CAA Signs “Slow News” Brand & Podcast Producer Tortoise Media

Peter White
·2 min read

EXCLUSIVE: Tortoise Media, the “slow news” brand set up by a group including former Director of BBC News and Times of London editor James Harding, has signed with CAA.

The Hollywood agency will rep the British company, which produces a slew of podcasts and publishes long reads, in all areas.

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The company, whose founders also include President of the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Katie Vanneck-Smith, and former U.S. Ambassador to the UK Matthew Barzun, has a subscription base of more than 110,000.

Podcasts that it produces includes My Mother’s Murderer, Hidden Homicides and The Hunt for the Porn King, which saw Tortoise become the first media outlet to track down PornHub’s elusive owner, Bernd Bergmair.

The company produces ThinkIn sessions, unscripted conversations between members, editors, and invited experts, who uncover and inform the stories they publish.

It comes a couple of months after CAA named Josh Lindgren as its first podcast chief. Lindgren, who has been with the agency since 2018, was promoted to head of its podcast department in March.

The agency has struck a number of major podcasting deals in recent years including a deal between Jonathan Glickman’s Glickmania and iHeartMedia for a slate of music-driven podcast, Ava DuVernay’s partnership with Spotify, a first-look deal with Warner Bros. for Mick Jagger’s Rainy Day Podcasts, a deal between Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions and Spotify and deals for Jamie Lee Curtis’ Comet Pictures and Paul Feig’s Powderkeg Media.

Last year, he told Deadline that the growth in podcasting that he’s seen over the past few years is “extraordinary.” “There was a real inflection point about two years ago and I think we’re hitting another inflection point right now.”

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