🍍The EP who helped shape a generation of narrative podcasts

Presented by Acast

⭐️ Great Things Start in Little Rooms

Jack White once told André 3000, “Great things start in little rooms.”

Podcasting was built in these little rooms. On blankets hung as soundproofing, on laptops balanced on laundry baskets, on hosts whispering into USB mics while the rest of the house sleeps. And somehow, out of those tiny spaces, entire worlds emerge. Worlds big enough to move people and shift cultures.

The secret isn’t the size of the room, it’s the permission it gives you. Small rooms let you make something before anyone tells you what it should be.

🎯 Open to Work Spotlight: Rebecca Cunningham

A showcase of podcast creators, editors, and storytellers who are open to work and ready to elevate your next show.

Rebecca Cunningham is the Founder of Cordelia Studios, an award-winning kids' podcast production company. She started the kids' podcast, Girl Tales in 2017 and has since helped build podcasts for Mattel, Realm, National Geographic, Spotify Kids & Family, Sony, America’s Test Kitchen, and tonies. She was honored with the Webby for Best Kids & Family Podcast Episode, a Signal Award, the Kennedy Center’s Next 50 Award, and The Gotham/Variety Audio Honors.

Cool stuff Rebecca’s done:

• Achieved 140k monthly listens, produced 300+ episodes, and 8 seasons of Girl Tales

• Wrote and directed The Barbie Podcast for Mattel

• Currently creating a new kids' podcast about Sephardic Jewish ancestry with the Jewish Writers' Initiative

• Led 2 sold-out kids' podcast events at the Kennedy Center

Roles she’s looking for: 

• Creative Director

• Head of Kids' Content

• Executive Producer

• Audio Producer, Audio Director, Writer

• Associate Producer, Brand Partnerships

Contact Rebecca via LinkedIn.

🎙️ Signal Flow: Henry Molofsky

Industry game changers and valiant minds share their wisdom, adversities, and paths to innovation.

Henry Molofsky is a podcast producer and executive, and one of the creative forces behind some of the most acclaimed documentary podcasts of the past decade, including Hysterical, 9/12, Missing Richard Simmons, and Wind of Change. His work has been named a Pulitzer Prize finalist, twice awarded Podcast of the Year at the Ambies, recognized with an Edward R. Murrow Award, and nominated for a Peabody. Molofsky has also helped launch influential shows like Still Processing with Wesley Morris and Jenna Wortham, Stay Tuned with Preet, and The Severance Podcast with Ben Stiller and Adam Scott. He lives in Los Angeles.

Editor’s note: The following interview has been edited for flow and clarity.

What I look for in a podcast pitch almost always begins with the host and their relationship to the story, their angle, their investment, or simply their passion. For investigative and documentary series, the host needs to be able to write. People hear the performance, but what they often miss is how much writing shapes every moment. If it’s good, you don’t notice it.

People have talked about a “Pineapple Street sound,” but internally the structure was more fragmented. Different senior producers ran their own narrative shows, often without crossing paths at all. What created cohesion was everything around the storytelling: editors like Joel Lovell shaping tone across multiple shows, shared engineers affecting sound, fact-checking embedded into the process, and original composers giving each project its own musical identity.

At Pineapple Street, my job as an executive producer meant initiating all parts of a show. Developing ideas, finding funding, negotiating terms, hiring the team, and setting up the framework a project needed to succeed. But I wasn’t the kind of EP who set things up and walked away. I was in the writing, the reporting, the interviews, the production, essentially acting as a senior producer too. These shows are writing-heavy and reporting-heavy, and even when something sounds off-the-cuff, every word is crafted on the page before it gets to the listener.

Discoverability, though, has only gotten harder. Ten or twelve years ago, if you made a decent investigative show, listeners would find it because there simply weren’t that many. Now there are dozens every week, some great, some not so much. And it’s hard to know what’s what.

Celebrity involvement can help, but only when the celebrity is genuinely invested. Otherwise, the audience feels misled.

Podcast artwork used to be an afterthought for us. We were audio people, and that’s where we put our money. But it became clear that podcasting is not just an audio medium; it’s an internet medium. Artwork matters. The whole visual identity matters. The way it looks on Apple, Spotify, Instagram, in an article, or inside a feed — all of it affects discoverability.

Designers would mock up every draft inside these real environments so we could see how it lived next to other shows. And because podcasts don’t come with built-in visual assets like film does, you have to think more like book publishing.

One of my favorite examples is 9/12. It’s a show about 9/11, and we didn’t want something depressing or literal, but we also didn’t want to lose the connection entirely. We worked with a creative director and a visual artist to explore ideas, like inflated shapes inspired by the Twin Towers, experiments with color, clouds. It was a long process, and I find that fun. Artwork should never be the thing you rush out at the end.

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Risk-taking has shaped many of the shows I’m proudest of. With Wind of Change, we flew to Germany to interview the lead singer of the Scorpions, a big swing financially and logistically. But I believe traveling always pays off. Being there changes what happens. When you show up, scenes occur naturally, and scenes are what make a story move. Reporting is always better when you’re physically present.

A different kind of risk was the score for 9/12. We commissioned an entire soundtrack built on a single instrument: a deep Norwegian tuba. It could have gone very wrong. Instead, because of the composer’s skill, it became one of the elements I’m most proud of. It gave the show a sonic identity you don’t hear anywhere else.

If I had unlimited resources, I wouldn’t chase a single “dream story.” I’d ask writers and thinkers I admire to pitch the thing they don’t think is pitchable. My favorite ideas are the ones I never expected, where the content matches the host or writer perfectly, where there’s a surprising angle or a completely idiosyncratic approach. I don’t want to compete with six versions of the same news-cycle idea. I want the story no one else is making.

And at the heart of it all is collaboration. These shows come from teams of five to ten people working together for long stretches, sometimes more than a year. The chemistry matters. The trust matters. Working with the same researchers, fact checkers, producers, editors, and engineers, it starts to feel like a band. When everyone is firing together, that’s where the good work comes from.

🎧 Podcast of the Week: A Very Merry Iconic Podcast

If you love pop culture served with warmth, wit, and just the right amount of festive sparkle, A Very Merry Iconic Podcast is a delight. Danny and Jenna dive into movies, music, TV, and all things nostalgic with the chemistry of two friends you wish you could join at the table. It’s the perfect listen when you want something light but genuinely joyful.

🥾 Further Exploration: Apple Podcasts unveils the most popular shows and trends of 2025

If you want a snapshot of what listeners actually showed up for this year, Apple’s 2025 Podcast Trends report is worth a scroll. It’s part inspiration, part market check. And a helpful reminder that the medium keeps evolving in ways creators can learn from.

ICYMI:

🎧 The YouTube Trap Most Podcasters Fall Into (And How to Avoid It)

🎉 Celebrating 2 years of The Noise Gate!

🤬 What brands misunderstand about podcast creators (and vice versa)

💡 The Quiet Spark

A weekly question to ignite fresh thinking, stir self-reflection, and fuel your creative process behind the mic.

Who on your team makes the work better, and how can you create more space for that?