Arielle Nissenblatt (Class of 2010)

Arielle Nissenblatt: When I was in high school, I had no idea what I wanted to do professionally and I was a little worried about that. I did well in the Judaic Studies subjects and Hebrew and I had a lot of extracurricular Jewish experiences so I worked for two years at a non-profit called the Institute of Southern Jewish Life (ISJL) in my first job after college. 

I think Schechter prepared me really well for [undergrad] because I found it relatively easy. I think [the curriculum at Schechter Westchester] was so rigorous and the people in my grade took it seriously. There was a lot of pressure to decide what I wanted to major in and what I was going to do when I started school and I didn’t have an answer to that. Now, as an adult, I realize that’s okay; you can figure the rest out later, but I did not know that right away. 


Q: How and when did you wind up working in the podcast world? 

AN: I can’t even remember if I knew what podcasts were when I graduated from Binghamton in 2014. Growing up, there was a huge emphasis on visual learning and looking at the board and being able to absorb the information there. I’m a very auditory learner and podcasts let me hear information. I think if that had been an option as a student, I might have been more tuned into the classroom or at least able to pick up information in a different way. I’m sure teachers and academic institutions are much more aware now of how to accommodate different types of learners, but I felt like there was such a strong emphasis that if you couldn’t learn one way, then they had to deal with that.

I studied geography in college and minored in Jewish Studies. While working at ISJL after I graduated, where the work was cohort-based, we were on the road all the time, driving from one Jewish community to the next throughout the South. Several of the people in my cohort started listening to “Serial”, and initially, I didn’t want to give in and join them. One trip, I decided to give it a try in secret and realized how much I enjoyed it but I wanted to branch out right away to other podcasts. Working as a communications coordinator gave me the background I needed to ultimately launch my own newsletter about podcasts.


Q: Where did your idea to create the newsletter, EarBuds Podcasts Collective, come from?

AN: I had no idea what I was doing when I first started. The idea came up in January 2017. I was stuck in traffic and listening to my five favorite shows, and thought: how do I listen to more shows when those five favorite shows are done for the week? I don’t want to wait for more because I knew, even at that time, that there were hundreds of podcasts and millions of episodes. How could I get all of the knowledge in the world if I didn’t know that the podcasts were out there? I thought if I have my five favorite podcasts, my mom has hers, my friend probably has hers . . . I sent a survey to my friends and family, and people would send in podcast episodes on a theme and then I would feature them on a rotating basis.

In 2018, I was hired to build out a podcast studio. I did the research and figured it out and learned what to pay people to make it work. During that time, I also did a lot of networking events for podcasters in the space. While I was doing networking events at the co-working space, I was also talking about the newsletter, getting people to subscribe to the newsletter and pay me to run ads for their podcasts on the newsletter, and also getting to speak at podcast events about podcast newsletters and about production and how to build a studio.

AN: That studio job was full-time, but I was also stringing together a whole bunch of other jobs, which was not my ideal. Then, I got a great job at a podcast listening app called Castbox as the business development manager. I was doing in-app promotion, selling ads, and working with podcast creators on how to get their podcasts featured in the app. I was also speaking at conferences on promotion mostly, and how podcasters could get their shows out there to the world. In August 2020, I applied for a job at Squadcast.fm, where I now serve as the community manager. I teach our users who love Squadcast to evangelize the product for other people. I create programs that incentivize them to want to share with others.

AN: I was with Castbox when Covid first hit. There were rumblings that it was changing listening because people didn’t have a commute anymore. But then, a few months into it, there were some surveys done that suggested that people were listening, but they were listening in different ways. They were listening while going on walks, cleaning, and doing the activities that they were picking up that they wouldn’t have been doing otherwise, like crafts. When I started working for Squadcast, I learned that the pandemic was really good for business because it’s a remote recording platform and people could no longer record in person, so they got a huge spike in users to the platform so that was really fun to come into.

AN: Working for a software company, there are going to be people who love the product and people who either don’t love the product or had a negative experience with it one time and they’re going to write negative things on social media. While I’m not in customer service, being a community manager, my job often crosses the line into customer service, especially on social media. Dealing with that with a calm head has been very difficult. Just finding tactics to placate people and make them feel heard and seen. It’s hard to explain that to people when they need to record a session and they have a guest waiting on the other side who is inconvenienced.

In a more general sense, there are so many podcasts out there right now and everyone thinks that their podcast is special and the truth is that there are a lot of different podcasts out there, but how do you tell that to somebody? It’s about managing expectations and letting people know that a podcast is not a silver bullet. There are a lot of companies out there making it very easy for people to make podcasts and that’s great, but not all of those podcasts are going to be monetized.

AN: The podcast space—and when I say that, I mean all of the places on the Internet where podcast people congregate and chat with each other—is extremely collaborative and there are good people in it who want to work with each other and I really like being part of that. I facilitate a lot of collaborations between podcasters. The number one thing I say when people ask how to grow their shows is that they should make a list of all of the podcasters that are in their topic area and they should collaborate with them and I get to make a lot of those connections. Also, I’m really proud that I got in early. By 2018, I knew a lot about the landscape and have been able to teach other people about that and that’s really fun.