I Don't Understand What Happened at WBEZ, Part I
A Former CDU Staffer’s Reflections on the Years before the Layoffs
I have a lot of thoughts and feelings swirling around after getting word that Chicago Public Media laid off fourteen people Wednesday, eliminated Vocalo and the Podcast unit, and that several friends were among those laid off. I’m frustrated, angry, and hurt, and feel concerned for my friends.
I’m trying to sort through my strong feelings and make sense of what happened, and why it happened. Among my friends and colleagues, there is a lot of anger directed at CPM’s leadership, and notably, the outgoing CEO, Matt Moog. (Some directed towards the board, but since nobody knows anybody on the board apparently, I’m seeing less of that)
This account is written as I remember it. I have a pretty good memory, and I’ve tried to bolster my memory with some notes and double check the dates, but I don’t have an editor, and mistakes are possible. I can say that this is how 2020-2022 felt to me at WBEZ and I hope this will be useful for all of us trying to make sense of the recent collapses of podcasting companies, and layoffs and restructuring in public media companies, particularly those impacting on-demand audio.
I started at WBEZ as the Curious City producer in early 2015, and in the spring of 2020, was promoted to Senior Producer in the podcast unit, not assigned to a particular show at first. For most of 2020, I continued working for the Curious City team, even though they had a new producer, helping them transition from a radio first show to a podcast first show, and also bolstering their team during the early months of the pandemic, when they retooled to do more quick turnaround reporting on developing events.
In late 2020, or early 2021 (best guess, January), then acting CEO Matt Moog called all of us in the CDU (what humans might call the “podcast department”) for a meeting. He explained that he had been making a study of the various podcasts WBEZ worked on at the time, and had some observations.
Interesting, I thought.
For context, Moog had recently been shifted from the Board Chair, relieving Steve Edwards of that role. Steve was drained from being compelled by the CPM board to preside over a round of painful layoffs and left a few months later for another job. It’s a testament to Steve that everybody I know still admires and respects him after that awful period, and one of the reasons was we felt that even though he couldn’t tell us everything about the board’s deliberations, what he did tell us was reliable (note here that other people MAY well feel differently than me about this, particularly those impacted by the layoffs.)
There actually was a new CEO hired, but she later withdrew, so the Board appointed Moog interim CEO. One weird thing that happened around that time: we had a staff meeting and somebody asked him if he planned to apply to the open CEO position, and he told us in a staff meeting he wasn’t interested in it. Looking back on it, that moment was telling, if not augural. Several months later the board announced that Chicago Public Media was acquiring the Chicago Sun-Times, and that the search for a new CEO had been suspended, and Moog was hired. Moog had been orchestrating this truly bold and impressive deal behind the scenes, without the staff having much idea of what was happening.
Now I don’t know, maybe Matt Moog really didn’t think he wanted to be CEO when he told us that in the 2020 meeting. Maybe the board conducted its search and realized “Hey the right guy is here under our nose,” and then convinced him, however reluctantly, to stand for candidacy. That feels unlikely.
It seems like at least part of the merger/acquisition was already in the works at that point. We don’t know, because it was all done very secretly. That acquisition took us, the staff, off guard, and we had mixed feelings about it. We did not like the lack of transparency, but there was something powerful about the idea. In an era of declining revenues for newsgathering, combining forces made sense, and we might create a newsgathering operation that was stronger and healthier than the two constituent parts. BUT, the Sun-Times was thought to be struggling financially, the merger was supported with grant money that would run out in three years, and we worried that WBEZ’s part of the operation might be dragged underwater. That said, most of the staff adopted the attitude that we would try to make it work for the best and there have been some really wonderful aspects of that merger and subsequent collaborations.
There were other moments in which Moog indicated one thing would happen, and something else did. To be fair, in some cases, circumstances may have shifted, but it often felt like Moog was wary of telling the staff at WBEZ the whole truth, or even part of the truth, for fear we wouldn’t go along with his plans. In fact, he said as much to us in a staff meeting at one point. (On reflection, it’s entirely possible that Matt Moog never said he wasn’t interested in the job of CEO, but that what he actually said was he wasn’t interested in applying. That statement proved strictly true. He never applied, he was appointed. Philosopher Harry Frankfurt has a great book about the practice of telling a strictly technical truth, that conveys the wrong impression.)
The irony was, at the time Matt Moog said he didn’t want to be CEO, I think many of us would have welcomed his candidacy. At the time, Moog felt like a breath of fresh air, doing some “adult stuff that needed doing” at WBEZ, like finally hiring enough HR employees (For years, any HR related thing, like extending a job offer, or notifying somebody they did not get a job, took weeks longer than it should, due to understaffing)
Anyway, in that podcast meeting in early 2021, Moog told us that some years before (2016 or 2017?), the CDU had been created and staffed at WBEZ in order to pilot and develop 4-6 podcasts, some of which they hoped would become “hits” and eventually, that the podcast unit would be a source of revenue through advertising, and a means of engaging new audiences who weren’t listen to the daily radio product. That hadn’t happened.
When I heard this, I thought “Great! Yes! Let’s rethink everything we’re doing and pilot some podcasts, and spend some time learning how to grow audience and make them a hit”
In my experience at WBEZ podcasts, we didn’t do “piloting”. When somebody greenlit a new show, a team was assembled — usually the bare minimum of staffing necessary — a launch deadline was set based on somebody’s gut feeling about how long it should take to make a new show. Then, everybody worked like mad for weeks or months to hit the deadline. In my experience, there might be a few group edits with senior editorial types, usually only content people, and no audience testing. I can NEVER remember doing the kind of piloting where you make the “same” show in three different formats, or other kinds of experiments around formatting. In fact, even suggesting that you should test the format, or do group edits would sometimes make people bristle, as though you were suggesting that our team didn’t know how to make podcasts. (One exception, Curious City did do some piloting and format experimentation in 2020)
The show would launch, there’d be cake and an announcement, the production team would go home for a weekend of pizza, sleep, and TV, and then they’d start it over again the next week, and hope like hell the show found an audience, and that they’d find a humane production rhythm before everybody burned out. Between 2018-2024, those hopes were usually disappointed, at least by the standards of the organization’s leadership,
So to me, Moog was suggesting our approach hadn’t been very deliberate and strategic. I agreed. Maybe we could actually look at all the titles we were making as a team, make some observations about what they needed to succeed (in some cases, a more realistic production schedule that would allow us to focus more on innovating format and less on cranking out episodes like a license plate factory). Maybe that would mean ending some and bolstering others with the newly available producers. Maybe we could ACTUALLY do some piloting.
But, it became clear that I had misread the subtext of this meeting. This wasn’t a “let’s rethink everything together” meeting. This was a “shape up or ship out” meeting. We were on notice. Our department was underperforming.
He also told us that spending money on marketing podcasts had failed, and would not happen again. They’d tried spending some amount of money (I think $40,000 or, if you will, .06 Moogs) on some podcast and it hadn’t worked. So, we needed to figure out how to market the podcasts without a budget (but with the help of our marketing team, who did a lot of great scrappy work in this regard)
But it wasn’t all tough talk. Moog acknowledged that some of the initial enthusiasm generated by the early success of public media adjacent podcasts like Serial and the first generation of Gimlet podcasts might have led to unrealistic expectations. There were more podcasts now, and “hits” were harder to come by. So he would give us extra time to figure things out.
Moog wrote four categories on the white board. I don’t remember his language, but they essentially were:
Downloads
Ad Revenue
Engaging Target Audiences (aka. getting people other than middle-aged white people to listen)
Mission
He pointed to the podcast 16 Shots, the brilliant, and powerful investigation into Laquan McDonald’s death, the efforts by members of the Chicago Police Department to spin his death as self-defense and a “good shoot”, the subsequent scandal, investigations, and close gavel to gavel coverage of the trial of Jason Van Dyke. It’s still a powerful record of that time,
He told us that 16 Shots was weak on the first two categories, but he thinks it was a good show for WBEZ because it was very much on mission. In other words, Moog would NOT have killed 16 Shots, despite what he considered a weak audience. That was comforting.
What Moog was saying felt reasonable to me. For an organization like WBEZ, evaluating podcasts based on those four nodes made sense. Sure, we wanted downloads, and we wanted ad revenue. But a podcast could be successful if it engaged new audiences we weren’t reaching through other content, or enhanced our mission.
OK, that’s all pretty reasonable.
The problem is after that, for the next three years, all the institutional priority and all the pressure from the bosses felt focused on the first two categories. I think our team did some great work during that time, work that was on mission, engaged new audiences, and experimented with storytelling forms. And the audience numbers I saw were moving the right direction. But it felt like we were always under pressure to get more downloads and ad revenue. I felt that pressure through my supervisors, who I sensed were feeling it from on high.
During that time, the CDU was slowly bled of resources, (most commonly by not replacing staff who left of their own accord) while being asked to produce more deliverables, and faster. It would be good to fact check this with somebody who worked there in 2023 and 2024, but I’m pretty sure at least three positions have been left unfilled in that time.
I also felt there were inefficiencies in our production processes and that not all of our difficulties were the fault of management. But I don’t think there was much intervention to help us do better.
I left in 2022, feeling burned out, sensing a negative trajectory, and because I was ready to live closer to the ocean and mountains than Chicago could afford. I left when I did partly because I felt that my experience with WBEZ was on the whole positive, and I wanted it to stay that way.
In my last two years, under Matt Moog’s leadership, it sometimes felt like he wanted us to fail, so he’d have an excuse to shutter the CDU. It’s hard to believe that’s really true.
But that’s what happened.
Next time: My thoughts on whether the CEO’s pay and the expensive studio renovation matter, or are distractions from the real factors. (Hint: I don’t know.)