Last week, Tara Palmeri launched her podcast — The Tara Palmeri Show — with a bang, featuring a debate between Democratic advocates James Carville and David Hogg.
It was the latest expansion into the digital media space for the former ABC News, Politico, Puck, and New York Post — among others — reporter. She previously launched a successful Substack account, as well as a YouTube channel that now features nearly 18,000 subscribers.
Despite her past work history, including working for some of the largest legacy media brands today, Palmeri decided to strike out on her. It would be easy to ask why she’d leave the comfort of those outlets to fend for herself.
She believes there’s an easier answer.
“Legacy media breaks a lot of news that’s really important, but they’ve also dropped the ball on a bunch of really big stories and it’s made the audience wary to go towards the institution,” Palmeri said. “It doesn’t help, either, that the Trump administration spent years trashing the media as fake news … I think people in general we’re just thinking they didn’t trust institutions anymore.
“They wanted individual voices. They wanted journalists or commentators that saw their worldview, understood what it was like to be them and wrote in a voice. And they no longer wanted to hear a voice of God from the corporate media sitting at a desk with perfect lighting, perfect hair, and perfectly scripted like a play telling them what the world was like. Suddenly, during COVID, they’re watching it on their screen and it’s not pretty. It’s authentic. It’s real. Sometimes, I try to explain people like ‘Why would you want to be on YouTube or Instagram when you used to be on ABC News in front of the White House?’
“And it’s like, if you were gonna watch an interview with someone that you admire, if it was an actor, sports figure, or athlete, how would you wanna watch them? Would you wanna watch them in their living room, comfortable though kind of a low-grade camera, maybe not too much hair, and make up, just in their element? Would you trust them more when you heard what they said? Or would you want to see them sitting across from Mary Hart with perfect hair and make up, and a setting that’s super controlled?”
She added that that “rawness” of a digital media endeavor is appealing to today’s news consumer, which motivated her to start her efforts.
“I think that people are really demanding that and the connection to the person who’s creating it. If there’s one thing we saw during COVID, it is that people really wanted to connect with the people on their screens because they couldn’t see anyone else. People still want that,” Palmeri said. “They want. They want that feeling of it’s a FaceTime video, they want that feeling that the zoom hasn’t stopped … People are ok with watching and listening to people who are on the other side of the world but can have conversations that they could never have before.
“It’s a great time, too,” she continued. “Not just a fun time but an important time to break the rules a little bit because the rules have already been broken. But now it’s time to break them and maybe remake them or decide what worked and what didn’t.”
The Red Letter, the Substack column written by Palmeri, was created in conjunction with her YouTube channel after she signed a partnership deal with the digital video platform late last year. Tara Palmeri noted that while she initially thought she would spend all of her focus on YouTube, she couldn’t get away from her writing past. Previously working at outlets like the Washington Examiner and writing the ever-popular Playbook for Politico, she said it was a natural fit to find an avenue to share her written thoughts.
“The truth is that I’m a writer,” Palmeri admitted. “And I found myself being drawn to and wanting to write. That’s what I have been doing my whole life, so it’s kinda hard to not go back to what you’ve been good at … I’ve been in newsletters for my whole life so it just kind of makes sense. Plus, you can put the content that you’re making on YouTube in the newsletters.”
With podcasting and YouTube now essentially being ubiquitous, Palmeri found the ability to harness both platforms for dual content roles an advantage, inching closer to 1 million YouTube views as the podcast launched in earnest last week.
She added that deciding which content should live on which platform hasn’t been a challenge.
“I think when you have an interview, it always makes more sense to put it as a YouTube video or podcast, because people want to hear the voice of the person you’re interviewing,” she said. “It’s more dynamic. When I do an investigation that doesn’t necessarily have people on the record, I usually put it on The Red Letter, on my Substack newsletter, because it makes more sense. It’s a more traditional new story, but I do write it in my own voice now, which isn’t what I didn’t do before.
“I kind of almost write it as an old school columnist used to write, always in the first person — kind of overexplaining, in some ways, my reporting process — because I do think that there’s a lack of trust in media. Probably, there would be some more trust, if we can explain how we do our jobs a little bit … It’s bringing people through the process, which is what you’re saying on YouTube with like big stars like Johnny Harris and Cleo Abram. I think that builds a lot of credibility with the audience, so I do that on my Substack.”
As far as the biggest challenge she’s faced since she launch her digital efforts, Tara Palmeri admitted there have been some changes to her process.
“I think managing people, honestly, and managing business,” she said of her biggest hurdles thus far. “I used to be a content creator. I was a journalist, I look for stories. And I look for scoops instead of talking to my producer, my editor, my thumbnail person, and this and that. Instead of spending time talking to the team and getting them ready for the day, I would be on the phone with a source.
“And that’s not to say that I’m still not talking to my sources and reporting. I also spend a lot of time booking, too, to make sure the show is coming along with strong newsmakers. So I guess what I used to do — which was mostly booking and gathering information — I’m now also running a business and managing people. That’s a lot.”
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Garrett Searight is Barrett Media’s News Editor, which includes writing bi-weekly industry features and a weekly column. He has previously served as Program Director and Afternoon Co-Host on 93.1 The Fan in Lima, OH, and is the radio play-by-play voice of Northern Michigan University hockey. Reach out to him at Garrett@BarrettMedia.com.
