Editor’s note: Hot Pod is a weekly newsletter on the podcasting industry written by Nick Quah; we happily share it with Nieman Lab readers each Tuesday.
Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is issue 224, dated September 3, 2019.
What happens in the absence of recognition? “I’ve achieved a peculiar sort of success,” said Nate DiMeo, creator of The Memory Palace, when we spoke over the phone last week on the occasion of the podcast being featured as the subject of a Radiolab episode that dropped last week.
By “peculiar,” DiMeo was referring to what he perceives as the podcast’s cult status, understanding it to be the kind of cultural artifact that may be respected and perhaps beloved by other producers and die-hard podcast fans, but probably won’t end up on the front cover of Variety or the leading anecdote of some mainstream write-up on “the podcasting boom” or whatever.
To contextualize said cult status, DiMeo evoked the Velvet Underground…
