Matthew Shaer Still Believes in Podcasts

In the beginning, there was the podcast boom, and with it came the kind of resources that few long-form creators could resist. Matthew Shaer, who spent more than a decade as a freelance magazine writer, for publications like New York and the Times Magazine, was among those who felt the draw. “There was the money to report,” Shaer said recently. Over the next several years, he would become a leading figure in the audio revolution, specializing in a kind of elevated true-crime storytelling. Over My Dead Body, released in 2019, retraced the killing of a Florida attorney; Suspect (2021) examined a 2008 murder at a Halloween party outside Seattle, and won the Ambie for Best True Crime Podcast. In 2020, he cofounded the podcast studio Campside.

Podcasting has changed since then; as Shaer acknowledges, there “is now no longer a boom.” In its place is the rise of a kind of talk show–cum-podcast—one-on-one conversations that are filmed and intended to be watched as much as listened to. In his newest project, Shaer splits the difference. Origin Stories, which launches next week, is a series of conversations with journalists, memoirists, novelists, and screenwriters about the creative process—some with video, some audio-only. Among the guests for season one are New Yorker staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe, Fargo showrunner Noah Hawley, and Pulitzer-winning podcaster Connie Walker. “There’s a selfishness to it,” Shaer said. “I’m the audience for the Paris Review interviews where writers talk about what pen they use, or how they outline something, and whether they use index cards, or how many cups of coffee they have to have before they set pen to paper. That is what I really want to hear.” This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.