, as a nominator/judge, and in close consultation with those who design and execute them. It is not supposed to be like this. Nominations and Awards help shows find greater acclaim and help legitimize them to audiences and producers alike. In the film world, awards help create packets to pitch content for sale to distributors. There's a snarky adage that says if you want to win laurels for your film, start a film festival. The optics here seem like the founding partners of The Podcast Academy took that to heart. And that sucks for every individual who works for them who should be proud their work is being validated and recognized. The optics delegitimize the process. Additionally, the nomination list screams of self-interest. Do we know that Hank the Dog is the best voice acting in podcasting? It might be. But if Matthew McConaughey wins The Ambie and tweets about it, it offers The Podcast Academy and The Ambies industry legitimization. I'd say that creates a conflict of interest for the Academy.

If anything they could have created two different tracks, one for big-budget / commercial productions, and one for indie. Make the decision between the two tracks be the show's budget.

My podcast was not nominated and that's fine, I didn't expect us to end up in competition in the Fiction Category. I submitted because I wanted to make sure that the nominators recognized that fiction is a wider category than I suspected they would nominate. I can't imagine any Actual Play podcast got any real consideration here. I am, however, EXTREMELY excited for the podcasters who are nominated who may be considered truly independent. By my count there are around 10, or ~6% of the 164 nominations.

If awards are going to start existing for podcasts that are meaningful to the community, there are some starting steps that should be taken.

These bullets apply both to festivals with awards consideration, and awards show at large not just The Ambies.

Submissions Fees should make you eligible for all category nominations.
Shows that are accepted to festivals or awards shows should be nominated for at least one category.
Shows that are accepted to festivals or awards shows should be nominated for at least one category.
Sponsorship or professional attachment to festival administration should render shows ineligible for consideration due to potential conflicts of interest.
Nominating Committees must not be part of any submitted projects due to potential conflicts of interest.
Category judges should not be attached to any accepted projects in a festival or awards show due to potential conflicts of interest.

We will be following all of the above bullets and more at the New Jersey Web Festival. It's this kind of experience that led me to partner with them. However, I've written separately about why I'm bringing the film festival experience to independent fiction podcasts, so I won't rehash it here.

When The Podcast Academy was announced a significant amount of the independent podcast world rolled their eyes because they were sure that any company with that specific founding list was going to be as elitist as they come. I and many others asked these podcasters to keep an open mind, because the starting team of individuals is so good. And they've done wonderful things internally, like I said at the top I am very happy with what I've gotten from The Podcast Academy as a member and the service it offers myself and fellow podcasters.

The Ambies seem to show that the naysayers were far more correct than not. The nomination list is a giant collection of conflicting interests, and media conglomerates patting themselves on the back while simultaneously taking the $100 submission fee per category from creators and using it to fund operations. (Check out The Podcast Academy's fancy new website that started rolling out in the last week.)

I had similar critiques for the iHeart Podcast Awards but I held out that The Ambies would turn out to be a celebration of podcasting as a whole. It looks like I was wrong.

Learn More About the New Jersey Web Festival

Good ol Boy Mike link

3/10/2021 09:21:46 am

Hey Ned,
I’m a fellow independent producer that served as a judge for “The Ambies” and can help communicate a bit of my experience. It was a heavy time commitment where I listened to well over 60 hours of shows, all of which that data is tracked and appears on each judge’s dashboard. There were multiple rounds of judging and a few times I had a show that I had already listened to once. Yes, I had to judge Hank the Dog.
There are CLEAR reminders that if you have any conflict of interest of a particular nominee to notify the judge coordinator and the title will be removed for your consideration.
I thought the judging process itself was fair and unbiased.
While I share some of the sentiment that independent shows are underrepresented, that is nature of the podcast industry landscape. I think the most obvious imbalance is that some of these shows probably had a $50k budget or more to produce a single episode. All of this celebrity talent and super polished audio editing is tough to compete with. I don’t know how you could easily even that imbalance other than to say this category is for a production budget under X.
The other odd observation was all of the shade for content produced by marginalized groups such as women, LGBTQ, race, or people that had a hangnail. I’m just not a fan of trying to solve the inequities of life with an award show. I just think there are better ways to celebrate these content creators for their accomplishments that lifting them up for who they are rather than for what they have created.
My own show has participated in many pay to play awards and while I don’t like that practice, I get the economics of these awards. I do think the entry fee does help to self-screen nominations. I even chose not to submit my own show as the categories did not align with my show which is Food related. If someone thought $100 was too much, then I’m not sure the content itself would compete well with these big budget productions. While that is sad to admit, it is the probably close to the truth of the situation. Again, you are trying to celebrate great content at any price point, not to solve the economic inequities of the podcasting industry.
I hope that members of The Podcast Academy take the time to vote for the nominees even if they think it’s an imperfect contest. We should celebrate great content and take the opportunity to learn from one another.

Ned Donovan link

3/10/2021 09:32:45 am

Hey Mike, great to have your thoughts here, and great points all around!

You're not the first nominator I've spoken with but you are one of the first to feel that the process was fair/unbiased. I personally think any company with a clear DEI statement, and a system of publicly available values that are about expanding the podcast industry, celebrating indie creators, and erasing inequity in the podcasting landscape, should not be given a pass because it's "the nature of the podcast industry landscape".

I agree with the forking of the concept between production above Budget X and production below Budget X (I mention it in the article) as a potential solve here, however I also just don't agree that celebrity talent and super polished audio editing is tough to compete with, as there are a number of indie shows that I believe have better used voice talent and equally polished audio editing that were made for $5 and a prayer. Is that to say that the shows that WERE nominated don't deserve to be? No like I said I think the creators on these shows are insanely talented and worthy of the paycheck they receive to do it.

I do, however, find it highly suspect that those specific companies are eating up the vast majority of nominations. Even if the process IS fair and unbalanced it's impossible to maintain the veneer when, frankly, The Podcast Academy has a clear conflict of interest with each of those companies and should have had to flag those entries in general. That's a bit extreme, but it would align more with the values The Ambies supposedly set out to celebrate.

I will absolutely vote on the nominees for their merits, as a filmmaker I understand what awards and press opportunities can do for a show and would never want to take that from the talents that made these shows. I just don't think this moment was well executed as the final list shows the kind of nomination bias that could have been called out in advance rather than promoting $!00/entry as a system that allows for all shows an equal footing.

The absolute easiest solve would be make it an entry fee for a show to submit and then let the nominators announce acceptances and recommendations for category nominations. That system is employed by a large number of film festivals and instantly equalizes the playing field per show. It allows companies to submit multiple shows easier, but it still means that you can't flood categories with individual nominations and shut out others.

Thanks again for connecting, I think it's a conversation worth having and my opinion is but one in a sea of those that should be talking about this!

All my best,

~Ned

Fitz E.

3/10/2021 01:23:54 pm

I agree with you that some of the finalists on the Ambies list are dumb and shouldn't be there, but your post doesn't pass the common sense test.

You picked some data points about major publishers having finalists. Okay? So what, is Dr. Death not supposed to get a Best True Crime Podcast nomination because it's from Wondery? That show wins literally every award, all the time. It's been translated into a million languages. Is Planet Money, one of the most acclaimed podcasts of all time, not supposed to be there, because... question mark?

I had serious issues with the Ambies nominee list, but this article ain't it. As a judge, I was alerted multiple times through multiple emails and via the voting dashboard to disclose any conflicts of interest. I was not even allowed to be a judge in the category of the content I have worked on in the past. Unless several members of the blue ribbon judging panel both blatantly lied on their application AND somehow had conflicts of interest that escaped the attention of the Podcast Academy leadership, your allegations of bias simply don't check out. This is a classic example of "correlation does not equal causation."

Look: I was frankly not happy with the list of Ambies nominees. A handful of very bad shows got on there. One of the business podcast finalists is literally not even a business podcast — it's a politics podcast ("The Heist" is about how Donald Trump won the election; it's listed as a "politics" podcast on Apple and every other podcatcher). That's stupid. And there are other finalists that don't even match the categories they're in. Harvard Business Review has several good podcasts, and their absolute worst train wreck of a show somehow made the list. At least one newer show from NPR on the list is subpar at BEST, with multiple better competitors in its category — yet it's there. There is absolutely some dumb, poorly produced trash that made the list. I am with you there. But I really don't think it's the majority. Most of the shows are there because they're just good.

And having said all that, I think it is foolish to ascribe malice to that which is adequately explained by incompetence. The outlier shows I strongly feel have no place as finalists may be there due to a difference of opinion, or they may be there due to people falling prey to cognitive biases that make them more likely to positively judge familiar shows; a person may be predisposed to vote for a show produced NPR, for example, even if it's just not very good. This could be remedied in the future by having judges do "blind" reviews of the shows, where they aren't told the name of the publisher or host(s) before judging, but that could be a monumental task considering how much branding occurs within the actual audio of episodes. It would require actual audio editing, and at scale, that would make this virtually impossible.

Also, Matthew McConaughey is not going to tweet about winning an obscure inaugural podcast award. That just doesn't pass the common sense test. He VERY likely doesn't even know he was submitted for the award, and if he does, why would he even pay attention? The same goes for other celebrities like Conan O'Brien and Hillary Clinton — do you honestly think they're going to give a bunch of PR/press just for getting a small award? What examples can you give of something similar happening, or of an organization pre-selecting bias ahead of time to try to capitalize on it?

TL;DR — I agree with you that the list is kind of dumb and there are glaring mistakes that make me question the competence of the committee. But arguing that the list arose primarily out of conflicts of interest is a tin-foil hat theory and not a productive way to argue against the legitimacy of this list, especially when there are so many other, better arguments to be made.

3/10/2021 02:00:31 pm

Hey Fitz E. thanks for commenting!

Look I think your points are incredibly valid, and you're not the first nominator to point out to me that the bias argument was watched for in the nomination. I've also had nominators reach out to me privately that they had concerns with what got put in front of them anyways. As I mention in the article, I don't think that a thumb was placed on the scale, I think an awards system was set up that tipped the scale one way as a foregone conclusion.

I also think (and I hope I made clear) that my problem here is 99% optical. It doesn't matter if it was entirely above board. 49% of nominations going to your founding member companies fundamentally begs the question EVEN if the answer is no harm done. I had one person I talked to who called me earlier to tell me they disagreed with the article tell me that over 50% NOT being from the founding members was a huge win for podcasting. Which is wild to me, honestly.

The number 1 complaint I have, when all is said and done, is that the promotional materials for submitting, The Ambies own DEI statement, and The Podcast Academy's stated mission fundamentally called on indie podcasters to submit, and what churned out at the end showed pretty blatantly that they were never going to take a vast majority of those shows seriously, but instead of branding themselves as approaching corporate interests, they courted more influx of $ in a really really badly inequitable system. I have a problem with that.

However I think your critiques of the article are dead on and a lot for me to think about, thank you for jumping into the conversation!

Carrie link

3/10/2021 05:04:57 pm

Add me to the chorus of indie producer-slash-Ambie-volunteer-judge who slogged through a year of listening into 30ish days that mostly agrees with you. Instead of echoing what Mike said before me, I'll add this...

There were some indie shows who I thought had real guts to enter their podcast... because they simply weren't good. Then there were indie gems that blew me away. For me, the Ambies not only highlighted the growing disparity between indie and commercial work, but also the total failure of education in the indie ecosystem as a whole.

As experienced, tested, professional indie creators, we need to do a better job at teaching those behind us what an award winning show really is and what it sounds like. Because sometimes it was stupid-simple stuff to fix that kept me scoring an indie creator higher. And it sucked because I am so down for the indie creators. So, who in the indie world is going to fix this problem? Or rather does the Podcast Academy have the opportunity to provide a solution? And will indies buy in?

Also, conflicts are gonna happen. You can't be active and involved at this level in the podcast world and not have them. I have no doubt 99% of us judges had at least one conflict, so I have to give props to the Podcast Academy for continually making it clear that you HAD TO recuse yourself if there was a conflict.

3/10/2021 06:18:10 pm

This is a great perspective and thank you! I agree the education points can be so much better and I actually find a lot of the networking that can lead to such education really available in TPA.

If The Ambies are meant to be aspirational for me as an indie creator then swing and a miss, you know? It didn’t give me shows to aspire to be, it gave me a laundry list of shows that in quite a few cases I find to be subpar content, you know?

Now I was not an Ambies judge and that is so subjective as to be meaningless to this conversation but the final nominee list made me say “well that’s a giant list of shows that isn’t celebrating podcasting” and not “those amazing shows are the crème de la crème and if I work real hard I aspire to be them.”

It was more like “oh that’s what they were looking for. Meh.”

Really appreciate the judge input though as obviously i’m not one and can only write to the optics of the list.

~ Ned

Kevin link

3/21/2021 02:42:54 pm

I'm an indie podcaster and put a ton of work into my show. I read about the industry every day to keep up with trends and news. I work tirelessly to improve my editing chops and make our sound the best it can be. But I know that, no matter how hard I work, there is no point in me paying to have us considered for any of the very many podcast award websites that are out there.

I truthfully feel kind of bad for the indie podders who continue to fork over the dough for these. There are better ways to spend your money. I'm honestly not sure that many people not involved in the industry know or care that there are podcast awards. While it would be nice to be able to show off being nominated or even winning on social media, I'm not sure it's impressive enough to boost listenership by any meaningful amounts.

The same shows get nominated just like the same shows appear on the front pages of all the podcast apps. It used to tick me off but I realized awhile ago that the only thing I can do is work on my show, build our following through any grassroots means available to me, and wait for the pandemic to slow down enough for all the celebrities, currently making podcasts to fill their time and stay relevant, to go back to making movies and TV shows. Then perhaps it would be easier for potential listeners to find our show in a sea of some 2 million podcasts.

It's easy to be cynical. And while reading your article I found myself nodding in agreement and shouting "preach!" more times than not. I know there are a lot of bad indie podcasts out there, as one of the judges who commented here pointed out. We all hear them...basically unedited with terrible sound and no structure at all. And it is puzzling that these shows would think it worth their time and money to register for an award.

But as someone who does put a lot of time into production and works really hard at this, I also know the deck is stacked against shows like ours. Rather than feel slighted by that I figure it makes more sense to keep working hard, learn everything I can, and worry about improving my show and getting more listeners. Wasting time and money registering for an awards website isn't going to do that.

My two cents, anyway.

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