There’s long been discussion of the challenges media face in trying to accurately promote pieces of content that cover multiple topics, such as a newscast or a podcast. This intensifies further when the topics are of wildly-differing severity. And Stephen A. Smith’s handling of this around his latest podcast, which discussed the fatal shooting of Black woman Sonya Massey by a sheriff’s deputy in Illinois, as well as Smith’s thoughts on Boston Celtics’ star Jayson Tatum, took plenty of criticism. Here’s some of the reaction to Smith’s tweet promoting that podcast:
This wasn’t just about the tweet, as the YouTube description of Smith’s podcast is the same: “Another horrifying police shooting, does Tatum lack aura? Inside the NBA done, more.” But this played particularly poorly on X/Twitter. And some of that’s about the way the platform works; for those quickly seeing this in a feed, it’s not obvious it’s a full podcast being discussed until the clip at the end. But Smith could have alleviated that at least somewhat by flipping the order of his sentences, or with any number of other things to make it clear how distinct these subjects were, such as separate sentences and/or an “Also.”
Beyond that, there’s a wider discussion to be had there about the pros and cons of working such disparate topics into a podcast. Of course, this kind of incongruity is certainly seen in other mediums as well, particularly with hour-long TV and radio newscasts that cover a wide variety of areas. There can be similar things in print or digital journalism as well, particularly with email roundups of top stories, but sometimes even from reader reactions to wildly-different stories being placed close together on a frontpage or homepage.
But a change with podcasts is it doesn’t necessarily have to be that way. Unlike newscasts where the news (plus commercials) is very specifically set for an hour timeframe, podcasts can generally be as long or as short as the host desires. And Smith certainly takes advantage of that; this episode was 37 minutes long, but his two previous ones (an episode-long interview with Democratic delegate Areva Martin and an episode covering a variety of sports and political topics , including an interview with journalist Roland Martin) came in at 56 and 71 minutes respectively. So it is at least possible to think Smith could have done his thoughts on the shooting of Massey (which covered the first nine minutes of this podcast) as something separate.
There are arguments against that too, of course. A nine-minute “episode” is difficult with podcasts’ distribution setup, and Smith has a number of endorsement deals that probably require certain things for episodes. And there is an argument for including them with other topics of “This might get people who only come to Stephen A. for NBA content to listen to his thoughts here.”
But there certainly are ways Smith could have gotten his thoughts out on the shooting here out without accompanying them with a quick pivot to takes on Tatum’s “aura.” That could have been with a standalone nine-minute video on this, the expansion of it to a full episode with an interview, or even just the pairing of this with other topics more serious than what level of “aura” a Boston Celtics’ player has. And those approaches, or even just a rephrasing of how he promoted this on X/Twitter, might have led to less criticism for him.
[Stephen A. Smith on X/Twitter]
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