Pineapple Street Studios Introduces Innovative Podcast Format with Launch of Monthly Series The 11th

Pineapple Street Studios, an Audacy company, today launched The 11th, an entirely new, innovative concept for the podcast space: a monthly audio series designed to create a home for intriguing stories that do not currently have a natural place in the podcast landscape, with content spanning original reporting, memoir, musicals, advice columns, fiction, and more from a continually evolving roster of contributors.

Beginning August 11, 2021, Pineapple Street will release a new installment on the 11th of each month, with the format of the show constantly evolving and the creators and contributors experimenting with shape, length, and style.

The first edition of The 11th is a four-part, reported series called “The Inbox” from writer Sarah Viren. In March of 2020, Viren wrote a New York Times story about her wife being falsely accused of sexual misconduct. After the story was published, scores of people reached out to Viren to say that they had similar stories — that they, too, had been falsely accused. For months, those messages sat in Viren’s inbox, as she considered what to do with them. What responsibility did she have to these other stories? These other people? Who would she believe? Was it her role to decide who was telling the truth? Over the course of four episodes, Viren opens her inbox, and wades into the murky waters of false accusations — the chaos they can create, and whose lives they actually upend.

“The 11th is a place for stories that might not otherwise be told, whether that’s because of format or length or perspective,” said Max Linsky, co-founder of Pineapple Street Studios. “There is not a singular personality as the voice of The 11th and that’s a deliberate choice — the goal is to create something that will feature a range of voices, both from within Pineapple and beyond. The incredible team of producers and editors working on The 11th has described it as a mystery box, where you never know what you’ll get each month — I can’t wait to hear how this team and this show will surprise audiences.”

For the September edition of The 11th, music writer and poet Hanif Abdurraquib explores the seminal Fugees album “The Score” 25 years after its release, meditating on the meaning of it for him, the industry, and the culture of modern hip-hop and the world at large. A blend of personal memoir and music journalism, this series takes inside the making and politics of the album, from the perspective of what it meant to a teenager in middle America in the summer of 1996 when the album came out, and today.

The 11th launches today, August 11, 2021, with the four-part series “The Inbox” on Apple Podcasts, Audacy, Spotify, and everywhere podcasts are available. New issues will be available on the 11th of every month across podcast platforms.

The team behind The 11th is Leila Day, Joel Lovell, Eric Mennel, Jenelle Pifer, Chloe Prasinos, and Kristen Torres, whose collective credits span national magazines, books, news, longform narrative podcasts, music, alt-weeklies, talk shows, and live storytelling, including:

Missing Richard Simmons, The Moth, This American Life, Marvel, The Stoop Podcast, Levar Burton Reads, The New York Times Magazine, The Catch and Kill Podcast with Ronan Farrow, Longform, and many more spanning multiple mediums — all sensibilities informing The 11th.

Sarah Viren is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and an assistant professor at Arizona State University, where she heads up the Nonfiction Writing and Publishing Graduate Certificate. She is the author of the essay collection Mine, winner of the River Teeth Book Prize and the GLCA New Writer’s Award, longlisted for the Pen/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, and a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award (as well as one of LitHub’s favorite books of 2018). Her essay “The Accusation” was a finalist for a National Magazine Award and was named one of Longform’s top 10 longform works in 2020. Viren is currently editing a forthcoming anthology of the essay in the Americas called The Great American Essay, and her second book, Autobiography of Shadows, is forthcoming from Scribner Books. She lives in Arizona with her partner, two kids, and a dog named Oki.

About Pineapple Street Studios:

Founded in Brooklyn in 2016 by Jenna Weiss-Berman and Max Linsky, Pineapple Street Studios, an Audacy company, paved the way for in-depth, diverse storytelling by way of high-quality original and partner podcasts. Pineapple Street Studios creates inventive, award-winning original podcasts: multi-episode narratives, investigative journalism, branded series, and talk shows that routinely debut in the top ten on the Apple Podcasts charts, reach tens of millions of listeners, and have been cited repeatedly on “best-of” lists. Pineapple Street Studios is behind some of the most critically acclaimed shows, including 70 Over 70, Patrick Radden Keefe’s Wind of Change, Welcome to Your Fantasy, Missing Richard Simmons, Back Issue, The New York Times’ Still Processing, activist Brittany Packnett Cunningham’s Undistracted, and The Catch and Kill Podcast with Ronan Farrow.

About Audacy

Audacy, Inc. (NYSE: AUD) is a scaled, multi-platform audio content and entertainment company with the country’s best radio broadcasting group, a leader in virtually every segment of audio, and America’s #1 creator of original, premium audio. Audacy engages over 170 million consumers each month, bringing people together around the news, sports, podcasts and music that matter to them. Learn more at www.audacyinc.com, Facebook (Audacy Corp) and Twitter (@AudacyCorp).