| Ashley Flowers, creator of the popular Crime Junkie podcast, is still getting used to being on camera. "I got into podcasting so no one would have to see my face," the 36-year-old budding media mogul told me over lunch a couple weeks ago, wearing a white sweater emblazoned with the phrase "J'adore podcasts" ( I love podcasts in French.) Over the past eight years, Flowers built Crime Junkie into the second-most-popular podcast in the US. (Joe Rogan is first.) The weekly show reaches about 6 million people, according to Edison Research. Over the last few months, Flowers has started recording video episodes of Crime Junkie to expand the show's audience. Her video setup is a work in progress. The "studio" is an old gym on the ground floor of her company's offices, located in the Broad Ripple neighborhood of Indianapolis. Soundproofing materials are scattered across the room and a couple of her producers oversee a makeshift video bay – a couple monitors on a table along one wall. One employee sits on the floor with her laptop, helping Flowers when she stumbles over a pronunciation. The person in charge of a makeshift teleprompter sits to its right, scrolling the script up and down manually. Flowers is now constructing a new studio devoted to video, part of an expansion that will triple her office space to 30,000 square feet and double her staff to almost 130 people. To help fund that expansion, Flowers raised $40 million from The Chernin Group, the investment firm of media mogul Peter Chernin that also backed Barstool Sports and Reese Witherspoon's Hello Sunshine. The deal valued her company, Audiochuck, at about $250 million, according to people familiar with the terms. That makes Audiochuck one of the most valuable podcasting startups in the world. Flowers could have funded the effort herself. Audiochuck, named after her dog, turned a profit of about $45 million last year, according to the people, who asked not to be identified discussing confidential matters. Flowers declined to comment on any financials. But Flowers wants Chernin's help expanding her business from a podcast network built around her to a media company that spans audio, video, merchandise and live events. Audiochuck's founder already wears many hats at the company. She is the host of its two primary podcasts, Crime Junkie and The Deck, and serves as chief executive officer. She gives feedback on stories, closes deals with distributors, sells advertising and tours the country taping live episodes. She's also the mother of a 3-year-old daughter. Flowers plans to hire more reporters to identify and investigate stories and ramp up her video business, creating original-true crime series for YouTube. She is going to explore making a film or TV show – though she's not moving to Hollywood – and might open an office in New York. "The next phase of growth is just, 'How do I make this really sustainable beyond me?'" she told me between bites of a steak quesadilla. Flowers used to work 15 hours a day, starting at about 5 a.m., but has scaled back to 10 hours since having her daughter. She doesn't take vacations. "How do I make sure that if something happens to me, or when I want to take a step back, 65 people aren't out of a job? I want it to be bigger than me." Crime Junkie began as a side project. Flowers has loved crime stories since she was a kid, reading Agatha Christie mysteries with her mom. After graduating from Arizona State University, she got involved with a local organization called Crime Stoppers that helps people report crimes anonymously. To help promote the organization, she began hosting a weekly local radio segment called Murder Monday. Flowers could tell listeners wanted more. Inspired by the hit true crime podcast Serial, she and her childhood friend Brit Prawat started taping a show before and after Flowers' day job at a software company. They released the first episode on Dec. 18, 2017. The early version of Crime Junkie involved little to no original reporting. Flowers and Prawat used the internet to scour local news for the most interesting stories. Listeners liked their conversational style, which sounded like two friends chatting on a couch. Flowers invested the bulk of her life savings in the show. There was little data to demonstrate whether a program was popular back then. But dozens of fans flew in from around the country when Flowers hosted a meetup on New Year's Eve in 2018. The same day, Rolling Stone named Crime Junkie one of the best true-crime podcasts. Flowers quit her job to focus on podcasting full time. Not everyone was happy with Flowers' work. In 2019, journalist Cathy Frye accused Flowers of plagiarizing her reporting for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, triggering accusations from others as well. "You quoted a portion of MY copyrighted story almost verbatim," Frye wrote on the show's Facebook page. Flowers pulled a few episodes, uploading them later with notes acknowledging the source material. She now describes this as a "learning experience" in an industry with no rules. "My goal always was to have investigative reporters," she said. None of it seemed to bother listeners, who continued to flock to the show. By the end of 2019, Flowers was making enough money to hire a staff and expand her lineup. Bob Baird, Flowers' old boss at the software company, became Audiochuck's chief operating officer. In 2020, she added CounterClock, a limited series hosted by Delia D'Ambra, and The Deck, which focuses on cold cases, launched in 2022. Both shows involve a lot of original reporting, and Flowers has now built a team of 10 journalists who travel the country looking for stories. "We've really started infusing original reporting and hopefully more investigative reporting, into everything," says Courteney Stuart, a veteran of local newspapers and TV stations who joined the company last year as director of reporting. As Crime Junkie has grown, Flowers has committed $20 million to nonprofits and her own foundation to help solve cold cases and support victims. She has been adamant about keeping it in Indianapolis. She grew up in northern Indiana, near South Bend. She and her husband went to the same high school – though they didn't start dating until after college. She has traveled to LA to meet with film executives and to New York to charm advertisers, but she has never wanted to leave. Staying in Indiana has benefits – it's much cheaper – as well as drawbacks. It can be hard to lure people to the Midwest. During one of her trips to Los Angeles, her representatives at United Talent Agency set up a meeting with the team at North Road, Chernin's film and TV company. Chernin joined the meeting and came away interested in a deeper relationship with Flowers. His top deputy, Jesse Jacobs, pressed Flowers to let them invest in her business. She fit Chernin's playbook as an individual with a powerful audience who wanted to build a larger business. "I find her uniquely impressive," Chernin told me this past week. "We have historically invested in a lot of people who built great creative products around a real passion. I'm not sure I've seen anyone who was also equally successful on business side." Chernin is now helping Flowers hunt for a CEO and build out the management team to handle day-to-day business matters. The added help should free up Flowers, who still signs off on every idea for the shows she hosts, to do more reporting and figure out how to adapt her brand of storytelling to YouTube. Flowers remains an avid consumer of true crime and often sends direct messages to hosts of new shows that she likes. While every podcaster right now is looking to YouTube, which has become the top podcast platform, Flowers believes the lane for true crime is still open. "I'm constantly trying to figure out how we don't get stale, how do we tell the story in the most interesting way?" she said. "Now I need to make sure as many episodes as possible are stories you haven't heard anywhere else. And the only way of doing that is having real boots on the ground." The best of Screentime (and other stuff) | Amazon is now in charge of James Bond | Amazon is now in charge of the James Bond franchise. The e-commerce giant acquired the library of Bond films when it purchased MGM in an $8.45 billion deal. Yet the Broccoli family, which had produced the Bond movies for decades, retained creative control. That meant no new movies (and no TV) without their sign off. In an announcement that surprised many in Hollywood, the Broccolis formed a new joint venture with Amazon, which is fancy for saying the they will continue to get paid for future Bond installments but have ceded creative control. The Broccolis didn't like working with Amazon, which is one reason there hasn't been a new Bond film since 2021. The Broccolis also couldn't figure out who should replace Daniel Craig, who has played Bond since 2006's Casino Royale. So what changed their mind? The obvious answer is money. Amazon will pay the Broccolis to give up control. Though Deadline said the deal is worth at least $1 billion, the details are more complex. The Broccolis will receive money when the deal closes and then participate in money from future projects as they remain part owners of the franchise. But also consider that longtime Bond producer Michael Wilson is in his 80s and his step sister Barbara Broccoli will have the money and freedom to make more movies outside of the spy franchise. Amazon can now make as many Bond movies as it wants – as well as the seemingly inevitable Bond TV shows. The movies will fall under the jurisdiction of Courtenay Valenti, a longtime Warner Bros. executive who took over Amazon's film studio in 2023. The internet has already mourned the death of the franchise, worried that Amazon will pick the wrong Bond and exploit the property to death. Lest the skeptics forget, there have already been some eminently forgettable Bond movies over the years. ESPN is getting out of the baseball businessESPN is opting out of its deal with Major League Baseball, ending its relationship with the organization after 35 years. ESPN had been paying an average of $550 million a year for 30 regular season games, the Home Run Derby, the Wild Card playoff round and up to 10 spring training games. For a couple of years, people in and around ESPN have been waiting for the largest sports media business in the world to drop some sports. The cost of live sports rights has soared and the pay-TV business has shrunk. It appears that day has arrived. ESPN has spared no expense when it comes to its most important partners: the National Basketball Association, college football and the National Football League. But it's cutting ties with baseball and appears unlikely to renew Formula 1, per John Ourand. Streaming will soon eclipse cable and broadcast combinedStreaming accounted for 43% of all TV viewing in January, a jump of almost seven points from just a year ago. YouTube, Netflix and Amazon continue to increase their lead over the rest of the competition. YouTube added about 2% to its share over the last year, while Disney is basically flat over three years. The No. 2 musician in the world is…Drake. I am a big Kendrick Lamar fan, but the people convinced that Lamar has done irreparable damage to Drake's career aren't paying attention to the data. People really, really like listening to Drake. He was the second-best-selling act in the world last year after Taylor Swift. Eminem was eighth. Lamar was ninth. Deals, deals deals - Amazon is making a bigger push into the regional sports network business.
- Cineworld, one of the largest movie theater chain owners in the world, is hiring a couple banks to explore an initial public offering or a merger.
- The company that makes Pokemon Go is in talks to sell its video-game business to a Saudi-backed publisher for $3.5 billion.
- A company that makes electronic pull-tab devices for charitable fundraising is worth almost $1 billion.
Japanese-Canadian singer Saya Gray just dropped a new album that I've had on repeat all weekend. | 
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