Coming to ETH on December 19, 2024!
Doors at 6:30pm | Show starts at 7pm - Moderated by Suzy DeYoung and Lee Shull
Brian Reed is the host and co-creator of the groundbreaking podcast S-Town, and co-host and co-creator of the hit podcast from Serial Productions and the New York Times, The Trojan Horse Affair. Reed was also a longtime producer at the public radio show and podcast This American Life, where he oversaw the show for years as its senior producer alongside host Ira Glass. He currently runs his own production company with fellow This American Life veteran Robyn Semien. His new project, a bi-weekly series titled Question Everything (September 2024), is an exploration of journalism itself, starting with his own work and the experience of being questioned as a journalist.
The seminal series S-Town won widespread critical praise and shattered audience records with more than 100 million downloads. Reed spent 3 years reporting and writing S-Town, which began when a man named John B. McLemore asked Reed to investigate an alleged murder in his small Alabama town. S-Town won a Peabody Award for being a “pioneering classic of the form”, is being developed into a feature film by director Tom McCarthy and Participant Media, and received broad acclaim for elevating audio storytelling into the realm of great literature. As Rebecca Mead wrote in The New Yorker, “Among the half-million products released in podcasting’s brief history, it is “S-Town”...that seems most likely to endure as a work of art.”
In 2022 Reed teamed up with new journalist Hamza Syed to co-host the eight-part podcast The Trojan Horse Affair, an investigation into who authored a mysterious letter that wreaked havoc in Britian in 2014. Syed was a journalism student when he and Reed started reporting The Trojan Horse Affair, and their dynamic and friendship has prompted critics to praise the series as a buddy comedy” of investigative journalism. Fresh Air declared it “Serial’s best podcast since S-Town”; Guardian columnist Owen Jones called it “the most sensational podcast of the year - exposing a huge scandal damning our society, politics, and media.” The Trojan Horse Affair spent weeks as number one on the podcast charts, was downloaded more than 13 million times in its first month, and stirred controversy in Britain – prompting calls for a public inquiry and the reopening of legal cases at the same time that politicians were denouncing the series in the House of Lords. The Trojan Horse Affair is now being adapted into a TV series starring Riz Ahmed.
