Another Round

» see buzzfeed.com/anotherround as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Tracy Clayton and Heben Nigatu were both writing for BuzzFeed when they started recording a podcast about whatever they wanted, with a drink in hand as the running structure. Episode one landed on 24 March 2015. The drinking was not the joke so much as the permission: a format where two Black women could sit down with someone and let the conversation go wherever it went, including into mental health and the parts of American racial life that an interview show usually walks around.

It worked very fast. iTunes put it in the Best of 2015. The Guardian's Sasha Frere-Jones called the hosts leading American cultural critics. Guests over the run included Ta-Nehisi Coates, Roxane Gay, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Issa Rae, and in one of the stranger bookings of the 2016 cycle, Hillary Clinton sat for an episode while running for president. Lizzo appeared on it years before most people knew the name.

The show ran 113 numbered episodes plus bonus material and a run of shorter installments called Shots. Panoply handled distribution. By the time it ended, Forbes had put Nigatu on its 30 Under 30 list and the show was being cited as the thing BuzzFeed had got right about audio.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

Episode 112 went out on 20 December 2017 under the title "Dearest Y'all, We Have Some News". BuzzFeed had decided to stop producing it. What makes the ending unusual is what came with the decision: the company gave the hosts ownership of the show rather than keeping it on a shelf, which almost never happens when a publisher exits a format. Clayton and Nigatu said they were going on an indefinite hiatus and would work out what to do with it.

Episode 113, "Our 2017 Kwanzaa Spectacular!", was recorded live at the Bell House in Brooklyn and posted on 27 December 2017. The hiatus started there and has not ended. The hosts later said plainly that they were exhausted, that anxiety and depression had been part of the last stretch of making it, and that owning a show is not the same thing as having the energy to make one.

~ the sales problem ~

Jonah Peretti said afterward that BuzzFeed had been bad at selling podcasts to advertisers and bad at selling content made for Black audiences, and he called that inexcusable. Few people in that chair say such a thing out loud about their own company, and it dates the problem precisely: the show was not short of listeners, it was short of a sales team that knew how to price them.

The show was American in a register that did not export. The show's register was Black American and its references assumed you had been following the same arguments in the same magazines, and a lot of the pleasure in it came from recognizing people before they were famous. From Ankara I came to it late and through the back catalog, which means I heard it as a finished object rather than as the weekly thing it was built to be. The 2016 Clinton episode in particular reads very differently when you already know how the election went.

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