Hello!

I felt the need to add a note along with our entries. First, it’s so great that there is a podcast category this year! We very much appreciate the addition of podcasts/digital audio as a category in its own right.

Our podcast, however, is of a different format than most (perhaps all?) other entrants. We are a live, daily broadcast. There is no writing (aside from a few questions written beforehand, which may or may not enter the conversation). There is no post-production (aside from the removal of advertisements for members or the occasional removal of a major setback, such as losing the phone connection with the interviewee—although anyone who listens to our show live from our app will hear these things); as such, there is no removal of “ums,” “uhs,” and so on to make the host or guest sound better. The questions cannot be reordered; the segment isn’t woven together by a score. The quality of the show’s interviews is dependent on our host, our guests, and our sound engineer, who doesn’t get a second chance and has to adjust as we go. The VALUE of our show emanates from some of the things I’ve just listed—mostly that doing five shows per week with scholars and writers on their most recent work is of high value to our listeners. The fact that we are an independent show is also of very high value to our listeners, because we are a political show, and have no concern for outside financial influences. A high volume of episodes, streamed live, on an independent-outlet budget is the nature of our podcast.

We are entering despite the description of your judging criteria, because while you might not have had this type of show in mind, in our opinion, we provide high-quality, topical, smart interviews. For a daily, live show that is almost entirely listener-supported, we feel that we most often provide listeners with content that is interesting, valuable, and simply wouldn’t be available to them as quickly and in an audio format if the show were done any other way.

I greatly appreciate you taking the time to read this note! I hope that our entries will do well on their own merits, but I also hope that some of the things I’ve mentioned might inform the addition of categories in the future!

Best,

Kelly Carey
Producer, The Majority Report