Buckeye Flame's Ken Schneck Launching New LGBTQ+ Reporters Roundtable Podcast

It’s been some seven years since Ken Schneck, the editor of The Buckeye Flame, was in the podcast game.

So Gay ran over 430 episodes with guests ranging from TV personalities to activists to musicians and models.

“Get out there, put on your cape, use your voice, make a difference, and remember,” Schneck said on the show’s final episode, in 2018. “Why be gay, when you can be SO gay?!?”

This summer, Schneck will be returning to the world of podcasting with This News Is So Gay, a new weekly reporter’s roundtable on everything queer. “Think Meet The Press,” Scheck said in a preview. “But gayer.”

And also more professional than his first attempt, he said. This second go-around will no longer be produced out of Schneck’s home office but, with the help of a Cleveland Foundation grant, out of the Evergreen Podcast studios in Downtown Cleveland.

All which Schneck feels will give him the bandwidth and stage to contextualize what’s quite the pressing time for LGBTQ issues across the nation.

Issues Schneck said he’s more than comfortable spearheading conversations on.

“I’m a fine writer. I’m a solid editor. I’m an okay professor, but radio is what I do,” Schneck told Scene. “I always tell people that behind the microphone is like the one place where I don’t get any imposter syndrome.”

“So personally, just being able to go back to that space where I’m able to create audio space for guests to be able to talk about what they do?” he added. “It’s exciting.”

The pilot for This News Is So Gay began in the studios of Ideastream in 2022, Schneck said, but the media company ended up scrapping the project. After securing grant money, Schneck soon began lining up guests—from reporters from The 19th to the editors of Lookout and of Queer Kentucky. (All who will find themselves on an upcoming episode.)

A kind of reporter’s notebook vibe will mix nicely, Schneck said, with clear-eyed national commentary. Episodes will be speedy: recorded every Monday, released on Wednesdays. Which means Schneck plans to strike a fine balance between being topical and being entertaining.

A balance that may separate Schneck’s new from the old: a pure dedication to the journalist’s craft as it pertains to—and comes from the pens of—queer journalists themselves.

And ideally rope in generalists and allies to the discussion.

“We’re just going to do our best to hopefully ground some stories that either people haven’t heard about or get more information, get more depth and complexity to a headline they may have read,” Schneck said.

“We know that going in that there’s no way this podcast is going to be the sole source of all LGBTQ news out there,” he added. “I also know that there aren’t a lot of opportunities in the audio space to access LGBTQ news in the way that I do it.”

This News Is So Gay debuts July 2 on podcast and streaming services.