Podcasts 2023: KILLED resurrects dead stories and gives journalists the opportunity for revenge
Podcast KILLED resurrects dead stories and gives journalists the opportunity for revenge.
Part of journalism is punching up while becoming familiarised with falling down. Hard.
Getting a story published is hard yakka and there’s a million reasons a yarn might be spiked before publication.
Reporters can also – shock horror – get things wrong or misunderstand the facts.
Podcast KILLED, hosted by journalist Justine Harman from media company audiochuck, resurrects dead stories and gives journalists the opportunity for revenge.
By which I mean unloading on their editors. And occasionally reflecting on their mistakes, which is a big deal for writers and journalists.
Think of it as the journalist’s answer to the revenge film Oldboy but in a podcast. Kill Bill eat your heart out.
And a lot of these yarns sound like genuinely good reads. Have you watched The Shrink Next Door, starring Will Ferrell and Paul Rudd?
The AppleTV series about a manipulative psychiatrist and a vulnerable patient was originally a feature that was shelved.
Good thing the writer didn’t give up. This reviewer wonders how the editor that booted the piece feels now.
Overall, this podcast is good. Hell hath no fury like a journalist scorned. And reporters unload with a grandiosity that has to be heard to be believed.
Paul Pringle, from the Los Angeles Times, describes his work as “righteous damage” as he dishes to listeners on why an expose on a dodgy doctor busted with an overdosed girl was spiked.
Pringle has a number of theories as to why his story was spiked and we hear from the editors themselves. Listeners can make up their own minds.
The media is regularly and fairly accused of navel gazing. It’s partly why social media platform Twitter became so boring.
But this podcast has enough meat, thanks to the journalists using the opportunity to vent their spleens and resuscitate their spiked stories.
Another one is Harman’s own yarn about how Elle spiked a feature in 2015 after she spent nine months working on the story. It was a feature on mothers who love gay porn stars, dubbed “porn mums”.
There are women in their 50s who send gifts to gay adult actors and attend events to act in an assistant capacity such as managing the merchandise.
So they are, in a sense, mums who also act as mums to gay porn stars. “I’ve read the piece multiple times,” says Harman of her own work.
“I think it’s OK. I can see some immaturity there, a few lines make me cringe, but I’m also reminded of details I have totally forgotten.”
Imagine reading something over and over again for years. Any writer would go insane, which might explain why a lot of them are a bit fruity.
Listeners hear from the journalists’ original primary sources, so there’s a rigour beneath the narrative.
Other spiked stories include an essay on rock legend Phil Spector’s death, a piece on Mormon elders and a secretive cruise liner for the mega rich.
All sound like great yarns and while you can’t read about them, you can hear them on KILLED.
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