Time magazine’s list of the 100 greatest podcasts boasts some serious Philly ties

Philadelphia found itself well-represented on Time magazine’s list of the 100 greatest podcasts of all time released this week.

Time culture correspondent Eliana Dockterman assembled the auditory smorgasbord in an attempt to “find the best of the best,” she wrote.

Some of Dockterman’s picks featured Philly natives. The New York Times’ Still Processing, co-hosted from 2016 to 2022 by Philly native and Pulitzer-winning culture critic Wesley Morris, earned its place as “appointment listening for anyone who cared about the capital-C, Culture,” Dockterman wrote. Co-host J Wortham has largely returned to life beyond the microphone as a Times critic, while Morris launched a solo podcast, Cannonball, this summer.

Alex Cooper, who rose from relationship adviser to interviewing the likes of former Vice President Kamala Harris as host of Call Her Daddy, grew up in Newtown in Bucks County, where she says her experiences at a Catholic school called St. Andrew scarred her for life — and informed her later work.

Another name in the top 100, Gene Demby, grew up in South Philadelphia before embarking on a journalism career that eventually took him to the host’s chair at NPR’s Code Switch. Two producers on the network’s flagship race and identity program, Leah Donella and Xavier Lopez, can also trace their reporting roots to WHYY, Philly’s NPR News affiliate.

One of the longest-tenured voices on Dockterman’s list, Terry Gross, hails from Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, and went to college in Buffalo. She’s hosted and produced WHYY’s Fresh Air since 1975, airing thousands of interviews across the country through the NPR network; veteran broadcast journalist Tonya Mosley joined Gross as co-host in 2023.

And the Ringer’s Chris Ryan, a frequent co-host of Bill Simmons’ The Rewatchables, grew up not far from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Ryan told the Longform podcast, another top 100 title, in 2022. His father, Desmond Ryan, reviewed films and theater as a critic for The Inquirer.

Ryan has hosted or appeared as a guest on more than one of Time’s favorites. Ditto for PJ Vogt, the Philly native who hosted Gimlet Media’s Reply All until a 2021 labor organizing controversy sparked his ouster. Vogt launched another of Time’s top 100 shows, Search Engine, in 2023.

Kelsey McKinney, who resides in Queen Village, was the founding host of Defector’s Normal Gossip, which created narrative out of legendary friend group lore. She bequeathed her hosting duties to Rachelle Hampton last year and released You Didn’t Hear This From Me in February.

At least two shows feature famous figures from the Philly sports scene. The eponymous host of Pablo Torre Finds Out was once an ESPN reporter who helped link the Sixers-rebuild rallying cry “Trust the Process” to Philly. And New Heights, hosted by the Super Bowl-winning duo of retired Eagles center Jason Kelce and Kansas City tight end Travis Kelce, was among six sports pods to get the nod, thanks in part to the “easygoing, no-holds-barred rapport between the brothers, and their guests,” in the words of senior sports correspondent Sean Gregory.

Philadelphia doesn’t just show up in hosts’ pasts. The city often looms large in their reporting, too.

The third season of Slate’s Slow Burn centered on the killings of Tupac Shakur and Christopher “Biggie” Wallace, natives of Oakland and Brooklyn, respectively. But it also featured an extended riff on C. Delores Tucker, the North Philly-born civil rights icon whose campaign to sanitize gangsta rap ran aground as the hip-hop community mourned its icons in the late 1990s.

Morris has dedicated episodes and segments of Still Processing to local R&B legend Patti LaBelle’s place among the greatest women musicians of all time; the Frankie Beverley and Maze hit “Before I Let Go”; and the Vine Street Expressway’s impact on Chinatown. That last episode released in June 2022, less than a month before team executives targeted the other side of the neighborhood for a new Sixers stadium. The podcast version of ESPN’s Oscar-winning 30 for 30 docuseries adapted the story of former Philadelphia Eagle Reggie White’s life and faith to audio. And Code Switch in May featured the story of veteran local journalist Linn Washington Jr., who recently hosted a podcast of his own about the 1985 police bombing of a West Philadelphia environmentalist sect in collaboration with The Inquirer and Temple University’s Logan Center for Urban Investigative Reporting.