Signal Awards Names 2025 Podcast Winners, From Poehler to Roddick

The Signal Awards revealed its fifth-year slate of podcast winners on Tuesday, crowning Amy Poehler's "Good Hang," Khloé Kardashian's "Khloé in Wonder Land" and Monica Lewinsky's "Reclaiming" among the gold-medal haul.

More than 94,000 unique voters cast 260,000 ballots for listener-choice prizes. The lineup spans culture, true crime, science, sports and music categories.

What made this year's class unusual?

Gold winners include "All There Is with Anderson Cooper," "Served with Andy Roddick," "The Mel Robbins Podcast," "Artist Friendly with Joel Madden" and "Angie Martinez IRL."

Music categories produced the artiest entry: "SongWriter: Isabella Rossellini + Sharon Van Etten" took gold. That cross-genre pairing pushes the genre roughly as far from the standard celebrity Q&A as Vermeer sits from a Polaroid.

Who picked up the honorary hardware?

"Criminal" host Phoebe Judge receives the Audio Icon Award, reserved for "an individual whose work has made a lasting contribution to podcasting." Pablo Torre, host of "Pablo Torre Finds Out," lands the Special Achievement Award.

iHeartPodcasts earned company of the year. iHeartMedia's Ruby Studios took agency of the year.

What did the organizers say about the field?

"Podcasting is no longer defined by a single format, platform or approach to storytelling and this year's submissions make that evolution impossible to ignore," said Jemma Brown, GM of the Signal Awards. "Charts and download counts can only tell us what's popular. At Signal, our role is to notice the creative risks that are quietly changing what everyone else makes next."

Who else took gold in the major categories?

Best Host gold went to "Good Hang with Amy Poehler" (listener's choice too). CNN's "Engagement Party," We Are Social's "Seen on the Screen with Jacqueline Coley" and Higher Ground's "Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso" also won gold in that bracket.

Documentary gold went to "Cult Queen of Canada," "More Muslim" and ProPublica's "Paper Trail" (the latter also listener's choice).

Best Video Podcast crowned CNN's "All There Is," "Take Your Shoes Off," "The Tamsen Show" and NPR's "Wild Card with Rachel Martin."

Indie Podcast gold went to four shows, including "Blank Check with Griffin & David" — a film-criticism fixture that has outlasted half the streaming services launched since its debut.

Best Writing favored the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's "12 Years That Shook the World," New Metric Media's "Cult Queen of Canada" and CitizenRacecar's "Smarter Than Cancer."

Where do the culture, news and science races stand?

Best Host (Culture) gold went to four shows, including "Khloé in Wonder Land," "Reclaiming with Monica Lewinsky" and The Volume's "Angie Martinez IRL."

News & Politics crowned Radio-Canada's "Louis Blouin aux États-Unis de Trump," the Institute for Global Affairs' "None Of The Above," KCRW's "Question Everything" and MSW Media's "The Daily Beans."

Science (Shows) awarded gold to "Are We Doomed?," CBC's "Quirks & Quarks," "Smarter Than Cancer" and Tumble Media's "Tumble Science Podcast for Kids."

True Crime (Limited Series) gold went to Exactly Right Media's "Two-Faced: John of God" and Pushkin Industries' "Valley of Shadows."

Best Co-Host Team crowned "Two Girls One Ghost" alongside Higher Ground's "IMO Podcast" — a Barack Obama–Bruce Springsteen production with surprisingly little rock-star posturing.

Where and when do the winners actually meet?

The winners party lands on Nov. 9 in Brooklyn, New York. No host has been named. Expect the usual cocktail-plus-podcast hybrid, with winners cashing in plaques rather than checks.

What's the broader takeaway?

The mix rewards celebrity-hosted conversation (Poehler, Lewinsky, Kardashian) alongside labor-of-love independents (Blank Check, Flightless Bird) and public-radio stalwarts (Quirks & Quarks, The Daily Beans), a coalition that suggests the awards are still trying to be all things to all earbuds. The Nov. 9 gathering will test whether that pluralism survives another year of consolidation in the podcast industry.