Kelsey McKinney is building a (socialist) gossip empire from Queen Village

In the summer of 2019, five young women boarded a ferry to attend an all-night party off the coast of Thailand. They drank and danced and delighted in the bacchanalia — until one of them vanished. That was just the beginning of a vacation gone disastrously awry.

When the women returned home to the U.S., fine but no longer speaking to one another, they began to tell the story of what had happened. The tale passed from person to person to person, as such stories do, until eventually it made its way to Kelsey McKinney, who told hundreds of thousands of people.

McKinney, 31, is the Philly-based host of Normal Gossip, one of the most popular podcasts in the country. Both on the show and in real life, McKinney is a warm, extraordinarily reactive listener, her blue eyes widening and her mouth popping into an O when she hears an especially interesting detail.

“Hello, my little gossipmongers,” she often says conspiratorially at the beginning of an episode, recording on a mic perched atop a stack of paperbacks in her Queen Village home. She then proceeds to tell a guest an anonymized true morsel of gossip, stopping to ask reaction questions along the way.

Gossip tends to get a bad rap. But McKinney and producer Alex Sujong Laughlin have worked to rehabilitate its image on the show, arguing that gossip can hold authority to account and also function as a little light in the darkness. At a moment when some of the most popular entertainment dissects gruesome crimes, Normal Gossip stands apart for its low-stakes thrills. The missing woman on the Thailand vacation, for example, wasn’t brutally abducted — she was just tired of her friends and decided to Irish goodbye the whole trip.

“She tapped into a cultural nerve,” said Dana Murphy, McKinney’s literary agent and friend, who worked with her on her 2021 debut novel God Spare the Girls. McKinney approaches gossip “with a level of rigor and also care and empathy that it’s not usually afforded.”

Clearly, her method is resonating. At the end of season three last year, the show hit 10 million listens; a national tour this summer has already sold out half its stops. Both Vulture and Time Magazine named Normal Gossip one of the best podcasts of the year.

Tattooed and nose-ringed, McKinney exudes DSA-meets-early-aughts-blogger energy. She’s not interested in what she and Laughlin describe as the “cult of talent,” in which one creator is cast as a genius and everyone else as an assistant. Behind her desk is a vibrant painting by two self-taught Australian artists who paint at the same time on the same canvas, selling their work under the joint name Gelbell. She saved up to buy it.

“It doesn’t look like the work of two artists,” McKinney said. The whole style challenges what she called the “branding lie” that artists make masterpieces by themselves, alone in some far-off woods. “Also,” she added of the painting, “I think it’s fun.”

On a recent Thursday, McKinney was scheduled to present to a roomful of marketing and brand executives in midtown Manhattan, at the request of Radiotopia, the independent production company now supporting and distributing Normal Gossip. There were swag bags and kombucha on tap; Conan O’Brien and Emily Ratajkowski were also speaking.

“I have a blazer, I swear!” McKinney said as she greeted her fellow podcasters, already assembled on a couch, wearing suits. Her Amtrak was delayed and she had rushed from the station in green platform boots and multicolored floral trousers. She warned everyone not to hug her, she was too sweaty.

“Are you going to Tribeca?” another podcast host asked her later, referring to the New York film festival.

“They don’t let people like us into Tribeca,” she joked.

McKinney grew up the daughter of an evangelical youth pastor in North Texas; her mother worked a variety of hourly jobs. In McKinney’s high school study Bible, Proverbs 26:20 was underlined and starred: “Without wood a fire goes out; without a gossip a quarrel dies down.”

“In Big Church the message was simple: Men were prone to lust, women to gossip,” McKinney wrote in a 2021 essay for the New York Times.

Laughlin, the cocreator of Normal Gossip, described McKinney as similar to the plucky heroines she read about as a child, radically different from their surroundings and unconcerned by it.

“They weren’t afraid to tell the grown-up man to f— off, and they knew what was right, and they were going to go save the puppy from the well or whatever,” Laughlin, 31, said laughing. “Kelsey is that kind of girl.”

Through stints at online media sites including Vox, Fusion, and Deadspin, a sports and culture blog originally owned by Gawker, McKinney mastered a certain pithy, extremely online voice. But she also witnessed the pitfalls of ill-informed venture capitalists taking a crack at media. As she saw it, they often ran good companies into the ground pursuing unrealistic scale and profit.

By 2019 she was a writer at Deadspin when the site’s new owners, the private equity firm Great Hill Partners, crossed the firewall between business and editorial and told its writers to “stick to sports.” The interim editor-in-chief, Barry Petchesky, defied the order and was fired. Afterward, McKinney and other stunned staffers met up for a drink at Planet Hollywood in Times Square.

At the time, McKinney was one of the only staffers with a company credit card; she paid for hundreds of dollars worth of appetizers and drinks and left a 100% tip. Over the next two days, she and all her coworkers quit.

A year later in 2020, McKinney and other former Deadspin staffers launched Defector, a direct competitor to their previous employer. The goal was to establish a sustainable business owned by its workers that made space for creativity.

Defector is now the home of Normal Gossip, a show that has turned out to be much more popular than anyone expected.

“There are definitely moments where I see her be like, ‘I’m gonna vomit,’ ” said Jasper Wang, Defector’s vice president of revenue and operations, on McKinney’s newfound prominence.

McKinney got the idea for the show during the pandemic, when she was missing the fizzy thrill of overhearing a good story at a bar. She tweeted that someone should just give her a podcast to talk about random people’s gossip. Her coworkers liked the idea, but McKinney wasn’t sure if she wanted to move forward.

“I was being a little precious angel because I was like, ‘But I’m a writer,’ ” McKinney said. “I had to be bullied at every step.”

When Defector initially pitched the concept to major podcast platforms in 2021, nobody wanted it. (“That’s why everything sucks, because you’re only buying things that are exactly like things that already exist,” McKinney said.) So Defector hired Laughlin on a freelance contract, and she and McKinney set about bringing the idea to life. They sourced stories from friends of friends and hammered out the show’s structure; Laughlin, who is based in New Haven, Conn., chose a “maximalist, campy, corny” style for music and sound design.

Soon after launching the podcast, in 2022, McKinney moved to Philadelphia with her husband and her dog, Georgia.

“I just want to live somewhere where I can hang out all the time,” McKinney said. “It’s a perfect city.”

She has embraced Philly with the passion of a true convert, maintaining a lanternfly kill log, displaying a homemade (by a friend) Tyrese Maxey prayer candle, and gamely introducing herself to the bartender at her local bar, New Wave Cafe, on Phillies opening day. (He told her, “Sweetie, I’m gonna learn your name in 10 years. Come every day for 10 years and I’ll learn your name.”) Inspired by Cate Blanchett in Tár, she’s also studying piano with the children of South Philly at the Philadelphia Piano Institute.

Normal Gossip has a one-year contract with Radiotopia; though Laughlin and McKinney love making the show, they don’t imagine they’ll do it forever. They want to be able to make new things, follow fresh interests.

Regardless of what comes next, McKinney has developed a broadly applicable philosophy of humanity from listening to hundreds of juicy tidbits from strangers.

“Everyone just wants to be loved,” she said, “and everyone is also a little bit evil.”