You could cite the sponsorship of Audible, the rise of Midroll Media, Gimlet and PRX’s Radiotopia, galvanizing events like Podcast Movement and the Third Coast International Audio Festival, but ask anyone and they will say that it was Serial and its 100 million downloads that elevated narrative-driven podcasting from dorky obscurity back in 2014. Serial was mainstream. Serial intensified and also transcended the This American Life aesthetic. Serial was serious.

It also clarified the affect surrounding its own mode of consumption. One did not merely follow Serial or like Serial in 2014; one was “obsessed” with Serial. It’s the word that came up most often in the coverage, and served as grist for ridicule and derivative works, of which there are now many – Breakdown, Another Dead Man Walking, Limetown. If TV has taken on the metaphor of substance abuse these days (we are “addicted” to Making a Murderer, we “binge” on Scandal), narrative-driven podcasting has taken on the argot of infatuation, of compulsion, of love.

That response was prompted by the podcast itself. Early in the first episode, there is a bit of theater when Sarah Koenig reflects on how a meeting with lawyer Rabia Chaudry prompted her investigation of the murder of Baltimore teenager Hae Min Lee and the issue of whether or not Lee’s former boyfriend Adnan Syed had really committed it. In an aside, Koenig uses the technique of false improvisation, seeming to rethink a word in mid-sentence, although the line strikes the ear as scripted:

This conversation with Rabia […] this is what launched me on this year long – obsession is maybe too strong a word – let’s say fascination, with this case.

Let’s not. When this first aired, here on Antenna Jason Mittell made the argument that the main character of Serial wasn’t Syed at all, but Koenig herself. In retrospect I’d go further. Because the show dramatizes how engrossed its host became with the investigation she was performing, her obsession was the “protagonist” of the show. After all, that which drives Serial’s seriality is neither the chronology of the story nor that of its reconstruction, but Koenig’s internal thought process, her uncertainty when faced with multiple avenues of interpretation afforded by the same datum. Remember the Nisha Call, the pay phone at Best Buy, Syed stealing from the donations at his mosque? We listened to Koenig organize and reorganize each of these, value and devalue them, recursively, incredulously, passionately. We listened to Koenig struggling with the stubborn ambiguity of an ever-growing wall of details. That is why (as critics are starting to realize) imitating Serial’s narrative is impossible to do without recreating its narration.

So Serial’s thorniest philosophical problem was never with ethics, but instead with something closer to hermeneutics. The last lines of the twelfth episode speak to this theme:

When Rabia first told me about Adnan’s case, certainty, one way or the other seemed so attainable. We just needed to get the right documents, spend enough time, talk to the right people, find his alibi. Then I did find Asia, and she was real and she remembered and we all thought “how hard could this possibly be? We just have to keep going.” Now, more than a year later, I feel like shaking everyone by the shoulders like an aggravated cop. Don’t tell me Adnan’s a nice guy, don’t tell me Jay was scared, don’t tell me who might have made some five second phone call. Just tell me the facts ma’am, because we didn’t have them fifteen years ago and we still don’t have them now.

In an ironic touch, Koenig cites detective Joe “Just the Facts” Friday of Dragnet, radio’s paragon of positivist “keeping going,” as she expresses skepticism about the certainty that such a method provides. What was at stake in Koenig’s obsession, ultimately, wasn’t her feelings towards Adnan (the allegation of romantic attachment strikes me as both unsupported and misogynistic) but her worry that certainty about him is unavailable. What if the truth isn’t out there? That is the fear to which Koenig was professionally and emotionally vulnerable, and by foregrounding that exposure rather than subordinating it, she gave the show dimension, made it special and weird.

Last month Serial returned, now with seven new staff members and a host of collaborators, including Mark Boal’s Page One film company, tackling an elusive subject: the disappearance and search for Bowe Bergdahl, an American soldier who left his post in Afghanistan one night in June 2009 and was returned after a prisoner swap five years later.

The topic is complex, but in adopting it Koenig also marginalizes her own voice. We hear little about her own thinking, opinions, epistemological struggles. The first episode ends dramatically, with a phone ringing and Koenig explaining “That’s me, calling the Taliban.” But this is almost the only moment of personal ownership in the episode. By contrast, the first installment of Season 1 was full of that:

… This search sometimes feels undignified on my part …
… I have to know if Adnan really was in the library at 2:36 PM …
… If you’re wondering why I went so nuts on this story versus some other murder case, the best I can explain is this is the one that came to me …

In the Season 1 launch she uses the object pronoun form “me” 14 times to refer to herself. In the launch of Season 2 she only uses it four times.

She’s an outsider, learning terminology as we do and drawing on others. A recent article in Vulture characterizes Koenig as a novice in national security, describing Boal as the “embed” with contacts in government and a background as a screenwriter for films like Zero Dark Thirty and The Hurt Locker. In its very structure, then, Season 2 turns away from the model of the heroic individual quest, of “dramatic nonfiction narrative in the form of a personal journey” as Eugenia Williamson characterizes the This American Life aesthetic, and toward a model of collaboration. No doubt many journalists will cheer this change.

The team is making use of all of its resources. “The Golden Chicken,” the second episode, draws on 12 interviewees from Bergdahl’s battalion, 25 hours of taped conversations between Boal and Bergdahl, an interview with Taliban leader Mujahid Rehman, reporting by Afghan Sami Yousafzai who made contact with a fighter named Hilal, as well as documents from Wikileaks, all to reconstruct what happened to Bowe in the first weeks of captivity. If Serial’s new season is “about the knotted relationship between systems and people,” as Slate’s Katy Waldman puts it, then it also requires a number of systems and people to explore it.

Like the first season, this one dwells on discrepancies. The Taliban say that they did a traditional attan dance to cheer up Bergdahl in an orchard during his transportation, but he remembers nothing like that. Like last time, the heart of the show lies in interview tapes peppered with humdrum audio, like the sounds of Boal microwaving his lunch, which contrast the network news snippets at the top of the program – what Koenig calls the “antiseptic upstairs realm” of the mass media narrative. Like the first season, this one often focuses on vivid details. In the third episode, we learn that Taliban fighters drink Mountain Dew, think sunglasses look cool, and say “What’s up, bro.” The first episode explains what life was like in Bergdahl’s station in Paktika province by focusing on the burn pit, where pitiable soldiers took turns stirring their own burning refuse. It’s a shit-stirring scene at a post made famous by a soldier trying to stir up shit.

In theory, there is no reason why the new season, with its dark humor, with its war and torture, with its humanized subject and investigators, should differ tonally from the previous one. Koenig clearly has sympathy for her subject – in the fourth episode, listen to her describe how a captor cuts Bergdahl’s chest slowly with a razor blade 600 times. With multiple accounts of these and other events, the same awe and uncertainty we experienced the first time should plague us. “Any one piece of this story can keep a person’s mind churning,” Koenig promises in an early passage.

And yet it doesn’t. Why? Because Koenig is not vulnerable to her story this time out; she tells the story without becoming a character in it. She has yet to speak to Bergdahl directly, and her retreat to the role of anchor bears the same antiseptic whiff as the TV media reports that the program borrows for its opening. We aren’t even following Koenig’s “mental churning” closely enough to know how fraught it might be. Without the pathos of a narrator’s affective relation to her narrative, the season comes across as superior journalism but inferior meta journalism. We’ve lost the innervating anxiety that made it special.

Just think of it at the level of sonic texture. Gone are the calls to Adnan, car rides with co-producers, footsteps into fields, knocks on doors, auditory situations in which we felt physically proximal to our host moving through space over a duration of time. Instead, Koenig speaks to us from nowhere in particular, pointing our ears at places rather than taking us along with her to visit them. Her intense intimacy with the audience is not mirrored by a similar sonic proximity to the people and places that the story is about, leaving the experience oddly hollow, even lonely.

Perhaps Season 2 is too far away from its focus. Obsession always implies a collapse of critical distance, but Serial’s own metaphors go the other way. Early on in the first episode, Koenig likens the Bergdahl story to a children’s book called Zoom.

It starts with these pointy red shapes. And then, next page, you realize those shapes are a rooster’s comb. Next page, you zoom out, you see the rooster is standing on a fence with two little kids watching him. Next page, zoom out again, they’re in a farmhouse. And then, zoom further, you realize that all of it — the rooster, the kids, the farmhouse — are toys being played with by another child […] Out and out it zooms, the aperture of the thing getting wider and wider until the original image is so far away it’s unseeable. That’s what the story of Bowe Bergdahl is like.

It’s what the podcast is like, too. Even as we get closer to the story, we seem further away.

This is not the only time that Koenig refers to children’s media. Earlier on in the episode, she contrasts Boal’s salty language with Bowe’s schoolboy politeness, noting that the latter’s go-to expletive is Charlie Brown’s “good grief.” During the second episode, Koenig describes the Army’s thinking once it knew Bergdahl was captured this way:

They also knew that the Taliban’s goal would be to get Bowe to a hideout in the tribal region of Western Pakistan, because Pakistan is like home base. Or, to put it in Tom and Jerry terms, Pakistan is the hole in the baseboard where Tom cannot go.

Finally, in the third episode, as Koenig narrates the nightmarish tale of one of Bergdahl’s escape attempts. As Bergdahl falls off a cliff, the scene takes on the language of the comic strip:

Bowe lands on a dry riverbed on his left side. He said the word “oof” actually came out of his mouth, just like in a cartoon, loud enough so that some dogs started barking their heads off.

Small wonder that Serial feels just as bracing this time around, but flatter. Adnan Syed was a cipher; Bowe Bergdahl is a sketch.

And so, a year later, Serial remains the best game in town, an ambitious program, dense and with the best narrative rhythm in American narrative audio. It still boldly leads the field when it comes to signaling what podcasts can do. But it has lost its touch when it comes to refashioning how podcasts can feel. Is it fascinating? Sure. But so far obsession remains too strong a word.

Fandom can either be a deeply lonely or incredibly connective enterprise, depending on what you happen to be a fan of. And expression of that fandom in a public forum has traditionally come with some element of risk. Increasingly, the fear of outing oneself as a fan of some phenomenon or other has dissipated as digital media enable an immediate dialogue between fan groups, and between fans and the objects of their interest (check out how Taylor Swift makes dreams come true!). What’s piqued my curiosity of late, though, is the way the podcast medium plays into fandom, as a venue that is tailor-made for delivery of content for incredibly segmented audiences.

Fan podcasts, or podcasts dedicated to discussing a specific cultural artifact, aren’t an especially new thing–The Whocast, made by and for Doctor Who fans, dates back to 2006. However, this single-serving podcast form seems to be having something of a moment. And oddly enough, much of this work seems to be coming from the comedy community. As a few examples, comedian Geoff Tate hosts a Cheers-themed podcast called Afternoon, Everybody! W. Kamau Bell and Kevin Avery launched Denzel Washington is the Greatest Actor of All Time Period last year. Kumail Nanjiani’s The X-Files Files is nearing its fiftieth episode. And Adam Scott and Scott Aukerman have spent two years on an on-again off-again project about their mutual love of the band U2, called U Talkin’ U2 To Me?

I want to talk a little here about U Talkin’ U2 To Me? partly because it’s probably the most listenable version of the fan podcast out there, even for those who can’t stand the nominal subject. The show isn’t really about U2 (except in certain moments, when it most certainly is), but instead uses the band as a platform to spring off into one diversion after another. Aukerman and Scott have managed to curate an entire world that revolves around their pop culture obsession, but only periodically dwells in it. A given episode of U Talkin’ is just as likely to include a 20-minute riff about Turtle from Entourage as it is to debate the relative merits of Rattle and Hum. The other reason to highlight U Talkin’ is that, in its latest episode, the hosts landed their dream guests: the four members of U2 themselves, whom they had the chance to interview in New York during the band’s run of shows at Madison Square Garden.

After the hour-plus interview concludes within that U Talkin’ episode (which is likely to be the series finale, seeing as it’s reached something of a natural conclusion), Aukerman discusses fandom at some length, noting the ability for large communities to gather around a single purpose and produce meaningful discussions about the work itself, forge connections with like-minded others, and generally have a good time. This is not an uncommon sentiment about fandom, certainly, and there’s a rare candor in Aukerman’s voice when he thanks all the people that reached out to talk about the podcast (fans of U2 or not) and what that connection means for him and Scott. The theme here remains on how this community helped to make a dream come true (meeting the band!) for Aukerman and Scott. And that’s where the platitudes and idealism of fan culture may need to be tempered a bit.

What goes unspoken here is that Aukerman and Scott’s experience with the object of their fandom is anything but common. It’s also an experience that’s predicated largely on their high status and cultural capital: their pre-existing industry connections and their own level of fame. The same is true for, say, Nanjiani, whose podcast tackles a different episode of Chris Carter’s sci-fi series in each installment. Nanjiani is accomplished as an actor, as well, and his X-Files love recently landed him a supporting gig on the forthcoming reboot. In a lateral example, we could even look at WTF With Marc Maron‘s recent booking of President Obama and the awestruck post-mortem episode that followed it. These are all high-status fans, and by privilege of access and talent have a much greater shot than the average fan to make these experiences happen. In a recent book, Barrie Gunter refers to the concept of “celebrity capital,” and it’s not much of a stretch to see a certain level of commodification at play here. It’s also a two-way street–we can see the benefits of exchange for U2 the band as well as for the U Talkin’ guys. Similarly, there’s some positive advance PR to be had for the X-Files in hiring an actor like Nanjiani who is a self-described “superfan” of the series.

I point this out not to say that Aukerman, or Scott, or Nanjiani, or Bell, et al. aren’t “real fans.” Listening to their work, it’s enlightening to hear the fun they have simply engaging with things they love. But they are definitely not ordinary fans, the kind who listen to these podcasts and enjoy them at least in some part because of the vicarious access they afford. The last two episodes of U Talkin’ are exhilarating. In the penultimate episode, the hosts detail their backstage encounter with two band members (including Bono’s offhanded acknowledgement of their enterprise, “We know more about you than you’d like”). Then there is the nervous, awkward, and ultimately charming interview with the whole foursome in the last installment. If we are to step back and reconsider this experience through the eyes of a couple of regular U2 fans, would the experience would even have registered as a cultural moment? Is it not part of the appeal that U2 themselves were thrust into a universe that had already been carefully constructed by a pair of media-savvy TV and podcasting veterans? (If you’re a regular listener, you’ll understand what a coup it was to get the band engaged in some of the many podcasts-within-a-podcast that Scott and Aukerman had established, like “I Love Films”).

Perhaps a broader discussion might lead to how these podcasts exist as entertainment products on their own terms, though it’s hard to disentangle them from their objects of analysis. Moreover, there’s a question on both sides of the microphone about what we want our celebrities to be, or perhaps just what we want to see in them. Maybe the success of this form comes not from engaging with the specifics of what the people we’re fans of are fans of. Maybe the appeal is in knowing they are fans, just like us.

Post by Jason Loviglio, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

I promised the Antenna editors an account of the Podcast Movement 2015 conference, held last month at the Omni Hilton in Fort Worth, Texas. But that was before I actually got there and realized what I had signed up for: It was a massive and elaborate event, composed of podcasters, would-be podcasters, and an army of sponsors with elaborate electronic kiosks, booths, and high-tech swag. The conference room stages had been decorated in a detailed brick and metal motif meant perhaps to evoke a trendy re-tooling of an earlier industrial moment, but which actually put me in mind of the brick ovens of Bertucci’s Pizza. A young woman I met at the conference, an aspiring educational podcaster, suggested a darker historical reference point for the ovens, which due to the spatial constraints of the stages did have a vaguely cramped, carceral appearance. I arrived on a Friday morning and rather than interrupt the pre-conference sessions that were already underway, I walked through the sun-blasted downtown, past stately Art Deco towers built with petroleum money, to a local café where I found air conditioning, the free city weekly, and a thin roast beef sandwich.

The opening plenary session of the conference took place later that first evening, a presentation of awards by the “Academy of Podcasting.” And while there is much to deride about any awards ceremony and perhaps little sport in doing so, it’s worth mentioning that this one lived up to its aspirational peers in several ways: the absurd, grueling duration of the ceremony; the execrable play-on, play-off music; and a loyal adherence to the conventions of the acceptance speech. (Yes, the winners actually said “I’d like to thank the Academy.”) The ratio of annual prizes to Hall-of-Fame inductees was about even, an interesting fact for an industry so young and for a conference only in its second year. The ceremony was as much about writing the history of podcasting as creating its future. I was struck most of all by the sheer scale of the podcasting universe represented: there were nine awards categories, including “Business,” “Food and Drink,” “Lifestyle and Health” and “Society and Culture,” the latter of which Roman Mars’ 99% Invisible won. Mars also won the “People’s Choice Award,” which the audience selected in real-time on their phones. Mars gave a keynote too; in that and in my conversation with him on the last day of the conference, he modestly and thoughtfully conveyed the sense that podcasting had been a refuge from the disappointments and challenges of public radio.

Roman Mars of 99% Invisible at Podcast Movement 2015.

The next two days’ sessions were replete with variations on similar nuggets of wisdom. Attendees were exhorted to “listen” many times, typically in sessions that permitted very little time for panelists to hear the questions and comments from the audience. Advice typically came in lists; it was all I could do not to write this up as “Seven Things I Learned at the Podcast Movement. Number 1: Listen!” Almost every session combined inspirational buncombe with a genuine desire on the part of the presenters to help the attendees, who paid nearly $500 for the conference registration, to figure out how to be successful. Two delightful exceptions to the formulaic, numbered bits of advice were Nikki Silva’s expertly produced presentation of The Kitchen Sisters‘ lost sound recordings, and Lea Thau, who led about 50 of us thru a storytelling workshop complete with Moth-like presentations at the end.

For most of the time, I felt as if I were at two conferences in one, a trope I tried out several times during the short Q&As, hoping it would catch on. One conference was filled with recognizable types: public radio veterans and those who aspired to make podcasts with the public radio sensibility, grouped loosely around the PRX’s “network” of podcasts, Radiotopia. These include Criminal, Strangers, 99% Invisible, and Fugitive Waves. The other, bigger conference was composed of entrepreneurial podcasters and their great hero, John Lee Dumas, a youthful entrepreneur whose membership organization Podcasters’ Paradise commanded the enthusiasm typically reserved for pyramid schemes, motivational speakers, and returned messiahs. Despite their zeal, members of Podcasters’ Paradise were easy to talk to and taught me a lot about how to think about the podcasting platform, industry, and community, which I heard many of them refer to as “this space.” I met one on the bus-ride to the Stockyards, a hulking retro-cattle industry entertainment district, who described the split in the conference between “Pro-casters” (professional broadcasters), almost exclusively from the public radio sector, for whom podcasting was merely another way to distribute and actual “Podcasters,” the scrappy amateurs with start-up ambition and moxie. Sure enough panelists in the Radiotopia sessions (Pro-casters all), avoided the term podcasting in favor of terms like “public media” to describe their platform-straddling work, and the word “shows” to talk about their own work.

John Lee Dumas of the “online community” Podcasters’ Paradise at Podcast Movement 2015.

And it was true that the members of Podcasters’ Paradise that I met were all amateurs to audio production. I learned at some point that the average number of downloads for podcasts was 158, a far cry from the tens of millions that Serial commanded. John Lee Dumas’ daily podcast Entrepreneur on Fire, however, was the lodestar towards which all the amateurs navigated. His hundreds of thousands of dollars in monthly income (updated regularly on the front page of his website) represented far more meaningful numbers to the podcasters than any dreary audience averages. Dumas’ appeal lay more in his humble backstory and exuberant message. An Iraq War army veteran, law school dropout, and Wall Street washout turned podcasting millionaire, Dumas exudes the optimism and charm of someone who can’t quite believe how well things have turned out. For his podcast, Dumas interviews equally exuberant young entrepreneurs, many of whom echo his rags-to-riches narrative, keywords (“bootstrapping,” “journey”), and variations on the metaphor of “on fire” to signal inspiration. The sound design and vocal performances of Entrepreneur on Fire, like that of Pat Flynn’s Smart Passive Money, another podcaster luminary, owe more to AM talk radio’s thin, digitally compressed sound than to the lush, artful sound of This American Life and Radiolab. Dumas’ interview style is rat-a-tat; there’s even a lightning round, which doesn’t sound much different from the rest of the program. It’s pretty much the exact opposite of the probing, allusive style made famous by Terry Gross on Fresh Air. If Dumas is “listening” to his guests, there’s no evidence of it. I will spare you a full accounting of Dumas’ message, which involves keywords whose first letters spell out the word “SUCCCCEESS.” Boiled down to its essence, Dumas exhorted his audience to “Invest, Learn, and Teach.” “Teach for Free,” Dumas advised. His free webinars on how to get started in podcasting are hugely popular loss leaders for Podcasters Paradise membership, which people pay $1,100 to join.

The “give it away” ethos and model seemed to be the golden thread running through the two parts of the conference. It was difficult to find a podcast of any kind that didn’t operate on the free distribution model, though some sold access to their full archives. Others tried fundraising in the public radio podcast model, simply asking listeners to “chip in a few bucks.” For the most part, the podcasting movement has been brought to you by corporate sponsors like Audible and MailChimp on the public media side and by subscriptions to additional services, books, “solutions,” CDs, and memberships on the business-oriented side. Some of the very popular business-oriented podcasts, like Entrepreneur on Fire, also include a spasm of super short ads from small business services like BrainTree and LegalZoom at the top of the podcast, at the “mid-roll,” and at the end. One vendor and conference sponsor, PodClear, offered high-quality internet voice service that podcasters could use to conduct long distance interviews more cheaply than ISDN lines and more reliably than phone lines or VOIP, a sign that public radio’s high-quality sound, rather than AM’s scratchy, populist immediacy, might be the emergent standard for the new medium.

Marc Maron at Podcast Movement 2015.

Marc Maron’s keynote (he was a late replacement for Glenn Beck) also represented a point of conjunction. Like Roman Mars, Maron’s work was universally known and admired. Like Dumas, he framed the success of his WTF podcast as a late reprieve from a life of failure and heartbreak. Broke, in the throes of a painful divorce, and a stalled career in comedy, he turned his garage into a studio, in part, he joked, because the ceiling was too low to hang himself from. Podcasting as a form of last-minute salvation was another uniting theme, giving the conference a tent-revival vibe. Even Lea Thau, the Peabody Award winning co-founder of The Moth, frames the success of her Radiotopia-backed Strangers show as salvation from a devastating career and personal reversals. Perhaps the purest articulation of the podcast-as-rebirth formula appeared on the back of a tee-shirt worn by one of the attendees that read “From Brain Tumor to 1 Million Monthly Downloads.” I had scoffed at the use of the word “Movement” in the conference title when I first heard of it, but now I understood a bit better the affective economy the conference was tapping into. Even Nikki Silva of The Kitchen Sisters described the conference as a “festival” that reminded her of the early, pre-NPR days of community radio in Santa Cruz.

Nikki Silva of The Kitchen Sisters at Podcast Movement 2015.

The gathering was big and the number and kind of podcasts represented was impressive. But I was surprised to hear speakers gushing about the conference’s “diversity.” It was, to all appearances, a very white Anglophone group, though there was at least some gender diversity, with women making up a bit less than half the gathering. The smallest session I attended, in a cramped, remote room hard by the restrooms, featured Carolina Guerrero of Radio Ambulante, the Spanish-language, pan-American podcast whose global audience grew fifty-fold in 2014 alone. Guerrero explained the meteoric growth in audience as a function of demographic changes, the show’s pan-American reach, and partnerships with BBC Mundo and radio stations in Latin America, as well as English-version appearances on Radiolab, Reply All, and This American Life. It was surprising that so little was said in the rest of the conference about the growth potential of Spanish-language programming.

By Sunday, the Stockholm Syndrome had set in and I began to identify with my captors, and to love my fellow conference-goers and the blank anywhere/nowhere of the conference hotel. Even the vendors, who lined the hallway of the meeting room level had become, if not friends, then at least familiar denizens of our temporary village. I collected lanyards, tee-shirts, and phone chargers in my tote bags and signed up for special offers. Conversations with familiar strangers became easier, as if in fulfillment of Lea Thau’s injunction that we be “Strangers No More.” People exchanged business cards with abandon, as if they genuinely hoped to stay in touch. Small confidences and bits of advice and email addresses were exchanged. We found it easier to pipe up during the sessions, despite the brief time allotted for Q&A. In a session on “Creativity and Storytelling,” the audience erupted 20-minutes in, protesting good naturedly the fact that the moderator had yet to address a question to the only woman panelist.

Serial‘s Sarah Koenig at Podcast Movement 2015.

The conference concluded Sunday afternoon with a final keynote, this one by Sarah Koenig of the podcasting’s game-changing hit, Serial. Like Serial, Koenig’s talk was exquisitely produced and disarmingly personal. After nearly a year, she still manages to seem genuinely staggered by the podcast’s runaway success. And yet somehow she knows exactly which sorts of behind-the-scenes tidbits about the reporting, production, and post-fame spin-control we’re desperate to hear. Perhaps most valuable was her candid presentation of an early draft of the first episode’s script, followed by the much-improved final version, a rare moment in the conference when the work of making good audio was shown more than merely celebrated or advertised. Koenig credited producer Julie Snyder with providing some of the most important improvements draft to draft, a valuable lesson about the importance of collaboration, another point often lost in the highly individualistic, “bootstraps” narratives and underfunded business model of the business podcasters. She also played bits of taped phone calls between herself and Adnan Syed, in which she gamely revealed her manipulations of Syed and his flirtations with her. Koenig projected the exact same uncertainty about Adnan Syed’s guilt that suffused the entire podcast without seeming the slightest bit less fascinated by the case. Koenig closed by taking questions, and yes, she really did seem to listen.

All photos from Podcast Movement. 

Post by Brian Fauteux, University of Alberta

This is the first post in our new series “The Podcast Review,” which offers critical appreciations of podcast series or episodes and other notable digital soundwork.

Podcasts about music come with a particular set of challenges. For one, it can be difficult for hosts to balance their own musical preferences against those of their listeners. Also, for more amateur productions, there is the tricky question of whether to acquire the rights to use songs in the podcast, to rely on brief clips that may fall within fair use (or its equivalent in other countries), or to just risk it and worry about consequences if they arise.

For these reasons and others, music podcasts, especially those that aren’t produced by a radio station or network like NPR or KEXP, often have a limited run. Staffan Ulmert of The Only Music Podcast explains that he and his co-host Louise Hammar had no idea why so many music podcasts barely make it to twenty episodes. He wonders if it’s because of licensing issues or if those involved in creating music podcasts start to resent each other around episode fifteen. Their new podcast, created just this year, provides an excellent perspective on how labels, artists, and listeners are discovering music today and how various facets of the music industries work.

The Only Music Podcast is produced in Gothenburg, Sweden, and is available via iTunes or from the podcast’s website, which organizes its episodes into a visually striking grid of images that are demarcated by a topic. The episode titled “Girls!“, for instance, is marked by a photo of Björk’s face surrounded by a black background. Episodes are released every two weeks and the goal of the podcast is “to avoid being too nerdy” and to ensure it appeals to listeners beyond those who “consume music and music news 24/7.” Staffan is a music producer who has released sample-based music under the moniker Mojib and is also the founder of Has it Leaked. Louise co-runs Telegram Studios, one of Sweden’s biggest indie labels; she has also managed a number of international artists.

Each episode is broken down into three distinct sections: News, “what we’ve been listening to,” and a distinct topic such as remixes. Two episodes have deviated from this format due to summer holidays: One, a list of guilty pleasure songs, and the other, a list of cover songs the hosts enjoy. Featured news topics are related to the music industries, such as the release of Tidal and its lack of transparency in terms of what they pay artists, recent album leaks (Kendrick Lamar’s “King Kunta”), and the popularity of surprise album releases in the United States. When introducing listeners to Tula, Louise does so by explaining the creative process behind the group’s music and offers some insight into why she thinks it resonates with listeners. She is able to provide this context since Tula works with her label, Telegram. During a discussion of Jamie xx’s “Loud Places” from Episode 3, we learn about the samples used on the track and the process of mixing and remixing. Louise then takes us through the history of remixing by rocksteady, reggae, and dub artists.

The final section of each podcast installment is particularly appealing for music fans, since it deals with compelling and familiar issues in the music industry, but with a refreshing perspective that isn’t filtered through the United States or the U.K. On Episode 5, “Girls!” (April 28, 2015), the discussion of women in the music industry centers on the year 1996 when Sweden was “bombarded with U.K. rock bands” and the “laddish” culture that accompanied it. The hosts discuss how there were many women artists on the charts that year (Mariah Carey, Toni Braxton, Celine Dion) but argue that because the industry was heavily dominated by men, it was hard for women’s perspectives to emerge. As a point of comparison, they then discuss Robyn and her promotion of women in technology. In the next episode they mention that this is a much larger topic and one that they will discuss again on a future episode.

Being able to hear the podcast evolve over the course of its 11 episodes is a fascinating component of The Only Music Podcast. At this year’s ICA conference, a panel on podcasting was followed by a discussion of the increasing popularity and professionalization of the podcast. A few points that were brought up included the “podcast/public radio voice” and the importance of large distribution channels. By contrast, the 11 episodes of The Only Music Podcast allow us to hear the hosts working through technical issues such as having two microphones recording at the same volume level (they have yet to receive their proper microphones). At one moment Louise admits that her iPhone battery has died and that the audio quality may now decrease. Many episodes end with Staffan asking listeners to write to the hosts if they have suggestions for improving the format. So, while the two hosts are clearly experts in their fields, I enjoy hearing the podcast develop and change over each episode. In the pilot episode Staffan admits that “It’s very difficult to create a podcast. We thought it would be very easy. It’s not…” He adds that he had a hard time listening to the first few episodes but supportive emails from listeners gave them the confidence to continue.

Staffan says that he and Louise are getting better at being themselves once they hit the record button. He imagines that they will run into some problems with licensing music if the podcast develops and its audience grows. If that’s the case, he hopes that sponsorship can help. This is a great time to tune into The Only Music Podcast, both because it deals with the ever-changing contemporary music industries, and because we can hear a podcast develop and find its voice.

Post by Neil Verma, Northwestern University

In her 2013 book Listening Publics, Kate Lacey points out a contradiction in listening habits arising out of the proliferation of podcasts and other programs born in the digital space. On the one hand, listeners experience radio in perhaps more personalized ways than they did in the past, listening to what they want and when they want, often in the micro-airspace of a personal device. On the other hand, these same listeners represent their acts of listening to others through social media much more readily and broadly than did listeners in the past (p. 154).

Our listening acts are thus simultaneously both less “in public” and more so, while becoming far more available to monitoring by a variety of entities clamoring for every crumb of data on audience preferences and behaviors.

The good news is that this contradiction suggests that despite the insularity of their sonic lives, there remains a persistent desire within many people to listen together, if only virtually. Lacey points to the rise of curated listening events, which have expanded quite a bit in the years since her book was published. Note the upcoming Cast Party bringing podcast shows to film theaters, recent RadioLoveFest at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), and the ongoing events of the Third Coast International Audio Festival. Although it’s not really new, listening together without visual stimulus still feels unusual, like an experiment in experience. By liberating publics and concentrating them, providing a paradoxical collectivity and anti-sociality at once, group podcast listening is full of possibilities, although it is unclear what they are and how to harness them.

Poster for the RadioLoveFest live radio series at Brooklyn Academy of Music.

In this post, I’d like to think about the classroom as a space in which to find out more about that. While we have opportunities to use public and virtual spaces to promote collective listening (this was the premise of my #WOTW75 project in 2013), and some of the most experimental thinking about podcasting is taking place online (see Sounding Out!’s Everything Sounds piece, Cynthia Meyers’s study of podcast business, and Jason Mittell’s coverage of Serial), it’s in classrooms where we can really “do” collective listening in a unique way. Unlike listeners in online groups, movie theaters, museums, and festivals, those in classrooms host critique without seeming to undermine community. Moreover, they benefit from a tremendous power that even educators themselves often undervalue: by meeting again and again, classroom listening enables conversations to grow, as the listening we do alone becomes the listening we do together.

According to this reasoning, teaching classes on podcasting isn’t just a new idea to attract students – although it does – but also a way of knowing the form of the podcast anew. In other words, podagogy (a word I didn’t make up, swear) is just as necessary to the current task of inventing podcast studies as it is to the task of applying it.

I recently had a chance to experiment with this in a course I taught on “Podcasting and New Audio,” which focused on narrative-driven podcasts in historical context. Broken into three sections – “What is a Podcast?,” “Possible Histories the Podcast,” and “Formal Problems / Critical Strategies” – the course gave opportunities for complicating student understanding of shows that many already knew well. By teaching Radiolab’s “Space” alongside a week on the history of sound art, for instance, we could rethink this show on discovery along lines suggested by conceptual art. Combining Serial with Carlo Ginzburg’s essay on the history of conjecture, we dug into the show’s hermeneutics, considering the way the narration approaches “evidence” with boundless suspicion while also providing listeners with sonic details that work as “clues,” offering seemingly privileged windows into meaning, like tracks in the snow.

I found the historical classes – highlighting the hidden legacy of radio drama, documentary, and the radio “feature” on podcast formulas – especially gratifying. Even the most ardent podcast fans know few masterpieces of the past. Want to blow the mind of a lifelong devotee of This American Life? Assign The Ballad of John Axon. Trust me.

Cover for a 1965 LP edition of The Ballad of John Axon by Ewan MacColl, Peggy Seeger, and Charles Parker.

I added two podagogical (there it is again) features to the architecture of the class, both of which involved listening to our materials as a collective, in the room.

In the first, I asked students to work in groups to produce recordings as responses to the reading, creating a quasi-podcast of their own. Prompts included: after reading Nancy Updike’s manifesto for radio, create a 1 minute “manifesto” using only sound (I got a great one based on Russolo); provide the shortest possible piece of audio that tells a “story” whose structure responds to how podcasters like Alex Blumberg and Ira Glass understand that term (the snap of a mousetrap, two seconds flat). Listening to these in class gave each group a chance to talk about their thinking, emphasizing sound as not just a vehicle of response but also as a way of knowing. Indeed, the very anticipation of being asked to create audio made them listen differently, tuning their receptors and making them as detail-oriented in the study of podcasts as many already are when it comes to TV and film.

That’s the same idea behind the second experiment in the course. In each meeting, one group would take the task of devising and leading a “Guided Exercise in Collective Listening.” To explain, I gave an example. On the first day, I broke the group into thirds and assigned them each one of Michel Chion’s “Three Listening Modes” (semantic listening for language, causal listening for sources of emanation, “pure listening” for sound objects) to shape how they listen to The Truth’s “The Extractor.” Then we listened to the whole piece and had a discussion about how it was different depending on our mode, and what points in the piece cued us to shift from one mode to another. In another case, I instructed them to make a four frame “storyboard” for Sean Borodale’s A Mighty Beast while we listened to it together, later asking what choices we have to make in “translating” from sound to a constrained number of visuals, as a way of troubling our lazy notions of the relationship between sounds and mental images.

Soon the students took over directing our listening activities. That became the richest part of the course, particularly for difficult episodes. Listening to Love + Radio’s brilliant but disturbing story “Jack and Ellen” encouraged us to look at how editing constructed the complex reliability – and the complex gender identity – of a blackmailer. A group that undertook Radiolab’s controversial “Yellow Rain” segment instructed us to listen for moments of shifting allegiance, an idea that sharpened our appreciation of the rhetorical use of silence in that piece, along with its bearing on questions of race and power.

Art from the “Jack and Ellen” episode of Love + Radio. Image: Cal Tabuena-Frolli.

Another value of listening together in class was more ineffable. Getting podagogy out of the pod, it became clear that these pieces simply hang in the air differently among other people than they do in the ear and alone, carrying discomfort, mortification and identity more heavily when they fill a room. By having both experiences, class listening introduces sequence to Lacey’s contradiction. Students begin with private listening on their own, have a second experience informed by peers as a group, and then explain their experiences and their discrepancies to one another. The rhythm moved from the public to the private and back again, something that a one-time collective listening event alone does not accomplish.

Curated listening in public is a laudable and exciting development, I hope we see more of it. I hope it gets even weirder. But in the classroom, collective listening can be a way of teaching the ear to be more critical, more aware of its own comportment and aesthetic responses, as well as of the habits of attention and social dynamics that underlie those responses, the very matters that podcast scholarship ought to be after.

If you’ve been enjoying television comedy over the past several years, you likely owe a debt of gratitude to a wholly different production form: the podcast. 

Podcasts have existed in their current form for well over a decade now, and have been much discussed as a technological form and an industrial challenge. Last year the format got perhaps its largest mass exposure ever, with the success of the docu-series Serial, an absolute sensation that was influenced by some of the finer elements of true crime TV and long form radio production techniques. There have been a number of popular podcasts in many other genres, like sports (The B.S. Report), technology (TED Radio Hour), and business (Planet Money), each of which can be found tucked into its little niche on the iTunes charts.

But I would argue, the unbridled cachet of something like Serial excepted, that the biggest cultural impact of the podcasting revolution, such as it is, has come from comedy. A cursory glance at the iTunes charts in the comedy category reveals a host of comic talent that would be familiar to nearly every TV fan in 2015: Marc Maron, Aisha Tyler, Bill Burr, John Oliver, Chelsea Peretti, Dan Harmon. These comics are joined by other comedy podcasters who have made their bones in screenwriting, local radio, improv theater, and even YouTube. While the technological ease of podcasting has allowed inroads for all kinds of talent to reach increasingly segmented audiences, comedians have reaped the greatest televisual benefits in a media landscape that we have come to accept as both post-television and, almost unquestionably, post-radio.

Take Maron as an example. The 51-year-old standup has widely credited podcasting (in his act, his book, and his podcast itself, WTF With Marc Maron) with saving his stagnant career. Cable network IFC developed a starring sitcom vehicle for Maron (cleverly titled Maron), which features the comic as a fictionalized version of himself, a comedian and podcaster, and which draws heavily on personal stories Maron had shared with his WTF audience. The show has been successful enough to advance to a third season, which premieres in May. Maron was certainly a known commodity as a comic before he began his podcast in 2009, but Maron is undoubtedly a career zenith, and owes its existence to the podcast’s success. In other cases, like in the case of Joe Rogan’s The Joe Rogan Experience (routinely near the top of the iTunes’s rankings), the podcast’s success owes far more to its host’s TV credits. And Rogan has plenty of those, from Newsradio, to Fear Factor, to his current role as UFC commentator.

What I think is most fascinating about this reciprocal influence between the arenas of podcasting and television are the narrative challenges (and opportunities) that come from translating one to the other. And on this count there are several podcast-to-TV properties that have had both critical and commercial success. In the case of Maron, the writing staff has whittled down years of Maron’s musings about his personal life, personal history, and personal neuroses (delivered in an extemporaneous monologue in the first ten minutes of each WTF episode) to a series of fairly average, wholly recognizable 22-minute sitcom episodes. WTF listeners know more about Maron’s outlook on the world than they probably ever cared to hear. In the resulting television product, Maron’s perspective is acted out and contextualized with re-enacted versions of those rants serving as de facto narration. It’s a far different approach to the same material. Some of the 200,000 regular WTF listeners may feel that the sitcom format neuters Maron’s delivery or diminishes the parasocial effect of engaging with the host’s current life crises twice a week for years on end; others may feel the sitcom effectively cuts Maron’s ranting off at a more appropriate juncture (it’s not uncommon for fans or other comedians to profess to loving WTF “except for the first ten minutes”).

Another of the most popular comedy podcasts, Comedy Bang! Bang!, has also made the transition to television (also on IFC, now in its fourth season). Unlike WTF, which is primarily an interview show outside of Maron’s monologue, the podcast version of CBB is essentially an improvisational showcase for comedians of various backgrounds. Framed as an interview program, CBB typically begins with host Scott Aukerman talking with a celebrity guest. Soon enough, the show is interrupted by at least one other guest, a skilled improviser performing in character in an attempt to derail the proceedings. Very little about the character’s personality is known to the other participants ahead of time. The results are often very funny, sometimes fall flat, and are never in any way constricted; the format of the show is incredibly loose with episodes stretching from 45 minutes to upwards of two hours, depending on when Aukerman decides to rein things in. In 2012, the IFC version of the show was developed, and included major celebrity guests (some of whom had appeared on the podcast), along with recurring characters from the audio version. The CBB television show faces significant narrative challenges in its adaptation, especially considering the fact that a typical episode must be delivered in under 25% of the podcast’s running time. In the adaptation, Aukerman has tried to remain true to the improvisational roots of the podcast. Clearly the appearances of the celebrities and guest characters are edited down from longer, looser improv sessions, but the show has taken advantage of the televisual format to include produced sketches, narrative framing devices, and musical elements (featuring comedian and bandleader Reggie Watts).

In addition to these more direct adaptations (of which I could also mention TBS’s failed, though critically well-received Pete Holmes Show), podcasting’s influence on television comedy is felt in more subtle ways. Lost in the recent shuffle of late night Comedy Central hosts is the continued success of Chris Hardwick’s @midnight, a panel show meant to skewer web culture that features three comedian guests each night, many of whom (like Hardwick himself) have had a great deal of success in podcasting, and who use the show’s promotional opportunity to drive traffic to their online offerings. Some of the most frequent guests on @midnight include Doug Benson, Nikki Glaser, Paul Scheer, and Kumail Nanjiani, who have all promoted their popular podcasts on the show (Doug Loves Movies, You Had to Be There, How Did This Get Made?, and The Indoor Kids, respectively). The ABC-Univision collaborative cable venture Fusion has had modest success with one of its first original series No, You Shut Up, featuring comedy podcast all-star Paul F. Tompkins (CBB, The Pod F. Tompcast, Spontaneanation, among others) improvising with fellow comedians and puppets from Henson Alternative (an offshoot of the Jim Henson Company). Comedy Central’s popular Review stars comedian Andy Daly, who is well known among podcast fans for his improvised appearances on dozens of shows. USA’s Playing House features comedians Lennon Parham and Jessica St. Clair who honed their skills through character work on scores of podcast episodes. The list could go on.

The influence and overlap between the worlds of podcasting and television (and live comedy) is expanding as visual and audio media continue to fragment. Issues of narrative construction and narrative influence are ripe for questioning, as are issues of economic viability and the longevity of both of these forms as the landscape continues to change. Additionally, the cross-pollination of talent between these forms could lead to interesting transmedia inquiries. To my mind, it’s heartening that, in just the past half-decade or so, many more prospects have developed for varied comedic voices, and that a burgeoning format like the podcast has incubated many of those opportunities.

As with its cultural presence, the SCMS program reflects a catholic view of radio. A decade ago, the relatively few radio papers primarily addressed network era radio, the contemporary renaissance in radio scholarship addresses historical work from a variety of periods, transmedia adaptation, contemporary broadcast and satellite-based practices, as well as related practices like podcasts and web-streaming services. Now in its third year, the Radio Studies Scholarly Interest Group continues to offer community and mentorship for radio studies scholars new to SCMS or to the profession. The following consists of a list of explicitly radio oriented papers, workshops, and presentations. If one has a larger frame, presentations under the rubric of “Sound Studies” can be found in a roundup on the Sound Studies Blog.

Wed, 10:00 A10 Lindsay Affleck “Richard Diamond as Radio Shamus.”

Wed, 4:00 D18 Panel on “Podcasting: A Decade into the Life of a ‘New’ Medium”
Brian Fateaux on “Satellite Radio and the Aesthetics of Podcasting”
Andrews Salvati, “”Historiography and Interactivity in Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History”
Kelli Marshal, “Transmedia Storytime with your host Marc Maron”

Thursday, 11:00 G5 Panel on “Intermedial Adaptations of War of the Worlds”
Gabriel Paletz “Book to Broadcast and across Media: Orson Welles’s Strategies of Adaptation”
Doron Galili “War of the Worlds, Mass Media Panic, and the Coming of Television”
Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman ““Invading Auditory Practice: On the War of the Worlds and #WOTW75”

Thursday 11:00 G21 Workshop on “Sound Work: Radio Production Cultures” with Shawn VanCour, Tom McCourt, and David Uskovich. Moderated by Antenna’s own Andrew Bottomley

Friday 9:00 K 22 Jennie Hirsh, “Transmissions of Fascism: Advertising Architecture through the Ente Radio Rurale Poster Campaign”

Friday 2:15 M8 Workshop on “The Problem of the Radio Canon” with Debra Rae Cohen, Bill Kirkpatrick, Kate Lacey, Jason Loviglio, and Elena Razlogova

Saturday 9:00 Radio Studies SIG Meeting! Special presentation Mira Burt-Wintonick producer of CBC’s WireTap and award winning audio documentary Muriel’s Message. She will present on “storytelling and sound design in the golden age of podcasting.” As my SIG co-chair Cynthia Myers describes it: “Part listening party, part discussion, this session aims to explore a variety of new sonic trends and possibilities in radio production. How do you make your stories stand out in a sea of audio content? What’s different about producing for radio vs. podcasts? How do you create a signature sound?”

Saturday 11:00 O7 Panel on “The Public Good Goes to Market”
Jason Loviglio, “NPR Listens: Psychographics, Audience Measurement, and the Privatization of Public Service Radio”
Christopher Cwynar, “Social Service Media?: Assessing the CBC and NPR’s Engagement with Social Media Platforms”

Saturday 11:00 O11 Panel on “Local and National Radio in ‘the long 1960s’”
Josh Glick “Soundscapes of South Los Angeles: Radio and the Voices of Resistance”
Darrell Newton, “Being of Color in Britain: Identity, 1960s Radio, and West Indian Immigration”
Eleanor Patterson, “We Are Not Reviving a Ghost: Reconfiguring Radio Drama in Post-network Era United States”
Alexander Russo, “Musical Storytelling to a Fragmented Nation: American Top 40 and Cultural Conflict”

Saturday 1:00 Panel on “Gender and Crossover Programming in the 1940s and 1950s”
Elana Levine, “Picturing Soap Opera: Daytime Serials and the Transition from Radio to Television”
Jennifer Wang, “Resuscitating The Wife Saver: Gender, Genre, and Commercialism in Postwar Broadcasting”
Jennifer Lynn Jones, “Signal Size: Gender, Ethnicity, and Diet Episodes in the Radio-TV Transition”
Kate Newbold, “‘Now The Booing Is Done in Soprano’: Wrestling, Female Audiences, and Discourses of Liveness in the Radio- to-TV Transition in America, 1940–1953”

Saturday 1:00 P10 Panel on “Historicizing Music and Transmedia”
Kyle Barnett, “Popular Music Celebrity, Jazz-age Media Convergence, and Depression-era Transmedia”
Kevin John Bozelka, “Everything on the Pig but the Squeal: Artist/ Publishers and Recordings in the Post-WWII American Entertainment Industry”
Landon Palmer, “All Together Now: The Beatles, United Artists, and Transmedia Conglomeration”
Alyxandra Vesey, “Mixing in Feminism: Playlists, Networks, and Counterpublics”

Saturday 1:00 P12 Morgan Sea of Tranzister Radio will be on a “Workshop on Trans Women’s Media Activism”

Saturday 5:00 R7 Panel on “Humor Across Media in the 1920s and 1930s”
Kathy Fuller-Seeley, “Becoming Benny: Jack Benny’s Production of a Radio Comedy Persona, 1932–1936”
Nicholas Sammond, “Extending the Color Line: The Intermedial Lives of Two Black Crows”

Sunday 11:00 T13 Roger Almendarez, “Radio Arte—The Formation of a Mediated, Local Latina/o Identity in Chicago’s Pilsen Neighborhood”

Sunday 1:00 U18 Peter Bloom “Learning the Speech of Counterinsurgency as National Allegory: BBC Radio and Instructional Propaganda Film during the Malayan Emergency”

This 1938 trade press article argues that choosing the announcer to voice the commercial is similar to choosing the correct typeface for a print ad.

As podcasters draw larger audiences, they are experimenting with business models, especially with advertising.

Like many media historians, I’ve been struck by the parallels between 1920s-30s radio and 2010s podcasting. Despite obvious differences between podcasting and early radio—such as asynchronous reception, niche rather than mass audiences, global rather than local distribution—podcasters hoping to support themselves by advertising share many of the opportunities and difficulties faced by the producers of Jack Benny and Kraft Music Hall.

When radio emerged in the 1920s, its boosters promised it would be an effective advertising medium because, instead of inert printed text, it used the human voice, which “tug[s] at heartstrings,” according to Radio Showmanship, and “affects the heart, mind, and soul,” according to a 1929 CBS pamphlet. Podcaster Alix Spiegel (Invisibilia) has recently made a similar claim about the emotional information carried in voices.

Early radio advertising proponents noted that audiences experienced radio as individuals rather than as masses, in the intimacy and privacy of the home, making it feel like a more confidential and personalized medium than, say, films in theaters. Likewise, some podcasters today note the high “engagement” they enjoy with their audiences, many of whom, listening on headphones or earbuds, are far more attentive than audiences for whom radio or television is sonic wallpaper. Advertisers who fear television audiences have strayed to other screens may find podcast audiences more appealing. As one podcaster explains, “People really pay attention to the ads,” so advertisers may pay very high prices (CPMs) to reach them.

The cartoonist H. T. Webster poked fun at announcers perfecting their commercial delivery.

Early radio proponents, such as a NBC time salesman, noted radio’s “pseudo-friendship” effect, when audiences’ parasocial relationships with radio personalities spilled over into their perceptions of whichever products those personalities endorsed. Likewise, some podcasters today, such as Mark Maron and the hosts of Men in Blazers, are asked by advertisers to promote products by integrating endorsements or uses of products into their podcasts, allowing brands to leverage the audience’s good will toward the host. Such “testimonials,” an established strategy in print advertising before the radio era, also had a long history in radio and television, as hosts such as Mary Margaret McBride and Arthur Godfrey integrated product endorsements into their talk shows.

However, advertisers do run some risks when closely tying the commercial message to the host or announcer’s personality. In early radio, some suggested that announcers delivering advertising messages must sound “sincere” or risk losing audience trust. The commercial’s words, according to Norman Brokenshire, a well-known announcer, must be “felt as well as spoken.” Likewise, StartUp podcaster Alex Blumberg, who uses first-person narratives and interviews in both his program and advertising, has insisted that he selects his advertisers carefully so that any implied endorsement by him is sincere and authentic.

In the 1930s the ad agency J. Walter Thompson would sometimes, instead of professional announcers, have an amateur or “man on the street” speak the commercial message; this, the ad agents believed, could make the advertising sound “more sincere, frank, and open.” Likewise, podcaster Roman Mars (99% Invisible) often uses soundbites of his own child speaking about his advertisers, and the producers of Serial, most famously, use “man on the street” interviews for their commercial for MailChimp. The interviewee who notoriously mispronounced the name as “Mail Kimp” reinforced the authenticity of the ad.

In 1920s radio, producers worried at first that audiences would turn off the radio if the program were interrupted by ads. Today audiences can easily avoid interruptive ads, and so podcasters feel a special need to keep them listening. Blumberg’s ads in StartUp, for example, resemble the rest of the show; as he interviews his documentary sources about his topic, so he interviews his sponsors about their business, with no change in style or tone. The similarity is so close, in fact, that he employs a special music cue so that listeners won’t confuse the ad with the program.

This integration of format or style between program and commercial was routine in 1930s-40s radio. Comedian Fred Allen made jokes with announcers about sponsors, and Jack Benny famously integrated humorous references to Jell-O into his comedy. The intention was not to confuse audiences but to smooth out any disjunctures and keep audiences listening.

Alex Blumberg of Gimlet Media & the StartUp podcast (Image: The Wolf Den/Midroll Media)

Blumberg has already confronted one of the pitfalls of such integrations. For his company’s other program, Reply All, the producer used an interview with a young boy about his use of the web site provider Squarespace as an advertisement for that site. The boy, and his mother, thought the interview was for the program, not an ad, and the mother’s sense of offense was rapidly transmitted via social media. In a perfectly reflexive and reflective episode about this event, Blumberg interviewed the mother, who noted that her son, unlike a hired performer, was offered no compensation for his testimonial. So Blumberg’s production of authentic ads via documentary-style soundbites has to gain the trust not just of the audience but also of the documentary subjects.

In some ways, then, podcasting is where radio was in the late 1920s, promising to be a new medium but like old media simultaneously. Advertisers’ need to reach attentive audiences has increased as audiences have been unshackled from linear media’s schedules and forced exposure to advertising. As podcasters try to monetize programming, maintaining their audiences’ trust and attention will be crucial to their success, and that, in turn, will depend in part on how they handle their advertising.

Previously on “Downloading Serial”…

… was more than a month ago. Why the delay? Partly it was personal circumstances: a dead hard drive, family commitments, end of the semester craziness. But more it was because I didn’t quite have enough to say to warrant an installment, as many of my thoughts were only partly formed, or contingent on how future Serial developments would play out before I wanted to commit to an analysis. My abiding sense that Serial itself was in flux as a cultural object made it difficult to write an analysis that could avoid its own wavering and uncertainty.

But now we are done, or at least the standard weekly release of the story of Adnan Syed on Serial has ended. His story is far from over, but the storytelling has stopped. And I’m left to reflect on what Serial was, and might have been, had it not been so wedded to its weekly release schedule and need to conclude before the holiday season kicks in. One of the most exciting elements of Serial is how it has seemed to be inventing its own structural conventions throughout its run, distinguishing itself from typical radio with variable episode lengths, and jumping onto the high wire act of simultaneously reporting and presenting astory. From the beginning, Sarah Koenig has said that we’ll be following along with her as she discovers the story, and that they did not know how exactly many episodes the first season would be. But the final month has felt like they were spinning their wheels, looking for material to structure each weekly episode (especially last week’s “Rumors” installment), even given the extra break for Thanksgiving, and finding ways to incorporate the miscellaneous new information that kept pouring in.

Despite its conclusive allusion to Dragnet, which made me smile, today’s final episode felt rather arbitrary, dictated by the desire to have a defined season of regular installments, and seemingly to avoid the counter-programming of Christmas and New Year’s. There is no resolution, with two court motions still in play but otherwise no change in Adnan’s status or compelling alternate suspects—the last minute identification of a serial killer felt underwhelming, making me yearn for an episode exploring that story and teasing out the many problems with that theory. Koenig ends by playing juror and acquitting Adnan, but even as bits of evidence may have swayed her opinions slightly throughout the series, I have no doubt that she has always held sufficient reasonable doubt. The ending of Serial, entitled “What We Know,” establishes that although we know a lot more about the case than when we began, the big picture is the same as established in the pilot: the prosecution’s case was not enough to warrant conviction, but no other explanation for Hae’s murder rises above the level of unsubstantiated speculation inappropriate for factual journalism.

I’ve been interested in how Serial draws upon conventions of serialized TV fiction, and there is no doubt that the podcast’s unprecedented popularity was fueled by those resonances. But in the end, I think those comparisons also highlight Serial’s greatest weaknesses. The producers fail to achieve the structural elegance that marks the best of serial storytelling, where each episode both stands on its own and as piece of a compelling larger whole. They tackled a genre of crime fiction where our expectations are always aimed at a revelation that will be satisfying and conclusive, answering the curiosity question of “what happened in the past?”, which is an unreasonable goal for an ongoing investigation to arrive at. They embraced a serialized form that has encouraged and even demanded forensic fandom to fill in the gaps between episodes, but did not account for how to deal with the ethics of fan investigation into an actual murder, and whether to integrate or ignore such fan practices. And by adopting the model of weekly episodes of a thematically unified season, they were forced to produce episodes without much new to say, and stop producing episodes before the story had finished unfolding.

None of these structural facets are essential aspects of a serialized podcast. Specifically, I wonder how Serial may have played out with a more flexible production and distribution schedule. There is no doubt that the weekly release creates a ritual of engagement that is hard to replicate, but after a few episodes establishing the hook, moving to a more sporadic release as motivated by the story and reporting could sustain that engagement. And why must the series end now, just because further weekly releases are untenable? Imagine that in two months you noticed there was a new episode of Serial waiting in your iTunes playlist, with an update on Adnan’s appeal, or an in-depth investigation into the possible guilt of Ronald Lee Moore. That would set Twitter ablaze, and renew interest in the series (and sustain engagement in anticipation of the next season). Unlike television or radio, there is no need for a podcast to follow regular schedules, as it can be updated and distributed more like software or blogposts. Fiction has long shaped crime stories to fit into the constraints of a book, a film, or serialized television—Serial has adopted those constraints for a new medium, rather than exploring how non-fiction audio might more radically reshape the serial form. Much has been said about how Serial’s success has made podcasting into a more legitimate and popular medium; I hope it can inspire more creative uses of the medium’s structure and serial possibilities.

I conclude here where I began as well—I think Serial is a remarkable achievement, and I found it truly compelling listening. And yet… I am left dismayed by the structural limitations it imposed upon itself, by the ethical considerations that it seemed unable to grapple with effectively, and the genre trouble stemming from marrying non-fiction content to fictional storytelling norms. I don’t find these flaws to be debilitating, or that my critiques are merely “concern trolling” (as I’ve been accused of doing). Instead, such dissatisfaction is the fuel that keeps me engaged—given the ongoing promise of seriality, we always hope for more, for different, and for better. While I doubt we’ll get more of Adnan’s story within Serial proper (although I assume there will be a This American Life episode in a few months following-up on the developing story), we will get another season. Hopefully Koenig and her team won’t try to recreate what worked this season, but rather explore a new story on its own terms, with new storytelling structures and less constrained possibilities for what podcasting may be. Regardless, I’ll be listening.

In coming months another idea of “standing” would preoccupy Welles and his fellow radio dramatists, many of whom concentrated on manipulating the standpoint at which listening rests in the world of the play, a property that I’ve called “audioposition.” By cleverly conveying “where listeners listen from” 1930’s dramatists felt they could convince audiences to accept radio drama as a legitimate platform worthy of assessment and appreciation.

Only dramatic “standing,” in other words, could produce “dramatic standing.”

This connection between audioposition and value is being rediscovered today, as podcasters seek recognition as dramatists, and various groups (on air, in cinemas, on stage, online, and elsewhere) rethink drama’s place in the “new golden age” of radio. In this column, I want to consider a few podcasts by The Truth, an American Public Media group responsible for some of the most interesting dramatic audio in recent memory, arguing that a new sense of audioposition – or, more precisely, of its instability – may be emerging today.

The Truth is a project of producer Jonathan Mitchell, who works with a group of actors recruited from The Magnet Theater in New York, as well as several other writers and radio editors. A long-time enthusiast of musique concrète, Mitchell’s plays “Eat Cake” and “Moon Graffiti” had been featured on such programs as Studio 360 for years, but most listeners likely first encountered his material when “Tape Delay” aired on This American Life last April. After that broadcast, The Truth’s downloads went from a few hundred per day up to 20,000. Today, the podcast has more than 35,000 regular subscribers.

Between story workshops, improvisation, recording sessions and editing, production of each podcast can take up to a month. Mitchell balances experiment and control. “The interesting thing to me,” he explains, “is the way the improv gets combined with the editing stage.” Just as there is no script dictating things at the outset of work, there is none at the end. In the latter phase, the most compelling recordings are assembled irrespective of the initial plan, a process that Mitchell likens to film editing.

The result has remarkable variety. In “Mirror Lake,” a young man returns to a scene from his childhood, only to discover that his memories have led him astray. In “The Death of Poe” a night watchman at the home of the great writer relates a a story-within-a-story of Poe’s mysterious death. And The Truth maximizes its settings, large and small. In “Do You Have a Minute for Equality?” the openness of a city street is contrasted with the claustrophobia of the dentist’s chair. In “In Good Hands,” urban explorers stumble into a dystopian society hidden in the bowels of New York, traveling through sound caverns in a story that segues rapidly between dozens of locations, including a subterranean garden and swimming pool.

Some of the best scenes emerge through auditory deceptions and stutters, something thematized in plays like “Interruptible.” At the outset of the recording, we hear an interviewer (Ed Herbstman) chat with the author (Melanie Hoopes) of a recent book entitled I Lived as a Dog for One Year. There is some crackle and a sense of distance, as if our ear is not quite as flush against the conversation as we expect it to be. “There’s a full moon out, does that affect you?” quips the interviewer, before the scene is interrupted by a telephone and the sound of a car’s turn signal, both of which seem clearer and closer to us than the preceding passage. Instantly the volume of the interview drops, as a new character, a taxi driver (Christian Paluck) argues with his wife about taking an extra shift on the day of their wedding anniversary. Mitchell insisted on using a car with a vinyl interior, to provide the right bounce for the sound, and the result is a beautiful sonic illustration of the taxi as a miniature soundscape.

The sudden “appearance” of that soundscape is just the first in a series of interruptions that structure the piece, but the sense of dislocation it provides lingers longer than most. Rather than listening to the interview, we had been listening to someone else listen to it. We haven’t moved audioposition in the space of the fiction at all, but misrecognized our audioposition from the getgo.

That use of slight-of-hand to create positional misconceptions is everywhere in Truth pieces. In “Domestic Violins,” we hear the auditions of violinists both from their own audioposition and also from that of the judges, a separation punctuated by an intercom in which we move from side to side abruptly. In “Tape Delay,” the sound of a conversation as we hear it enter a cell phone sounds quite different from when we are given the phone’s “perspective.” The Truth‘s most recent piece, “False Ending” starts as the lights come up on a college screening room for a post-show discussion after a swell of music that provides a sense of “returning to reality,” until the audio begins subtly changing again and we discover that the post-show discussion was itself a film, and the lights come up in another screening room in another college, where another post-show discussion is about to begin.

It’s significant that many of these inside/outside instabilities and switches of audioposition involve some other medium. The mechanism empowering each game is another device – a car radio, an intercom, a cell phone, a TV broadcast, a screening – that works as a hinge between sound and meta-sound. In an age that understands itself to be one of media convergence, perhaps something speaks to us about the joys, blunders, and terrors of misrecognizing mediation for immediacy, of mistaking one ongoing mediated state for another. Today, the way for a medium to acquire “a dramatic standing to jeopardize” might lie precisely in dramatizing the jeopardy of mediation.