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What makes a TV program, radio, podcast or social video post rise to the level of a Peabody Award winner? Jeffrey P. Jones, executive director of the Peabody Awards, explains the metrics that matter for the prestigious kudos on the latest episode of Variety podcast “Strictly Business.”
“What makes Peabody unique are that it is platform agnostic. You also can’t campaign for it. There is no 23,000 members voting. Instead, it’s a jury of 18 people that meet face-to-face and decide the award unanimously. So that’s the process that makes it unique,” Jones says.
The 85th annual Peabodys will be handed out June 1 at a ceremony in Beverly Hills. The University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communications has administered the awards since 1940, meaning that the Peabodys predate the Emmy Awards by eight years.
The organization’s archives include copies not only of every winner but every submission since the beginning. In recent years, it has received about 1,200 submissions per year, which are distilled into a few dozen honorees.
“We are the third-largest archive of audio visual materials,” Jones says. “Only behind the Library of Congress and UCLA. And only 5% of it’s been digitized. It’s an extraordinary repository.”
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Jones emphasizes that Peabody tries to cast a wide net for its annual honorees. There’s no set number of winners in its various award categories, including entertainment, arts, documentary, news, children’s/youth, interactive and immersive, podcast and public service.
“We do popcorn stuff, too, but there’s always a degree of, what is the showrunner trying to communicate and how well does it match with the times. So sometimes a show like ‘Succession,’ for instance, is obviously extremely current and playful and fun and great writing and great acting and all that,” he says.
In his other role as a professor at Grady College, Jones has penned several books about the intersection of comedy and television news and how it shapes popular culture. In this moment of whirlwind change in culture and politics, Jones sees the mainstream news media struggling to keep up.
“When you have so much change happening so quickly, it is truly an avalanche,” he says. “I feel deeply empathetic toward anyone trying to be honest with their readers and viewers and listeners. With that pace of change and just everyone feeling overwhelmed by it all, it’s a difficult task if you’re a media producer.”
“Strictly Business” is Variety’s weekly podcast featuring conversations with industry leaders about the business of media and entertainment. (Please click here to subscribe to our free newsletter.) New episodes debut every Wednesday and can be downloaded at Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Spotify, Google Play, SoundCloud and more.
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