Brad is the Host and Managing Editor of ABC's daily podcast Start Here — this interview has been lightly edited for style and readability
James Cridland: Now you launched Start Here, the ABC News daily podcast, in 2018. You’ve just made 2,000 episodes. That’s quite a lot!
Brad Mielke: I’m exhausted just listening to you say it, James. How did how did we get here? That sounds just unreal.
JC: How many of those 2,000 episodes have you done yourself?
BM: It’s it’s definitely more than 1900. And then our top correspondent has more than 237 appearances. That’s just for a guest!
JC: You’ve been traveling around the US, reporting from a lot of different places, during that time?
BM: We primarily have me anchoring the show from New York. Every day I’m speaking to several of our many, many correspondents fanned out across the world. Over the course of the last seven years, we have done segments from literally every continent - that includes Antarctica. We’ve done segments featuring an astronaut while in space. We’ve even done a segment with a diver while he was underwater, setting a Guinness World Record for the amount of time spent underwater. So literally heavens and earth is the expanse of the Start Here destination list.
JC: How do you keep fresh every single day? Doing a daily show every single day takes its toll, doesn’t it?
BM: It does. I think it’s really just about trying to keep the listener in mind. The listener is first, second, and third priority here. When we think about Start Here, it’s all about taking what we find to be the most interesting news of the day, and then trying to think about why should the listener actually care? We know that they get headlines pushed to them on their phone every minute of the day. Why should they actually care enough to spend five or six or seven minutes on a given topic? What makes it interesting? What pushes it forward for them? I think that’s what keeps it fresh every day.
There are so many storylines that feel - even though you’re constantly hearing them - somehow beyond your grasp, as if you’re supposed to know a lot of background history that no one has told you about. And when I’m sitting around talking about the news with my colleagues, that’s not necessarily what we’re doing. There’s lots of stupid questions between journalists - “how did the this war start?” Or “what was the law that he was supposed to have broken in the first place?” That’s where clarity comes from. And the thing that I keep hearing from listeners over and over again is thank you for asking the questions that I would ask this person if I were there. And to me, the part that makes this a dream job is I just keep getting to ask those questions of both my own colleagues and of newsmakers.
JC: How has the audience grown or changed since 2018?
BM: It’s interesting. There are moments where it grows exponentially, then there are moments where it levels off, then there are moments where it grows again, and then it levels off. We actually have never really seen a real dip in listenership, which is interesting. We’re apparently a very ‘grabby’ show: once you hear us, you stick with us. We’ve seen that in our in our analytics.
I think your audience would know this better than anyone, is podcasts get other podcasts. When we have successful ABC podcasts where we are featured, or where we feature other podcasts, those grow with each other exponentially. So I remember that we were seeing a steady growth in listeners, but we were still small-ish. And then all of a sudden, ABC’s The Dropout happened, the true crime podcast about Elizabeth Holmes. We saw our numbers spike, because we were always being mentioned in the ad breaks of that. And we’ve done that for other podcasts within ABC.
And then there’s also the news itself. When there were tectonic moments in the news cycle, we see our numbers again take a big rise and then not let up. So with this new administration, we’ve seen a significant rise in listenership just since Trump started his second term.
JC: Can you see when a good story or a good episode title has driven to more listeners?
BM: We do indeed see a huge uptick in listenership for certain episodes. I think one of our biggest episodes of the year was The Diddy Verdict. I think that’s what the episode title was called. These are the things that you want to know, that have been floating around in the ether, and here’s that 20-minute show that - today I need to make extra sure to listen to it. Or that’s the day that it’s being shared a lot amongst friends, or it’s being highlighted in other platforms. So you do see the news itself sometimes drive listenership, and then you’ve got diehards who listen every day.
JC: Are you audio only still?
BM: We are. We’ll do features with videos sometimes when there’s a particularly interesting interview or something like that. We’ll make sure to tape the video of it. And sometimes that gets clipped into use for ABC Network. But generally we’re audio only, and there’s a good reason for that, which is - we are a produced show. It is very different from two dudes sitting and chatting for two and a half hours. We take a lot of pains to condense into the best possible 20 minutes we can. And if that means that we are getting a grade level talent to call us from their pajamas in their closet, and that’s the only way they will talk to me, well we’ll take them like that. Mercifully, we will not ask them to put themselves on video! But that’s how we end up getting so many of our best interviews in the moment, because we are calling people at all hours of the day and in all parts of the country, often when they’re on scene and not in a position to have any sort of film team with them.
JC: So, what happens in the next 2,000 episodes?
BM: I’ve got so many big dreams, James! I think that that Start Here is at its best when it’s explaining big, urgent national and international news the day that you need context for it. Like when October 7th happened in Gaza and in Israel, by the next morning we had a show up explaining why this was such a big deal. I still think that we can do better as a show in doing coverage from these moments that are unfolding as they happen. I’m the one talking to a correspondent in the field, as it should be - these are our experts that are fanned out across the world and they have this expertise. But my dream is that we’re able to continue turning this into a platform at ABC that is both packaging news for you, but also reporting the news the very first time out there - that we are a news gathering and news making platform as well as a summarizing product.
I’m in my dream job right now. I truly don’t know how they’ve allowed me to do this. They took a reporter who had just come off the campaign trail, who had learned what it was to be a reporter in the field. They said, “Hey, would you ever want to host this podcast? Podcasts are becoming interesting.” I was like, Yeah, hello, of course. And then we’ve managed to somehow make success make it successful, and I’m somehow like still the host of it. I’m very uh happy and excited to keep rolling here.
JC: Brad, it’s always good to have a chat with you. Thank you so much, and well done on 2,000 episodes.
BM: Thank you so much. It’s really truly a a dream to be doing it, and it’s been a joy to talk to you over these last several years since we’ve been on the scene. So thank you so much.