EXCLUSIVE: Pineapple Street Studios was one of the premier podcast production companies making narrative series such as Wind of Change, Missing Richard Simmons and The Clearing.
A year after the company’s owner Audacy filed for bankruptcy, it shut down the studio.
Two of the company’s top executives have now started their own podcast studio and have started working with some of the figures that helped drive the narrative podcast boom from a few years ago.
Joel Lovell, who was Executive Editor at Pineapple Street, and Henry Molofsky, an Executive Producer, who were both at the company from its launch in 2016 through to its end, have launched Please and Thanks Productions.
Please and Thanks is now launching its debut project, a series with Amazon’s Audible Originals from Dan Taberski, who was also responsible for series including Running From Cops, Surviving Y2K, The Line, 9/12 and Hysterical.
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It has also partnered with Amy Poehler‘s Paper Kite Productions, which is behind the Parks and Recreation star’s Good Hang, and Patrick Radden Keefe, the man behind Scorpions-infused CIA story Wind of Change, on new projects.
Its first release is Dan Taberski‘s Manifesto!. The six-part series, hosted by Taberski ,sees him set off on his most complicated quest yet. He attempts to reclaim the manifesto from the sweaty clutches of mass shooters and return it to its rightful place: with the artists, the warriors, the visionaries, and the mildly crazy regular folks with something to say. Along the way, he even writes his own.
Its project with Poehler’s Paper Kite is the company’s foray into documentary audio and has also just been sold to Universal Studio Group Audio. The investigative audio series is expected to launch in 2027 and is produced in association with Long Run.
Paper Kite’s audio division is now headed up by Jenna Weiss-Berman, who co-founded Pineapple Street, and worked closely with Lovell and Molofsky.
The project with Radden Keefe, author of recent hit book London Falling, is an audio-documentary podcast in the music space using his investigative reporting.
“At a time when fewer companies are making narrative documentary podcasts, Please & Thanks is built on the belief that the appetite for great audio storytelling never went away, even as business models have changed. If you tell good stories and produce them at the highest level, audiences will give you their time and attention, and that’s worthwhile culturally and as a business,” Lovell and Molofsky said.
