The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
Influencers & Digital Creators · The audience South Bend built online
South Bend's digital layer is the strangest in this record, because so much of it is invisible from the street. The biggest true crime podcast in America began with one host recording in Indianapolis and the other, a South Bend woman, joining down a telephone line from here. The university on the city's edge runs a media department with student tracks, staff brand managers and a social partnership announced as reaching hundreds of millions. And the city's own memory institutions, its civil rights center and its history museum, learned to podcast the archive. What follows is that record, kept under a strict rule: nobody is here on their own say-so. Every person below stands on coverage beyond their own profiles, and every audience figure is printed with the date of the source that reported it. Where the record supports less than a full article, the leg prints less, and says so.
Brandon Reed: the animator the platforms found at home
South Bend - 2016 to present
The South Bend start: Brandon Reed was born and raised in South Bend, and he has never built his career anywhere else. He started drawing at around five years old and sold cartoon pictures to his friends, drew through middle and…
Cartoon Connect: a studio that is a house in South Bend
2016 - present
The plant: Every earlier leg of this record measures a trade by its buildings. This one has a house. Cartoon Connect, founded in 2016, is the animation studio and YouTube channel behind Lil Ron Ron, Gotta Be Mo, and Granny &…
Ashley Flowers: born in South Bend, built in Indianapolis
1989 - present
The South Bend start: Ashley Flowers was born on 19 December 1989 in South Bend, Indiana. The encyclopedia record of her childhood is a reader's: Nancy Drew novels and Matlock on television fixed her on cold cases early, and she…
Brit Prawat: the South Bend end of the line
South Bend - 2017 to present
The telephone co-host: Crime Junkie's first episodes were recorded in an extra bedroom of Ashley Flowers' home in Indianapolis, with her co-host joining by telephone. ELLE's profile of Flowers, published 11 August 2022, fixes the…
Audiochuck: the company the South Bend pair built
2017 - present
Thirteen thousand dollars: Audiochuck, the podcast network Ashley Flowers founded in 2017 and named after her dog Charlie, called Chuck, began on her life savings of $13,000, raised at the start through Patreon memberships and…
The institutional wave: the city podcasts its own archive
2017 - present
South Bend's Own Words: The first sustained South Bend podcast this record can fix is not a creator's show but an archive's. South Bend's Own Words, from the Civil Rights Heritage Center at Indiana University South Bend, edits…
The pattern: one stayed home, one phoned it in, one university industrialized it
2016 - 2026
Three roads: South Bend's digital creators divide by geography into three kinds, and none of the three is the obvious one. The rooted: Brandon Reed built the city's largest creator audience from his own house and, on the record…