“The cool thing about radio is it’s like an island of lost toys,” Tobin Low, the co-host of WNYC’s podcast Nancy, told the audience gathered at the Brooklyn Historical Society.
Indeed, as podcasting has taken off in the past few years, it’s assembled a group of personalities from quite disparate backgrounds. Low, for his part, was previously a professional cellist.
The big-tent nature of podcasting was the theme for the Brooklyn Historical Society’s panel on podcasting last Monday, entitled “A Mic for Every Voice.” The panelists included Low; Nancy co-host Kathy Tu; Jenna Weiss-Berman, the founder of Pineapple Street Media and formerly the director of audio at BuzzFeed; and James T. Green, a producer at Gimlet and cofounder of the podcast Postloudness. Eleanor Kagan, BuzzFeed’s current director of audio, moderated the panel.
The panel quickly addressed one of the aspects that complicate the big-tent narrative: as with other types of media, podcasting tends to
