I'm Aisha Roscoe and this is the Sunday story from Up First.

Before we get started today, a lot of listeners have been asking how can they support the show?

And there is a super easy, totally free thing you can do.

And it takes literally two minutes.

Go into the podcast app where you're listening right now and rate and review

the show. That's it. Doing that helps other people find up first and that helps keep us going.

Thank you so much. Now, if you're like me, your podcast queue is always overflowing with options

and it seems like there are new podcasts

launching every day. But deciphering what's actually worth listening to, that can be a challenge.

And that's where NPR's Pod Club newsletter comes in. It just launched this summer. So I sat down

with one of the writers, Lauren Gonzalez,

to get to know more about this new offering that's dedicated to bringing you handpicked

podcast recommendations. Lauren Gonzalez, welcome to the podcast. Hi, thank you for having me.

Yeah, so can you explain, like, what's the origin of Pod Club?

How and why did it get started?

So Pod Club actually started within NPR first.

I think a lot of people expect podcasters to be always excited and totally up to date on what all the podcast launches are, but we struggle

as much as everyday listeners do too. And so we started Pod Club actually as a Slack channel

to give producers, editors, reporters a chance to connect to the joy of audio again. And so it became almost our online water cooler station. And

it led to so many things. We had book club style podcast discussions. And we would be sharing

our favorite recommendations. And we made a decision that we really wanted to bring this fandom and curiosity to our listeners

and readers as well so that they could be enjoying and fan-girling about podcasts as much as us.

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