The creators of the new podcast series Dig Where You Stand are in it for the long haul. Chicagoan Ben Schuman-Stoler is an experienced audio guy who put in over a decade at Berlin-based book summarisation service Blinkist before leaving to found Kollo Media, while Peter Matthews is The Berliner’s digital editor and a native Londoner. Discussing the decision to structure their show – a documentary-style podcast delving into the shocking number of colonial-era body parts held in Berlin’s museums – into three hour-long episodes, each dense with interviews and archival audio tape, Schuman-Stoler acknowledges that making short fluffy episodes would boost the show’s profile, numerically at least. “In data terms, you can multiply everything by how many episodes you have so the number of absolute downloads will be higher – but [racking up downloads] was never our goal.”
As Spotify chases ad revenue to try to recoup their somewhat hapless investment in the industry (the audio giant spent $500 million purchasing podcast companies like Gimlet Media in 2019), new podcasts tend to be identikit shows in which celebrities interview other celebrities and blowhards blow hard (hello, Joe Rogan), or click-baity exposés of sex cults and cold cases. In short, anything to rack up those downloads. All this makes Matthews and Schuman-Stoler’s series – unabashedly serious, engaged, campaigning – and the thinking behind it all the more refreshing.
“These kinds of deep, complex, dense, long podcasts – and especially history as a category – may not sell the most advertising right away, but they tend to result in a long connection with people, and growth over time,” says Schuman-Stoler. “This is only season one of Dig Where You Stand. I’m very curious about what season seven is going to look like.”
Friends for over a decade (their meet-cute went: football, pub, shared love of books), making a podcast together was something the two men often discussed. But it wasn’t until they followed a hunch of Matthews and attended a symposium on colonial human remains in Berlin last November that they realised they’d found their subject. “When we heard them talk, just this range of voices, we could just tell there was a lot of heat there, and a lot of passion,” says Schuman-Stoler of the international activists and academics present.
“We realised then and there that there was a kind of weight to the subject, a complexity,” Matthews adds.
Just how complex the issue is became clear when they started reporting. “The subject is so large… Those human remains were stolen from all across the world, from all different times in history.”
It was a steeper learning curve for freshman podcaster Matthews, who readily admits he had to learn the art of asking concise questions. “When you’re writing an article, you can see the structure of it much more clearly, whereas with the podcast it’s much more about, well, what tape do we have and how do we build the story from there.” For Schuman-Stoler, fluency in any particular medium is less important than a kind of heat-seeking curiosity. “Knowing when something is interesting or not is the thing that actually makes something good or not. The rest is just dressing.”
Although the pair stress that the “really impressive work” on repatriation is being done elsewhere (“There’s a lot of activism happening; we were just kind of riding on their coat-tails,” says Matthews), they’re both very much convinced of podcasting’s ability to open people’s eyes (or ears) to history’s long tail, and confident too that there’s an audience for it.
In the weeks since the first episodes aired, listeners from Gothenburg, Sweden to New York, New York have got in touch to share stories of appropriated cultural artefacts and remains to be found in their own cities. “Audio is very powerful,” says Schuman-Stoler, pointing to the way people listen to podcasts while doing something else. “I really like the idea of somebody biking around Berlin or riding the S-Bahn and listening to this series while they look at the city. That might change the way they’re thinking about their space, how it’s affecting them and who they are.”
“The head of the Museum of Pre- and Early History [in Berlin] said to us at some point, ‘You know Vienna’s got thousands of human remains, the British Museum’s got thousands, the Hermitage in St. Petersburg too’,” says Matthews. “I thought, well wouldn’t it be great if everybody started to investigate? If there were thousands of people doing this work of digging and turning up where the stuff comes from, of putting pressure on people to address this world-spanning crime. Wouldn’t that be fantastic?”
- Listen to Dig Where You Stand wherever you get your podcasts
