The Millennial Medium: The Interpretive Community of Early Podcast Professionals

Abstract

Through evidence gathered from sixteen interviews with producers and businesspeople in the podcast industry, this paper argues that the professionals that populated the early phase of the formalizing podcasting scene made up an interpretive community defined, in part, by their appreciation for, and experiences with, public radio. I chart how this interpretive community cast themselves against dominant public radio paradigms when they moved into podcasting, while also retaining much of public radio’s ethos, and I discuss what the central preoccupations of this interpretive community were. I assert that audio broadcasting as understood and practiced within the interpretive community is a particularly millennial medium, influenced by the norms of digital communication. And I make claims about how this is foundational to understanding podcasting’s political and aesthetic predispositions. Ultimately, this argument advances and nuances one connection between public radio and podcasting using qualitative interview data.

Keywords

Podcasting production studies interviews production culture millennial generation social media

Introduction

In the first season of the hit podcast Startup Alex Blumberg narrativizes founding his business, Gimlet Media. Blumberg explains that there is a particular kind of podcast he wants to produce with Gimlet: “There’s all kinds of podcasts out there,” he says, “from a couple of people talking around a mic to the kind that I make and have a particular soft spot for, which focus on storytelling and journalism” (Blumberg 2014). Before Gimlet, Blumberg’s career had been defined by public radio—he had been a producer on the long-running PRX show, This American Life. And here he explains how podcasts influenced by the public radio tradition are different from (read: better than) those celebrity-based chat shows like The Joe Rogan Experience that have recently dominated the charts.

The cohort that invented the type of podcasting Blumberg references was a group of people roughly around the same age. Many of them went to the same elite liberal arts colleges, many of them had moved to New York or Washington D.C. in their twenties and had worked or tried to work at WNYC in New York, WBUR in Boston or at the National Public Radio (NPR) “mothership” in Washington D.C. As they collectively became disillusioned with the labor politics and recalcitrant nature of public radio they struck out on their own and invented something that fell between traditional entertainment and social media. It had the same self-revelatory and self-referential quality as early expressive forms of social media like blogging but it was also invested in the tricks of the audio form, in creating something interesting, engaging, and beautiful—rather than truthful or journalistic. Like Blumberg, these producers took their inspiration from This American Life and other media-rich audio programs in the public radio ecosystem. Producers in this tradition understood themselves to be at the nexus of journalism and entertainment, often focusing on the word “storytelling” as the connection point between the two modes. But, at the same time they rebelled against what they saw as public radio’s conservatism and pedantry.

This paper takes evidence gathered from interviews with sixteen podcast professionals to explore the complicated relationship between early podcast producers and the public radio infrastructure from which they sprung. The people that I interviewed were all early and mid-career professionals who came of age as producers within an industry coming of age in its own right. I understand these producers as an “interpretive community” and this paper charts the trajectory of this interpretive community in order to argue that podcasting is a particularly “millennial medium”—a concept that might advance scholarly understanding of the relationship between non-commercial public radio and the growing podcast industry.

The NPR Experience

National Public Radio was founded in 1970 as an offshoot of the Public Broadcasting System (PBS), established by the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967. NPR’s directive was to produce educational content that could provide a counterweight to the dominant commercial broadcasting paradigm of the time (see McCauley 2005, Chapter 2). Within this broad dictate, Siemering (1970), NPR’s first program director, wrote a targeted mission statement entitled “National Public Radio Purposes,” which asserted that NPR would focus on seven goals in service to the public. These goals laid out a vision for NPR as a site for broadcast journalism with other interests in culture, art and public service, all of which would be animated by the imperative to “serve the individual” and to “celebrate the human experience as infinitely varied.” Though these phrases are somewhat vague, the overarching goal, according to Ralph Engleman (1996), was to “at once highlight American pluralism and help reintegrate a fragmented society” (p. 91). Siemering’s seventh and last stated purpose for NPR was to “Produce materials specifically intended to develop the art and technical potential of radio” (1970). And as Thomas Looker writes, this directive was particularly exciting to producers who wanted to expand or reinvent the possibilities for audio and who drew inspiration from European public radio as well as artistic audio “feature” producers such as Peter Braun (Looker 1995, 104). Because they were animated by the promise of creating something new in the audio medium and were relatively unburdened by any directive to grow their audience in order to attract advertisers, their productions were recognizably distinct from the commercial media of the time.

But despite its stated focus on a plurality of voices, and its historic and unprecedented emphasis on female anchors such as Susan Stamberg, the first host of All Things Considered (see Loviglio 2008), NPR’s production teams tended to be dominated by white professionals (see Berkman 1980). Alongside this, as NPR evolved, the institution and its affiliates developed an understanding of their own audience—those people who connected with NPR’s ethos and content. Christopher Chávez (2021) explains that, “despite its mandate to reach a broader public, NPR has consistently delivered programming to a narrow audience of educated, middle class, white listeners” (p. 9). This audience was overwhelmingly politically progressive (see Mitchell 2005, Chapter One), but not radical. And this awareness of the audience folded back into the kind of content that was created by NPR and their affiliates. Kumanika (2015) interrogates the overwhelming whiteness of the “NPR voice” noting that “Public radio has become a kind of speech community with its own norms and forms of aesthetic capital” (p. 6). As Jack Mitchell writes, those who critique NPR—like Kumanika, a self-professed fan—do so because they believe that “public radio has not lived up to its promise” (Mitchell 2005, 177), namely the promises laid out by Siemerling in 1970 (see also McCauley 2005, 112–113). For many of the producers I spoke to, this sense that public radio was not fulfilling its mission was the central feeling that led them to podcasting.

Understanding Podcasting

Much scholarship has focused on podcasting’s relationship with radio, especially in terms of the dominant forms it takes (see Berry 2016; Llinares et al. 2018; Markman 2015, 4–7; Bottomley 2015). But scholars have also asserted that podcasting is not just a continuation from or an evolution of radio (see Llinares et al. 2018, 4). From the earliest days of the medium, there have been multiple strains of podcasting with different histories that intertwine. The form was popularized by people who were already media professionals and who shared a techie bent. Adam Curry, a former MTV VJ created “Daily Source Code” in 2004, which—as its name implies—was geared toward an audience interested in technology, who would have been early adopters of iPods as well as the suite of consumer media technologies associated with podcast production, distribution, and listening.

Much of the research on podcasting has tempered some of the mainstream press’s enthusiasm for the democratic potential of the new medium—the idea that anyone can suddenly have a soapbox—while still holding the door open for podcasting to be an alternate form of broadcasting that could productively compete with corporate-controlled media (Sterne et al. 2008). Markman (2012) used an online questionnaire to suss out the motivations of early independent podcasters and found that most podcasters of the time were older male professionals who were typically highly technologically proficient (see also Markman and Sawyer 2014). As these studies indicate, there was a certain type of person who was willing and able to put in the time, effort and skill development required to start and sustain a podcast at the beginning of podcasting as a cultural form. Berry (2018) explains that even though podcasting has a relatively low barrier for entry, it is still bars many from participating: “We all could be podcasters, and we all could listen to whatever we want but the reality is that during these early phases both tasks presented technical challenges for the vast majority of people” (p. 14).

Still, podcasting has provided new distribution streams for voices who have been underrepresented in mainstream broadcasting and as such the medium can have political, activist potential. For example, in the case of those “feminist killjoys” (Tiffe and Hoffmann 2017) and Black voices (Laughlin 2021; Florini 2015) who speak to their own communities and unite counterpublics based on shared identities. Florini (2019) identifies podcasters as central to the networks of Black activist media makers who have fueled the #BlackLivesMatter movement. And, Fox et al. (2020) understand podcasts that focus on Black identity to be a form of public pedagogy (following Giroux 2011).

Individuals and communities feel particular connections with podcasts and podcasters and those connections can grow into networks of like-minded individuals. Much of the scholarly conversation about podcasting has focused on the hyper-intense fandoms that some podcasts have and the parasocial interaction podcasters inspire (see Meserko 2015; Sperber 2021).

And as podcasts have grown in popularity an industry has developed around them. Podcasting’s dominant generic conventions began to crystallize when the This American Life-launched PRX show Serial first debuted. At the time, Serial was the most listened to podcast ever and its success is seen as an inflection point in the history of podcasting (Berry 2015). Serial was heir to the narrative and production styles of public radio. Yet it added to this the affordances of the podcasting medium, namely seriality (see Durrani et al. 2015), to create a narrative form that came to define podcasting in the public imagination for a time. Dowling and Miller (2019) note that the immersive journalism and style of commentary popularized by Sarah Koenig, host of Serial, set the standard and style for many popular podcasts that followed it. And Berry identified 2016 as the year that podcasting reached maturity as a medium, and this was due—at least in part—to the overnight success of Serial (Berry 2016, 662).

McHugh (2016) hosted an industry discussion for Radio Journal around this time that found that in the post-Serial phase of podcasting there was a formalization of the type of storytelling that American podcasting producers told that was heavily influenced by the This American Life and Serial style of “host-led” storytelling. It is this phase of podcasting, the phase that this paper focuses on, when former public radio professionals were suddenly in demand as they had the audio skills to produce podcast content. Cwynar (2019) writes that the public radio persona—embodied most famously and successfully by Alex Blumberg—became an entrepreneur after Serial, suddenly selling himself on the newly flush podcasting market and Sullivan (2018) argues that the success of Serial fueled the formalization of the broader industry with major media players vying to buy up independent podcasts and create podcasting networks fueled by advertising. Many of my interviewees moved from public radio to the newly-formed companies beginning to populate the inchoate industry of podcasting during this phase in podcasting’s development. And though the history of podcasting is more of a complex tapestry than a single thread, this is the thread that this paper focuses on: the interpretive community that translated NPR’s ethos to the new medium of podcasting.

Method

This study is based on sixteen semi-structured interviews with podcast professionals. I use the term “professional’’ to draw a distinction between those people who produce podcasts as their sole income, usually within larger media organizations and those “amateur” or “indie” producers whose podcasts typically remain independent from media companies. My interviewees had held positions at organizations central to the podcasting industry including iHeart Media, Apple, Gimlet Media (owned by Spotify), Pushkin Industries, Pineapple Street Studios, PRX/ Radiotopia, Stitcher, and Vice Media among other independent production companies. Interviewees were discovered through snowball sampling (see Arksey and Knight 1999). Because of my use of this sampling method, most of my informants were American podcasters, and I see this as a bias of the sample that limits the generalizability of my argument.

Media Studies has privileged the role of the “producer” (a sometimes fuzzy, socially constructed category as Mayer [2011] illuminates) since at least Newcomb and Alley’s (1983) pathbreaking work The Producer’s Medium which centered around interviews with television producers. Production studies has argued for the importance of studying up (Nader 1972), that is putting those in powerful positions under the microscope. But as many in production studies have noticed, the power differentials between scholarly researchers and media producers are more complicated than up and down, or even sideways (as Ortner (2009) described her ethnographic work with film professionals, who, as she notes “are really not much different from anthropologists and academics more generally” (p. 176).

I met my first informant at a party for a mutual friend. Because of our informal introduction, speaking to this informant felt like studying sideways from my perspective. She agreed to meet me for an interview and she introduced me to several of her colleagues in the podcasting space. Most of my informants were my age, had similar educational backgrounds and life experiences to mine. However, it is difficult to know how both parties understand the power dynamics of the interview process (see Mayer 2008, 146; Vonderau 2019, 62) and as a qualitative researcher I find myself guided by the anthropologist John L. Jackson’s (2010) insistence on “ethnographic sincerity” as a guiding ethical precept. Jackson asserts that in the “mutually cathected ethnographic moment” (S283) the ethnographer must recognize and acknowledge the affective structures and lived experiences of informants alongside their own, in a way that honors the humanity of the experience.

Within the space of the interview a constant self-reflexive awareness of affect and power is important and this is further complicated by the dynamics inherent to interviewing producers. John T. Caldwell (2008) has characterized his interview work with film and television producers as “rich, coded, cultural self-portraits” (p. 14) that are always marked by “self-interest, promotion, and spin” (p. 14). As media professionals, producers have a near-innate sense of their own self-presentation. My interviewees were clearly practiced in the art of being interviewed and of interviewing. They were (without exception) skilled media professionals who understood how interviews can function as PR tools for their professional enterprises. I do not mean to imply that what they said was untrue in any way, but just that they presented a careful, polished version of themselves—something I was aware of and sensitive to in my interview process and, later, when I analyzed the interview data.

Given this understanding, I provided my informants with an informed consent form both when I contacted them and after I had written this article so that they could review quotes. All of the quoted people in this article agreed to have their names published here both at the time of the interview and after seeing the quotes that would be used. I believe that many (if not all) of them wanted to be named as they are presented as experts on their field and on the history of podcasting. And, I see their names and the names of their companies as important to the history recounted here.

My interviews were initially focused on the political economy of the burgeoning podcast industry but I found that my conversations with producers inevitably veered in the direction of public radio, its impact, its problems and I adapted my interview protocol after each interview to reflect the interests and preoccupations of my informants. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and then coded using an iterative Grounded Theory approach (see Charmaz 2014). I concentrated on finding connections between and among interviews rather than focusing on personal narrative accounts.

Early Podcasters as Part of a Production Culture

It is useful to understand the podcasting scene—especially as it existed in the years between 2003 and 2014 (pre-Serial)—as an interpretive community. Zelizer (1993) suggested that seeing journalists as members of an interpretive community rather than as members of a profession was useful as a heuristic for understanding the way that journalists saw the world and their work in it. Interpretive communities are discursively built and they contain within them collectively understood political and aesthetic assumptions. Within individuals they operate as framing devices that illuminate and constrain world views. Within networks and groups they operate in a similar way, though they are subject to change along with the vagaries of public opinion.

One producer at iHeartRadio, Mangesh Hattikudur, explained that in the early days of podcasting everyone was listening to everyone else’s podcasts and it reminded him of the blogging scene where “You would link to other people and root for everyone in the space, because there just wasn’t room, it was too small a space for sharp elbows” (Hattikudur 2021). Pre-Serial podcasters were talking to each other, sharing their understandings of the new medium and sharing their work. There were places where audio enthusiasts might meet up and talk with each other, namely the Third Coast international audio festival, the Transom storytelling workshop in Cape Cod and the SALT institute in Maine. Beyond this, there were websites, blogs, listservs and informal clubs. Sharon Mashihi, a producer at Gimlet Media, told me that she was part of this loose cohort of people who “all wanted to make audio” and who met in person and online to talk about their projects. She says that before Serial, “we were all barely freelancing, barely eking by and when Serial came out suddenly the floodgates opened. And there were so many jobs. And we were the only qualified people who needed jobs available for those jobs” (Mashihi 2021). This interpretive community, bound by their interest in the audio form, working in and outside of the public radio infrastructure were suddenly in demand after the first season of Serial proved to be a massive success, and what they shared was a love of radio, a drive to tell stories in the audio medium, and a set of ethical and political beliefs influenced, in large part, by NPR’s ethos.

Early Love of NPR as Defining of the Careers of Podcasters

The interpretive community of audio artists and journalists who came of age in audio before Serial talked about hearing NPR on the radio while they were children in the backseats of their parents’ cars as a formative experience that helped them understand the power of radio and its prestige. As Eric Nuzum puts it, “I grew up a backseat NPR listener. So I came to associate it with something that had value and was good and I couldn’t really articulate why” (Nuzum 2021). As Nuzum alludes to here, those children who listened to NPR in the backseat of their parents’ cars understood it as a particular cultural touchstone within an upper middle-class, overwhelmingly white cultural context. Because their parents respected NPR and saw it as a valuable resource, so too did the children, even if, as Nuzum explains, they could not articulate what it was about NPR that felt special. Thus those producers who came of age listening to public radio as children inherited class-based listening practices.

This story of hearing public radio as a child was so common among professionals in the podcasting space that one Black producer made it a point to tell me she had not heard public radio as a child, and she understood that this fact set her apart from her white colleagues. She told me, “as someone who didn’t grow up listening to public radio or—you know I’m a Black person—I didn’t know people could make jobs out of radio” (Kariuki 2021). For this producer, her status as a Black person from an immigrant family set her upbringing apart from many in the podcasting space who grew up listening to NPR with their parents.

Those backseat NPR listeners grew up and worked at their college radio station and dreamed of working for public radio when they graduated. At this stage they tended to see public radio as mission driven—a mass medium with a set of ethics that transcended the profit motive; they understood and admired this about NPR.

But when these young producers got jobs or gigs at NPR affiliate stations such as WNYC in New York or WBUR in Boston they quickly became disillusioned with the labor politics within these organizations. Their pay was abysmal and they were told that they didn’t do this kind of work for the money—they did it for the mission. As Kate Osborn, a former public radio producer who became the head of audio production at VICE media, explains, “that old guard at NPR was always telling people like me, maybe not directly, but basically with the salary and other stuff : ‘Oh, you don’t do this to make money’” (Osborn 2021). It was understood that because public radio was not-for-profit and mission driven, it was not a path to personal wealth and indeed to talk about money or to express that you might want or need money publicly was seen as gouache or proof of unseriousness.

At the same time, the paternalistic and ultimately conservative nature of public radio constrained young, idealistic producers and in their minds did not reflect the mission of NPR as they understood it. They describe the disappointment they felt when they finally made it to one of those coveted radio jobs only to discover that they could not get any of their ideas to air. And the sense that the power structure of public radio was controlled by an older, white, conservative population who saw themselves speaking to people like them felt stifling to the young professionals who wanted to tell more contemporary stories. Jenna Wise-Berman, who left public radio to start her own production company, Pineapple Street, explains how this wore on idealistic young producers who believed in public radio’s value because “the promise of public radio was that it’s this mission-driven thing and then I think a lot of people felt like—what is really the mission here? I’m not really able to do the things that feel mission driven—like why can’t we do a higher-production Black podcast? Why did it take so long to do something like that?” (Wise-Berman 2021). The older generation running public radio seemed uninterested or indifferent to the stories that the younger generation wanted to produce, even when those younger producers thought they were reflecting the original mission of NPR by promoting a plurality of voices.

Young radio producers in the late aughts and early 2010s felt like public radio was too conservative both in what it was willing to air and in its inability to adapt to an increasingly digital audience. For Jessica Alpert this became a constant struggle for her at NPR affiliate WBUR in Boston and it led to her founding her own podcast production company. She told me, “I was always butting up against this very old school, public radio, ‘this is our box. We’d like to stay in it. We don’t wanna poke any holes in it, you know?’ And I was like, this kind of thinking is going to be the death of you. And I just couldn’t do it anymore” (Alpert 2021). Kate Osborn connects this sense of stagnation that young producers felt with the birth of the podcasting industry:

There were so many generations that getting anything on the air was very hard. And they [public radio outlets] slowly became interested in some innovation and they mostly allowed us to do it online, but it wouldn’t necessarily make the radio. And I would argue that that is true for generations and especially true, in the mid to late aughts, which I really believe led almost directly to the podcast boom, because there was a whole generation of radio makers who were twiddling their thumbs at their desk (Osborn 2021).

Osborn says that there were many frustrated young producers who began thinking, “I’m sick of working for nothing. I’m sick of being told no all the time. I’m sick of the fact that there’s no sense of urgency for us to grow or die” (Osborn 2021). Another podcast professional working in public radio at this time told me that the new podcasting industry taking shape in the form of small, but quickly growing startups like Midroll (now Stitcher) seemed like “the cool startup well-funded version of public radio” (Taylor 2021) so it was a natural fit for young producers who loved the promise of public radio but also felt disillusioned with the actual working of it.

But even if it made sense to go from public radio to new podcasting production companies, for many producers it was as much a rebellious act as it was a career move. I had one producer tell me (off the record) that Alex Blumberg’s founding of Gimlet was a “revenge play” against public radio. Of course I have no way of verifying whether this is true. But it is interesting that the gossip in the podcasting space takes on this tone, this sense that public radio—which for many people was their first love, the thing that got them into audio—was a flawed space that many needed to escape from. And even though the idea of Gimlet as a “revenge play” is gossip or even a joke, other producers expressed that a similar sense of anger or resentment was fuel for their exit from public radio.

The Influence of NPR on the Young Podcasting Industry

In the growing podcasting industry former public radio producers found more creative freedom, and suddenly, to hear them describe it—wholly unexpectedly—they made much more money than they had ever assumed that they would. As producers left public radio for startup podcast companies their public radio pedigrees made them appealing to investors and to audiences. Kate Osborn told me, “we’re all somewhat dining out on the trustworthiness of NPR” (Osborn 2021). The value of public radio training remained a blue chip in the growing world of podcasting.

Podcast producers who came from public radio also retained their love of and belief in storytelling as the audio medium’s central affordance. Sharon Mashihi notes that Ira Glass and This American Life were particularly foundational to the work that early podcasters produced. On those storytelling practices, she explains, “I still feel that we’re simultaneously benefiting from those and tyrannized by those. To this day practices that started at his show are replicated at every podcast company, I don’t even know what podcasting would be if he hadn’t existed” (Mashihi 2021).

But at the same time, podcast producers who were trying to define the form in the years following the success of Serial also struggled to define the new medium against public radio. Jessica Alpert explains that when she hires former public radio producers at her company, “we have to sort of bang some things out of them. We have to reorient people to a different type of thinking around producing” (Alpert 2021). Podcast producers especially want to avoid what they see as the pedantic “NPR voice” and toward a more dynamic, conversational tone. If public radio had internalized an older, “Boomer” audience, podcasting focused on a younger audience, the millennial audience. If the NPR listener has the radio in the car, the podcast listener might be on the subway listening through earbuds and podcast producers understand this to be a different audio experience associated with a different set of expectations. In translating NPR’s mission-driven understanding of the power of radio to a new medium and a new audience, these producers established a set of norms in the young industry that were taken from the not-for-profit space and reformatted to appeal to a younger, digitally native audience.

The Metaphor of Generational Change/Parenthood

In my conversations with podcast producers we kept coming back to the metaphor of generational change. Public radio was like a parent and the early podcast professionals who rebelled against it in the 2010s were like “teens leaving their parents and being like “look at this cool thing I do!” (Wise-Berman 2021). Another podcast producer also used the metaphor of adolescence to describe the industry, “We’re like in our teenage years I don’t know how else to describe it. It feels like we’re like 17. You know we’re about to turn 18–it’s up to us to decide where we want to go” (Lee 2021). And others concurred noting that the podcasting industry was still rapidly growing and changing, and was “in the middle of defining ourselves. It’s not like it doesn’t feel like Hollywood yet where it’s kind of set in stone” (Kariuki 2021).

NPR is in the DNA of these producers who started in public radio and are now the heads of their own production companies, or of other verticals at media organizations. But what are they trying to define themselves against exactly? Beyond the generic and esthetic tics so characteristic of NPR, podcast producers saw NPR as too politically conservative and too hesitant in its critiques, especially around issues of race and racial justice.

There was an awareness of and a fluency with discourses of social justice among these professionals, especially along a Black/white axis. Leaders of production companies—who were mostly white—were quick to point out to me that they were committed to diversity in hiring and that they never put an all-white team on a Black story. This was their self-reflexive, somewhat knee-jerk reaction about their responsibility toward racial justice.

But at the same time as producers hope to create something new in the podcasting space, they are constrained by some of the same things that have plagued public radio. As the metaphor of generational change also implies, public radio is still the progenitor of podcasting. And many pointed out that podcasting may be different from radio but it is still structured by whiteness both in its reliance on the “NPR voice” and set of aesthetics and its internalized understanding of a white audience. And while younger producers talk about a commitment to diversity, there is little indication that the podcasting industry is particularly diverse. Stephanie Kariuki, an audio producer at VICE, told me that among her network of producer friends and colleagues there is a constant conversation around the burnout that happens disproportionately to Black and POC producers who are invariably in the minority in the companies they work within and who are tasked with telling typically traumatic and sometimes traumatizing stories. “The effects that telling those stories are having on us, mentally and just our relationship to work—how long can we sustain that?” (Kariuki 2021)

And as the podcasting industry grows, becomes more formalized and agglomerated, new power structures have emerged or have been transposed onto the industry. Gretta Cohn, who runs Transmitter Media, told me that she has seen podcasting change in the past ten years. She told me, “I have noticed that the folks who are in that gatekeeping role have largely been legacy media people who do not come from podcasting. It becomes an interesting tension where I’m pitching projects and also educating at the same time about what it takes to do this work” (Cohn 2021). Other producers noted the same thing, remarking that as the industry has grown, gatekeepers have proliferated and they tend to look similar to the gatekeepers that have controlled legacy media for decades: white and male.

Podcasting: The Millennial Medium

Podcasting is a commercial medium that has proven to be highly profitable and has been folded into legacy media enterprises as part of the suite of media products offered by them. But it is important to understand where many of the cultural norms, political beliefs, and aesthetic preferences of this new medium come from, especially because the medium retains much of the mission of public radio: the drive to focus on a diversity of experiences and the imperative to explore the audio form chief among them. Understanding podcasting as a particularly millennial medium developed within an interpretive community is a useful heuristic that might help illuminate one complex connection between non-commercial media and the podcast industry.

Those producers who were inspired by NPR’s purpose and style and were able to carve their pathway in the podcast industry were overwhelmingly members of the millennial generation (colloquially defined as people born between 1981 and 1996 and encompassing the first cohort of American digital natives). As an interpretive community they had a shared understanding of the world and of the changing media landscape that was markedly different from, while still influenced by, the generation of media makers that initially inspired, and in some cases trained them. As charted above, this interpretive community found themselves dissatisfied with the politics and economics of public radio but they also believed in the importance of NPR’s mission and they took that understanding of radio with them into the growing podcast space.

Seeing podcasting as a millennial medium also helps contextualize its formal and aesthetic norms. In my interviews, “storytelling,” “authenticity,” and “intimacy” emerged as God words. These ideas have become the guiding aesthetic values of the young podcast industry and have established the conventions of the genre and I want to argue that they are rooted in a particular generational understanding of media and media making. The millennial generation grew up alongside social media and because of this, they value and understand “authenticity” as a guiding ethos (see Marwick 2013; Marwick and Boyd 2011). Podcasters see authenticity as guiding the supposed intimacy of the audio medium (see Berg 2021; Sienkiewicz and Jaramillo 2019). For Sarah Murray, this is a sonic analog to “a mode of witnessing a transformable self that has emerged as a genre and social capital in visual digital cultures” (Murray 2019, 310). This interpretive community came of age in the early years of social media and was the first generation to post their lives online in granular detail for an audience of their peers. A shared understanding of the norms of digital cultures guides their belief in the power of the audio medium as a site in which they can speak to others in a way that feels more direct, more authentic than, for example, an Instagram post. And they bring this understanding of digital communication into the podcasting industry.

Podcasting is a medium created within the context of an overwhelmingly millennial interpretive community and it bears the stamp of this generation’s understanding of media both in its politics and its esthetics. But podcasting is also ingrained with the understanding of the world and of the power of the audio form that comes from the public radio tradition. Podcasting professionals are still galvanized by NPR’s mission and are intent on translating those principles laid out by Bill Siemerling in 1970 but for an audience of their peers, of millennials.

Conclusion

The connection with public radio that millennial podcast producers feel is important because it has defined the aesthetic forms, ethical directives, and political predispositions of a popular mode of podcasting—the kind of podcasting that Alex Blumberg referenced in Startup, the kind of podcasting that Sarah Koenig practiced in Serial. With the success of shows like Call Her Daddy and The Joe Rogan Experience, new power players have emerged in the podcasting industry, and the media-rich storytelling and self-reflexive authenticity once dominant has given way to brash hosts who sound more like the shock jocks of old (Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern) than like Ira Glass. Although podcasting has always encompassed a variety of genres and the chat show has always been a popular format—the amount of resources being funneled into these spaces shows that the podcast industry may be shifting its priorities. It is also important to note that podcasting is not simply an American phenomenon and there are interpretive communities of podcasters all over the world producing influential work and creating new advances in the industry and form. These communities of podcasters should be the focus of future research.

This paper has charted the story of what happened when a new medium met an old mission. Whether or not the power centers of podcasting are changing, the mark that this interpretive community of millennial public radio enthusiasts have made on podcasting is undeniable. And, the young professionals who saw the potential for podcasting to reinvent NPR’s political and aesthetic goals for a new generation are now executive producers, CEOs, and Vice Presidents, still growing, maturing, and guiding the industry. The fact that they came from a digitally native generation and were able to transpose the norms and practices of social media into the audio form, creating intimate publics centered around the values of “authenticity” and “storytelling” is important to advancing our understanding of how the torch between public radio and podcasting was actually passed, and what changed in the process.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Corrina Laughlin

Author Biography

Corrina Laughlin is an instructor of Communication at Loyola Marymount University and holds a Ph.D. from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

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