Why Normal Gossip’s Creators Are Stepping Away

Did you hear what happened? After almost three years of dispensing delightfully juicy gossip sourced from ordinary people, the beloved Normal Gossip is coming to a close … in its current iteration, anyway. This week, the podcast released a season finale announcing that its creators, host Kelsey McKinney and Alex Sujong Laughlin, are leaving the show to focus on other projects. But it isn’t ending outright. Succeeding McKinney as chief gossip-slinger will be Rachelle Hampton, the former host of Slate’s internet culture podcast ICYMI, whom regular listeners will recognize as a recurring guest on the show since its inception. Joining Hampton as co–gossip curator will be her old ICYMI producer, Se’era Spragley Ricks.

It’s an appropriately exciting move for a team that’s always been smart about handling its business. Normal Gossip debuted in early 2022 as part of Defector Media, the creator-owned indie publishing operation, and swiftly became a purely organic hit — something that’s practically unheard of in the podcast world these days. The show also did things on its own terms: committing to a restrained release schedule, only delivering episodes its creators believed in, preserving work-life balance. “We would like to grow … but I’m not gonna turn in a terrible product that people don’t like so that we can make 50 mediocre episodes a year,” McKinney told me in 2022. “The goal here is to make something good, and because we were given the space to make something good, we did.” Audiences agreed: Normal Gossip has now garnered around 45 million downloads across the 70 episodes it’s published to this date.

McKinney and Laughlin’s decision to step away is consistent with their philosophy of doing things their way. So is their decision to pass the show on to Hampton and Ricks, who are eager to usher Normal Gossip into a new era. “We’re just so proud of having built a thing that works with a stable, humane production process that we can give someone else in this horrific media environment,” Laughlin tells me now. Longtime fans will still have the opportunity to commune with McKinney around the subject of gossip when her book, You Didn’t Hear This From Me: Notes on the Art of Gossip, comes out next year. But for now, there’s the season finale, which sees McKinney passing the torch off to Hampton mid-episode.

To commemorate the big change, Vulture convened McKinney, Laughlin, Hampton, and Ricks to talk about the transition, what they’ve learned about human nature’s relationship with gossip, and their favorite episodes from the original era.

Kelsey and Alex, tell me about your decision to step away.

Alex Sujong Laughlin: So the both of us have been going 150 percent on the show for the last three years, and we’re proud because we’ve basically gotten it down to a science. It’s now this beautiful conveyor-belt production process! But over the past year, with Kelsey’s book coming out and two of us trying to make more space for other projects, we were trying to figure out how to square all that with this giant thing we do, which is Normal Gossip.

Kelsey McKinney: We really feel like we’ve built something that doesn’t depend on a single person. The whole time we ran the show, I’d joke that if I died, everything would be fine.

All of us have seen shows that have lasted beyond when they should have because they became popular and were making money. - Alex Sujong Laughlin

Laughlin: Rachelle joined Defector back in July, and she started coming to meetings regularly because she’s a friend of ours and part of the Normal Gossip universe since the very beginning. The idea for her to take over just came up over a series of conversations, and eventually we started to think, Oh my gosh, this might be exactly what all of us want.

Did it take time to warm up to the idea at all, Rachelle and Se’era? Or was saying “yes” pretty instant?

Rachelle Hampton: It wasn’t a hard sell at all. I’ve been a fan of Normal Gossip since well before it started. I remember recording my first episode as a guest with Kelsey in 2021 and thinking, This podcast was made specifically for me — like Kelsey had looked into my brain and thought, Rachel wants a podcast; here it is. So when I started at Defector and joined the meetings and saw how the show actually got made, I just couldn’t help thinking, This is kind of a dream job.

Se’era Spragley Ricks: I’ve been a fan of the show since the beginning too. I enjoyed being Rachelle’s producer when we both worked on ICYMI, so to be able to be her producer again on a show I love was a super-easy choice.

Was there ever a possibility you might have ended the show outright?

McKinney: One thing Alex and I have talked about since the beginning is how we believe that a show should run for as long as people are excited to make it. There wasn’t ever a point where we were like. “Oh, we’re gonna end it.” But before Rachelle came on, we did start to have conversations about how long we could sustainably do this while having a good time and making a good show.

Laughlin: All of us have seen shows that have lasted beyond when they should have because they became popular and were making money. I can think of several shows that I loved so much but it’s clear they just lost the fire for it …

McKinney: Name names!

Laughlin: [Laughs.] We’re just so proud of having built a thing that works with a stable, humane production process that we can give someone else in this horrific media environment. It’s also a real gift to be able to bring people who are fresh and can breathe new life into it, you know? People who haven’t read 10,000 gossip submissions in the last three years or whatever.

Rachelle and Se’era, what differences should we expect? Do you reckon you have different tastes in gossip than Kelsey and Alex?

I can tell you the content of, say, the Civil War and make it sound like gossip, because part of what we’ve learned from the show is that there’s a very specific tone and cadence that exists within gossip. - Kelsey McKinney

Hampton: That’s an interesting question. I think most gossipmongers have similar tastes. All of us have a shared sense for what makes a good story, a good piece of gossip. But there are going to be changes, right? The most visible of which is that the show is being taken over by two Black women. Both Se’era and I have roots in the South, and both of those communities — Southern, Black — have rich traditions of oral storytelling in addition to having just such a profound love of gossip.

Ricks: I think about Ressa Tessa a lot, who captured the attention of the entire internet earlier this year, and one thing I always thought was, like, She could’ve been my cousin! Not that my cousin was in a scamming situation or anything, but just the way she told that story felt so familiar to me.

Hampton: Normal Gossip has always had incredibly diverse guests — it’s one of the things I respect the most about it — but I’m excited to have that perspective built in from the stories that we pick to how we choose to tell the story to the phrasing we use to the guests we pick to the sound designer we use. We’re still figuring all of that out, of course.

Let’s shift into a quick retrospective here. Kelsey and Alex, looking back at the show you’ve made, what have you learned about the nature of gossip and why people like it?

McKinney: Ha, that question is basically all I think about now — how gossip has affected us, the way that it works in the world, how it’s changed in my imagination over the course of the last three years. I think the thing making the show has taught me the most is this idea that much of what we call “gossip” is actually a tone more than anything else. It’s not the content itself, right? I can tell you the content of, say, the Civil War and make it sound like gossip, because part of what we’ve learned from the show is that there’s a very specific tone and cadence that exists within gossip. And I think this is true across all cultures: It comes down to tonality when you shift a conversation and say, “Oh my God, did you hear this?” That’s part of why the audio medium has been so good for this show. You can feel it in people’s voices, right? We can hear it in the difference between when people are getting warmed up before we record and the moment they switch into gossip mode. It’s innate on some level.

And what has making Normal Gossip taught you about making podcasts?

Laughlin: That it’s not that hard to treat people well. That it’s not that hard to have a humane production calendar and workload. That it’s not even that expensive!

Hampton: I’ll second that. Watching this show from behind the scenes helped me realize that not only is the humane pace they’ve created is sustainable and not gonna kill you, but it also just makes the show so much better. There’s this idea out there of “content over everything” — just keep pumping things out! I so admire how Kelsey and Alex have done a great job of sticking to the belief that the show will be so much better if they don’t crunch out new episodes every single week of every single year.

McKinney: And you know, Nick, that’s what everyone tried to get us to do early on. Everyone was, like, “Please do two episodes a week.” And we were like, “We will die.”

Laughlin: Yeah, we would’ve probably made a lot of money, and maybe the show would’ve been bigger, but it would have been for nothing. We would have become husks. We wouldn’t be the best versions of ourselves at all.

I would like to hear from each of you what your favorite episode is so far.

McKinney: He’s trying to get us canceled. [Laughs.] You know, I’ve done a good job consistently saying throughout this series that I don’t choose between my children. There is something in every single one of these episodes that I think is great; otherwise we wouldn’t have published them. And we’ve killed episodes before that are fully recorded because we were like, “It’s not good enough for our standards.”

Laughlin: My answer would be “the last one.”

McKinney: Yeah, in some ways, Alex’s answer is the right one. It’s always the most recent episode that I’m like, “Oh yeah, this one fucks.”

Hampton: For me, the episode I relisten to the most is a toss-up between the bird lamp episode [“Spot the Scammer,” with Claire Fallon and Emma Gray], which is iconic, but also “Short King of East Texas,” with Who? Weekly’s Lindsey Weber and Bobby Finger.

Ricks: This is a tough one! I love the one with Brittany Luse [“MFAs and Other Mistakes”].

What’s the episode that people talk to you the most about?

McKinney: Oh, Rachelle’s knitting circle [“Can I Say Something Bitchy?”], which is a really early one that people talk about all the time.

Laughlin: Bird lamp definitely comes up a lot. The landlord one [“Vigilante Renovation,” with Jasmine Guillory] as well.

McKinney: “Splitting the Dog Vote,” which was with David Roth — people are constantly talking about that episode too.

Laughlin: Squeezing the peaches [“Every Peach is a Miracle” with Samin Nosrat] comes up surprisingly often, especially when peaches come back into season.

Last question, and this should be familiar: Kelsey and Alex, what’s your relationship with gossip moving forward?

Laughlin: Oh, I’ll always be attached to it in some way. When the show took off, people started coming up to me constantly and being like, “Can I tell you this thing?” I think that’s gonna continue, and I am grateful for that because it’s provided a really nice way to build relationships with strangers.

McKinney: I’m excited for my relationship with it to be less professional. To be able to accept those stories on the street without people being like, “You can’t use it.” Because I was never gonna use it anyway. And I’m excited to not have to filter everything through the little cog in my brain: “Wait, can I use this? What can I keep?” It has kind of polluted my ability to consume stories, and I’m excited for that to be leisure again.

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