And now, the Paul Wells No-Show

I'm ending regular production of my podcast. Here's why.

Me in 2018, when I started the interview series that later became a podcast

In September of 2022, when this newsletter was five months old, I announced that the time had come to make “a big bet on in-depth conversation” with a new podcast, which I called The Paul Wells Show. In a lot of ways that bet paid off nicely. I’m proud of the podcast. But after three seasons, I’m cashing in my chips. I’m ending production of The Paul Wells Show as a weekly podcast.

This decision was hard to make. It came as a surprise to some people who were ready to work with me on making a fourth season. While the show’s had a rocky couple of years behind the scenes — twice losing the institutional support that came from partnerships with large universities — I had every reason to believe I could now make the podcast work with advertiser support. Indeed I’ve been curious to see how advertisers would welcome a chance to put their money where my mouth is. The Paul Wells Show has a good story to tell. The audience it reaches in any given month quintupled in the last year. More people are listening than ever, by a lot, and it’s a highly-educated, influential audience.

But in recent days, I’ve begun asking myself a different question: Is podcasting where I can keep doing my best work? That led to a different answer.

Podcasting uses production skills I don’t have, and time I don’t want to spend on editing, so I need a team. That costs money, more than the newsletter, which is a solo act. The costs were borne first by the Munk School at the University of Toronto, then by the Max Bell School at McGill University and their founding patron, the Max Bell Foundation. Neither arrangement lasted as long as I’d hoped. Time to try advertising.

I had good talks with professionals who have a track record of making political podcasts work in Canada. It works best if I make a lot of episodes, and if I read advertisers’ ads, essentially making myself their pitchman.

These are fair things to ask. In fact they’re routine in podcasting. I don’t skip a beat when I hear Bill Simmons or Prof G read commercials.

But the year-round production schedule started to look like a hamster wheel. A lighter schedule could be imagined, but it’d reduce advertiser interest. And as for the ads… Look, sometimes I’m wrong about something, but at least I’m the one who’s wrong. I didn’t want anyone in any corner of my audience to wonder who they’re hearing when they hear my voice, not ever.

One more thing. I’ve been going through my stats. The posts on this Substack that get the most likes, comments, new subscriptions and shares are consistently the written posts. I mean, here are my top posts, from throughout the life of this newsletter, ranked by audience and engagement. You have to go through more than 90 of them before you hit the top podcast episode. It’s like you’ve all been trying to tell me something.

I recorded a really good interview last week with Brian Stewart, the veteran CBC foreign correspondent who’s got a new memoir coming out. We’ll post that episode in mid-September, after the book hits the market. I don’t expect to have any more podcast episodes after that. I’ll still do audio and video — but occasionally, when it suits the material, or on the spur of the moment when news is breaking. I won’t polish it up to quite the same gloss before sharing it. You’ll find it here, and maybe on my Youtube channel, but probably not on every podcast platform under the sky. The time I save can go into more elaborate reporting and more focussed writing. I’ll try to keep getting better at the work I do best.

I’ve been doing interviews my entire adult life. I started letting audiences listen to the interviews in 2018, when I began interviewing newsmakers at the National Arts Centre for a magazine. That series went online during the COVID lockdown — and then it became this podcast, essentially without a pause when I went independent. So I’ve been doing this for something like eight years. I’m grateful that so many people gave thoughtful answers to my questions, and that a growing audience gave this work their time and attention.

I hope you’ll keep reading.