The art of the podcast review: Times critic James Marriott tells all on how he tackles the fast-growing media form

How do you review a podcast? It is a question I, and I should suspect most of my colleagues in this section, have found ourselves asking repeatedly. It is somewhat of an erratic art form, some repetitive bordering on plagiarism, others almost beyond the confines of explanation. Many will stick to a firm outline, hugging a theme or structure closely. Others are about as rambling and unpredictable as standard human conversation. But what do you do if you have to review a podcast for a prestigious national newspaper?

It is a question that James Marriott, columnist at The Times, had to ask himself when he found himself becoming the paper’s new podcast critic. “It was one of those slightly random things that happens at newspapers,” he explained of his origins, perhaps partly even a little bemused at how it had happened himself.

We’ve all heard of book critics, film critics or food critics. But a podcast critic?

“I had predominantly been writing about books, but I had also been mainlining episodes of In Our Time. I had come into work one day looking quite tired, and my boss was concerned. When I explained the reason, he suggested I could start to write some podcast reviews. At the point I started, I probably didn’t listen to loads. But now it has all become so much more massive.” 

Massive indeed, but unlike books, the media form James had previously become used to lending his words to, podcasts have no identifiable literary canon. We’ve all heard of book critics, film critics or food critics. But a podcast critic? “I think the main problem is that podcasts are so much more random,” Marriott posited. “If you are a film reviewer talking about a new film, you can mention a certain number of really established films which everyone has seen. But podcasting is so much more diffuse and there is so much more divergence amongst the reviewing, that it becomes hard to replicate or follow.”

The Times columnist largely learned by practice as opposed to theory, resolving there was no other way to hone his new skill. But he did face some initial setbacks. “One of the ways the audience has changed is that when I first started you’d always get at least one comment saying, ‘What’s a podcast?’ But that doesn’t necessarily happen now.”

He also faces another rather glaring problem: there is something inherently personal and intrusive about podcasts. People can be as protective about them as their favourite book or band, perhaps even more so. The trepid reviewer places themselves between listener and podcaster at their peril, and sometimes it can lead to backlash. “There are a lot of very popular podcasts which cater to a particular niche of people, and outside of that niche, few people have heard of them,” James summarised. “This is just one of those quirks of the internet age. But people can find it quite aggravating to see them reviewed objectively. It is almost a ritual in book writing or TV producing to have your content reviewed, yet this is just not comparable for podcasts.”

People don’t think broadcasting is skill. Some celebrities look at it and just think it is easy.” 

The podcasts Marriott reviews are certainly not exclusive to your more artistic and well thought out shows (James cites The New York Times’s Nice White Parents as an example of that strand of podcasts.) Those which are just two blokes (or, starkly more rarely, two women) sitting in a room are as “perennially fascinating”, in his view. But it is true that the latter are also the ones which more regularly draw his ire. And if you were worried about Marriott holding back, fear not. ‘Ghastly social phenomenon’ and ‘common ground of vacuousness’ are just two of the phrases the writer has used in relation to recent subjects. And just a few days before we spoke on Zoom back in February, he had written a piercing column (unrelated to podcasts) lamenting the rise of talentless celebrity. I couldn’t help but feel he was drawing quite strongly on his podcast-reviewing pursuits, and put it to him that the crossover was quite extensive.  “There was actually a paragraph in the original edit about it,” he said, confirming my suspicions, “but I figured I had whinged on about it so much elsewhere it probably shouldn’t make the cut. But podcasting is dreadful for this. People don’t think broadcasting is skill. Some celebrities look at it and just think it is easy.”

He continued: “There are a whole series of car crash examples which have been some of the most fun to review as I get to be so vicious. Tom Daley did a terrible one. He was so boring to listen to and was trying to interview celebrities, but had none of the instincts you needed. Jameela Jamil also did one about dating, despite having been in a really long-term relationship, and it just came over as really patronising and smug.”

He wonders aloud if it may be a short-term trend, given how unfruitful some of them have proven. But the podcast industry at large seems to face bigger problems. Despite suggestions that this year the audio form will reach 505 million listeners, many of the biggest streamers are beginning to rethink their commitment. After attempting to muscle in on the market by creating huge podcast departments and securing wide-ranging broadcast deals, companies such as Spotify are now beginning to count their pennies more wisely, leaving job cuts to follow in tow.

As James detailed, it bodes badly for some of the industry’s most enlightening output. “A lot of media companies bet quite big on sending journalists to investigate the fentanyl crisis, or corruption in Colombia. They are expensive to make and rigourous to research but have become simply unsustainable due to the decline in digital advertising. The other cascading effect of being able to sell on the intellectual property to Netflix or other big streamers also just hasn’t happened either, so it has been quite a grim time for the industry.”

The future, in James’s view, lies more with a different kind of podcast. “We have seen the huge explosion of this ‘two guys talk about politics’ genre. People love those parasocial, feeling like the silent third party setups. I think that’s where it is going.” Such a move might prove bad news for the podcasting industry, but good news for Times readers. For as long as James Marriott dons his helmet and pulls on his hazmat suit to wade through the bad and the ugly in our service, no podcast, however ‘ghastly’ or ‘vacuous’, will go unreviewed. I think I’ll drink to that.