About Podcast AVL
Mission
Through The Overlook with Matt Peiken podcast, Podcast Asheville fills the local gap in quality audio news programming with informative, engaging conversations about social, economic, political and other topical issues affecting residents of Asheville, NC.
Episodes regularly spotlight the work and concerns of Asheville's Black community, along with those of the city's social-service nonprofit and creative communities, against the backdrop of growing inequities widened by tourism and gentrification.
Primary editorial focuses of the podcast:
Government and public policy
Spotlighting local nonprofits working in homelessness, affordable housing, better pay for service workers, mental health and other pressing social-service needs.
Racial reparations and Black-led enterprise
Artists creating original work (music, literature, visual arts and theater/dance)
What We Do
Podcast Asheville is a mobile, hyperlocal podcast production company created to amplify under-heard voices, uniquely inform and engage listeners and partner with other local media serving Asheville, NC.
The Overlook with Matt Peiken is our founding, flagship podcast. Since launching in February 2023, Matt has self-produced 175 episodes (as of Aug. 1, 2024) exploring the news, arts, issues and trends of Asheville.
In July 2024, we launched a weekday morning newscast podcast aggregating and summarizing stories from across Asheville’s news media landscape. New episodes of Wake Up, Asheville! and its Spanish language mirror podcast, ¡Despierta! Asheville, post every weekday morning and run less than five minutes each.
Aside from our own productions, Podcast Asheville advises, coaches and handles a la carte production services for a variety of voices in and around Asheville.
About Matt Peiken
Matt is a career journalist who most recently spent 5-1/2 years reporting on arts and culture for Blue Ridge Public Radio, the NPR affiliate in Asheville, NC. Before coming to Asheville, I was a longtime staff arts and features writer with the St. Paul (MN) Pioneer Press and arts reporter with the digital arm of WCPO-TV, in Cincinnati.
Previously, he founded and managed a variety of online journalism efforts, including the online video program 3-Minute Egg, the music-talk podcast Metal Brainiac and the community op-ed page Opine Season. He also served as managing editor of the Walker Art Center’s magazine and was as a longtime contributing writer to Modern Drummer Magazine.
In October 2012, he self-produced God Votes No, a 45-minute video documentary about voices of faith supporting marriage equality in Minnesota.
He’s won regional journalism awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Associated Press, Radio Television Digital News Alliance of the Carolinas and the California Newspaper Publishers Association.
Commitment to ethical journalism
Matt Peiken has spent his entire career producing work with editorial independence, integrity, transparency and humility. That continues with The Overlook with Matt Peiken.
All guests are invited onto the show without compensation. While Matt informs guests about the broad topics he’d like to cover in a conversation, guests aren’t provided any specific questions in advance of an interview, nor are guests allowed to hear or approve the contents of an episode before it posts.
If Matt becomes aware of factual errors either in the introductory narrative of each episode or the interview itself, he will correct it both within the episode’s text and audio and inform listeners of the correction through the episode’s accompanying text.