ABOUT THE SHOW

A real-life Our Town for our times, CEMENT CITY is an Audacy Original podcast from Cement City Productions, hosted by Jeanne Marie Laskas. The story follows Jeanne Marie and her friend Erin as they stumble off the highway into a dying town they’ve never heard of, which has a Smog Museum, a mayor named Piglet, and not a whole lot else. 

Jeanne Marie and Erin arrive in town with one burning question: What’s it like to live here? They decide to buy a house – and stick around to find out what’s going to happen to this little town left for dead. But it’s not dead. Donora, PA will not go down without a fight.

Jeanne Marie, a longtime journalist, has spent her career helping Americans understand the lives of other Americans – coal miners, gun shop clerks, migrant workers, staffers in the White House mailroom. This time she joins audio producer Erin Anderson to tell the story of one American town.

CREDITS

JEANNE MARIE LASKAS

Jeanne Marie Laskas is a New York Times Best Selling author of eight books, including: Hidden America, To Obama: With Love Joy, Hate and Despair, and Concussion, the basis for Ridley Scott’s 2015 Golden Globe nominated film. She is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine. Also publishes in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, GQ, and elsewhere. Laskas is delighted to be making her podcast debut with Cement City.

WRITER/HOST

ERIN ANDERSON

Erin Anderson is an independent audio producer and documentary artist. Selected credits: KCRW’s Unfictional, WHYY’s The Pulse, Serendipity, and Sarah Award-winning audio drama Our Time Is Up. Her installation-based artworks have appeared at Jack Straw Gallery, the Smithsonian Museum of American History, and elsewhere. Anderson is a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, where she teaches narrative audio.

PRODUCER/WRITER

EDITOR

MICHAEL BENOIST

Michael Benoist is the Deputy Editor of The Daily, the news podcast from The New York Times. He spent nearly two decades as a magazine editor at National Geographic Adventure, GQ, Medium, and The New York Times Magazine, where his stories were nominated for nearly a dozen National Magazine Awards and won four. He brings that same sense of ambition, respect for the audience and willingness to invent and reinvent to audio.

ADDITIONAL CREDITS

  • Mike Woolley

    Sound Design and Engineering

  • Kira Witkin

    Production Assistance

  • Tim Maddocks

    Research and Fact-checking

  • Annie Brown

    Music Consulting

  • Kaitlin Roberts

    Additional Production

  • Sindhu Gnanasambandan

    Additional Production

  • Susan Scott Peterson

    Additional Research and Production Support

  • Tyler McCloskey

    Additional Research and Production Support

  • Julianne Sato-Parker

    Additional Research and Production Support

  • Rachel Wilkinson

    Additional Research and Production Support

  • Lawyers for Reporters, Cyrus R. Vance Center For International Justice

    Legal Services

  • Danny Bracken

    Original Music

  • Low Lumens

    Original Music

  • Tyler Morrisette

    Original Music

  • Donora

    Credits Music

  • APM

    Additional Music

  • Jenna Weiss-Berman

    Executive Producer

  • Leah Reis-Dennis

    Executive Producer

  • Maddy Sprung-Keyser

    Executive Producer

  • Danna Singer

    Photography

  • The Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh

    Additional Support

CEMENT CITY is dedicated to the victims of the 1948 Donora Smog Disaster, an environmental catastrophe that killed 20 people over a weekend and sickened thousands. It was the worst air pollution disaster in U.S. history and paved the way for the Clean Air Act of 1970. Toxic emissions from the Donora Zinc Works, owned by U.S. Steel, are widely recognized to have cause the disaster. Seventy-five years later, the company has never claimed responsibility. Donora and its death smog have been largely forgotten.