The Pay Check Is Adweek’s 2021 Podcast of the Year

This March, after two seasons spent exploring the systemic forces behind the gender wage gap, the Bloomberg Media podcast The Pay Check shifted focus. Inspired by the political reckoning spurred by the police murder of George Floyd, hosts Jackie Simmons and Rebecca Greenfield set out to interrogate the racial wealth gap, its causes and potential solutions. Audiences responded positively: From Season 2 to Season 3, the number of downloads increased 238%, according to the publisher. “While the topic was a departure, it fit seamlessly into the mission of the show, which is to look at economic disparities,” Greenfield told Adweek. “In the gender pay gap, women make 20% less than men, and in the racial wealth gap, white people in the U.S. have seven times more wealth than Black people.” The result is a deeply stirring blend of personal history, historical analysis and quantitative reporting that marshals the vast resources of Bloomberg Media in hopes of unpacking a distinctly American problem. The podcast was honored by jurors with Best Diversity and Inclusion Podcast in the 2021 Adweek Podcast of the Year Awards and was selected as the overall Podcast of the Year honoree. Here Are 2021's Adweek Podcast of the Year Winners Through the show, Simmons and Greenfield sought to understand why, although Black Americans make up 13% of the U.S. population, they hold just 3.8% of its wealth. To do so, the hosts realized they would have to take up the story at its beginning, at the very advent of the country. Jackie Simmons The resulting saga begins on an intimate note, as Simmons, who is Black, shares the story of her family’s attempt to hold onto land in a small town in Texas. It concludes, eight episodes later, with a conversation between the hosts and their Bloomberg colleague Claire Suddath, who wrote about her family’s legacy as slave-owners and her subsequent attempts to make amends for the past. The bookending episodes mark the beginning of the racial divide in America and trace it up until current day, making clear the connection between the institution of slavery and the financial imbalance that mars the country now. By enlisting history to understand economics, The Pay Check demonstrates how racist policy, over the course of centuries, has led the financial paths of Americans to diverge so wildly by skin color. In Episode 3, The Last Plantation, Simmons and Garfield examine why the top five white landowners in the U.S. own more land than all Black landowners combined, a product of systemic discrimination in agricultural policy. And in Episode 4, The Black Homeownership Tax, the podcast explores how Black Americans have been shut out of building generational wealth through homeownership. Rebecca Greenfield In trademark Bloomberg fashion, rigorous data reporting adds new dimensions to familiar narratives. In one instance, Bloomberg Media economic reporter Catarina Saraiva calculates that, if the value of an enslaved person to their owner was about $1,000 per person, or about $4 billion in total, at the time, that translates to $42 trillion in today’s money. Reporting like this brings to life the financial reality of slavery, which built wealth for white Americans, and any business tangential to the slave economy, for nearly 250 years. “To think about the value of a human life in those terms, it really sat with me,” Simmons said. “We were commodities.” The podcast responds to these revelations with a nuanced, pragmatic look at reparations. Rather than ask whether Black Americans deserve remuneration, The Pay Check focuses on what such an effort would look like in practice. In one moving section, Black podcast listeners call in, detailing the ways in which the roughly $300,000 owed to the descendants of slaves would change their lives. The segment is one of many that underscore a central tenet of The Pay Check: That for generations of Black Americans, the pathway to wealth was too often hypothetical. Previous honorees in Adweek's Podcast of the Year Awards include Recode Decode and Go Off, Sis. View all of this year's Adweek Podcast of the Year winners here. Bloomberg Media and Ebony Join Forces to Seek Out New Audiences

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Bloomberg Media’s The Pay Check Is Adweek’s 2021 Podcast of the Year

The series’ incisive third season explores the racial wealth gap

Mark Stenberg

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Mark Stenberg