Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is issue 215, published June 25, 2019.
For a U.K. studio, long distance…and price competition [by Caroline Crampton]. Chalk & Blade, a London podcast production company founded by two ex-BBC staffers in early 2016, caught my attention recently when it announced several production partnerships with big outfits in the U.S., including Puskin Industries and the Rockefeller Foundation. Among their credits: the Malcolm Gladwell-hosted Solvable, Bethany McLean’s Making A Killing (on Luminary), and another paywalled series heading that way later this year.
It’s not every day that you get a small U.K. outfit working on big American shows like this. (Chalk & Blade has four staffers in its Shoreditch office, plus part-time freelancers.) So I put in a call to co-founder Ruth Barnes to find out a bit more about these partnerships, and why they’ve decided to work across the Atlantic rather than focus on U.K. commissioners and…
