The Pub - Mike Pesca on life after NPR
POCKET CASTS
While Mike Pesca still makes regular appearances on NPR, he hasn’t worked there for a year and a half. But he still listens.
“I loved NPR, I still do,” Pesca told me on The Pub. “I kind of love it for its flaws, as well. Among them, a stodginess.”
Pesca, whose work as a sports correspondent for NPR was more bombastic and humorous than typical NPR fare, has been freer to cultivate his talents and eccentricities in his new primary gig, hosting The Gist podcast for Slate.
“For those of us who worked at [NPR’s] New York bureau with Mike, that he wasn’t given his own show was a source of constant confusion and frustration,” said Planet Money co-founder Adam Davidson, who left NPR not long after Pesca.
This week on The Pub, Pesca talks about life after NPR, how public media looks from the outside, his rabble-rousing interview with Kim Kardashian while sub-hosting Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me! and whether he thinks NPR has heeded hisparting advice to be more ambitious and daring. (He doesn’t.)
“It seems like they have their things that work, and then they very, very cautiously — off the things that work — toe-touch into things very related to the things that work,” Pesca said of his former workplace.