Podcast Journalism: The Promise and Perils of Audio Reporting, by David O. Dowling. New York: Columbia University Press, 2024. Hardcover, 299 pp.
Narrative Podcasting in an Age of Obsession, by Neil Verma. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2024. Hardcover, 276 pp.
Every summer, I review the syllabus for my Introduction to Literary Reportage seminar, an idiosyncratic, practical introduction to the subject, conveying techniques, models, and inspirations for my students to appropriate for their own work. I ask myself whether the readings are of sufficient contemporary value. Or do they stray into the “Great Books” category of “worthy” or “important” literary vegetables?
I pause when I come to Joseph Mitchell, a writer I revere, and wonder what would happen if he were to pitch his profiles of downtrodden eccentrics to The New Yorker today. Would they be topical enough for the magazine circa 2025? Then I think about the excellent New Yorker Radio Hour, and realize that Mitchell would likely thrive in audio, whether at the magazine or elsewhere. Surely, Ira Glass would add him to This American Life’s stable of raconteurs, along with Sarah Vowell and David Sedaris. And I bet Joe Richman would jump at the chance to run the story of “Lady Olga,” the bearded lady whom Mitchell once chronicled on Radio Diaries. And, who knows? Maybe Sarah Koenig would dedicate a season of Serial to untangling the fate of Joe Gould’s “oral history of our time,” allegedly the longest book ever written.
In the past decade, a segment of the journalism establishment has run a macro version of this experiment, trying to figure out the degree to which podcasting might be literary journalism’s savior. The momentum began in 2014, when the first season of the Serial attracted five million listeners in four weeks. By way of comparison, This American Life, the show that launched Serial, took four years to accumulate a million listeners. Then, in 2017, Brian Reed’s show S-Town attracted ten million listeners in four days (35). There was obviously gold in them thar hills; the question was whether anyone was canny enough to extract it. David O. Dowling is optimistic. Dowling is a professor in the School of Journalism & Mass Communication at the University of Iowa, and author of A Delicate Aggression: Savagery and Survival in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (Yale, 2019). In recent years, his scholarship has focused on the intersections of literary journalism, media production, and culture. “Among the most significant developments in digital journalism of the past twenty-five years, podcasting signals a promising and lucrative turn in a once beleaguered news industry,” he writes in Podcast Journalism: The Promise and Perils of Audio Reporting. “With its longform storytelling, binge-listening audience, and influx of sponsors, the medium has buoyed journalism from the wreckage of digital disruption seen in diminished attention spans, shallow online news templates, vanishing advertising revenue, and decimated newsroom staffs” (2).
The most important question, of course, is, what kinds of journalism might a successful audio business model fund? “To what extent can podcasting perform as principled, narrative journalism capable of fulfilling media’s duty to democracy,” Dowling asks (2). Podcast Journalism is in some ways a sequel to Immersive Longform Storytelling: Media Technology, Audience, Dowling’s 2019 book, which devotes a chapter to audio. A study of the various forms of immersive journalism (interactive texts, on-demand television, 360 video), it highlights the nature of the connection journalists form with their listeners. In both books, the subjectivity and intimacy one associates with the writers of the New Journalism era play an important role. “Passionate content renders a personal connection to establish a level of knowledge and trust between listener and narrator, one not seen since the unabashedly subjective work of such luminaries as Tom Wolfe and Joan Didion,” he writes (Immersive Longform Storytelling, 134).
Dowling is bullish to a fault; he doesn’t really deal with data—the persistence of radio, the unpredictability of podcast advertising—that contradict his thesis. “This book charts the ascent of podcasting into prominence as the fastest-growing medium in the digital publishing industry,” he writes (8). Podcast Journalism provides an excellent overview of the social, cultural, and industrial forces that have influenced narrative journalism’s audio turn. He highlights the conventions that distinguish audio from other forms of journalism, particularly the technique of showing the process of creating the podcast to the listener. Dowling argues that this “self-reflexive and transparent representation of the process of production” makes the “ethical dilemmas of reporting” explicit (6). “Trust us. We’ll show you how the sausage is made,” is the pitch. Podcasting’s open-ended, “postmodern narrative sensibility” (7) distinguishes it from earlier generations of more buttoned-up journalism. The number of podcast listeners is growing steadily. The diversity of listeners is increasing—from 2017 to 2019, non-white listenership rose from 33 percent to 43 percent (20)—such that Dowling argues that podcasting provides a place of “liminal praxis” for “progressive content produced by and about marginalized groups typically erased from the headlines” (6). Podcasts are relatively inexpensive to produce and circulate, making them difficult to censor, regardless of the content. Indeed, Dowling devotes a section to the “massive wave” of “conservative podcasting” (132), which makes me wonder why he believes the medium inherently tilts in one direction more than the other. When a medium’s power stems from “humanizing the reporter,” a lot depends on whether that reporter is Ira Glass or Rush Limbaugh.
A common criticism of podcasting is that it is dominated by true crime, which is both true and beside the point: podcasting is no more fixated on the category of true crime than magazines, books, and movies always have been. For Dowling, true crime provides a good example of podcasting’s power of “reflexivity.” While true crime was once devoted to telling, and solving, crimes, often from the perspective of the police, the genre functions differently today. Dowling shows how podcasts like Reveal and In the Dark focus on the process through which they hold “authorities in the criminal justice system to account” (50). They are meta investigations of the system itself. “We weren’t trying to solve the case,” explains In the Dark’s Madeleine Baron, “we were trying to figure out why it hadn’t been solved, and the consequences of the failure to solve it” (70).
Revenue receives equal billing with intimacy in Dowling’s book. According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s “U.S. Podcast Advertising Study, 2023 Revenue and 2024–2026 Growth Predictions,” podcasting advertising revenue grew dramatically from $105 million in 2015 to $1.8 billion in 2022, before slowing down dramatically in 2023. Podcast listeners are a valuable demographic for advertisers: they are well educated, with thirty-seven percent having college degrees; well-to-do, with thirty-one percent earning more than $70,000 per year (104); and young, according to the Amplify Media article, “Podcasting Captures Younger Audiences in an Aging Media World” (2024). Since the commercialization of the internet, we have witnessed the degree to which brands and publications will debase themselves in search of “impressions” or “visitors.” An entire industry of “search engine optimization” has sprung up to salt headlines with terms that will attract unwitting consumers, who are monetized with advertisers. The desperate attempt to attract traffic is a race to the bottom and works against those who want to provide quality material to smaller audiences.
In Dowling’s analysis, immersion is the key to podcasting’s financial and editorial power. “Podcasting is part of a wave of immersive longform storytelling that has taken over digital publishing, one characterized by business models predicated on engaged time rather than clicks,” he writes (9). Unlike other multimedia forms, the very structure of audio lends it an immersive advantage. It passes through a “single channel that it completely fills without sharing space with other sources vying for the listener’s attention” (35). This is particularly true of lengthy, highly produced nonfiction podcasts like Radiolab, Serial, and 99% Invisible, which are “analogous to the print journalistic features appearing in high-caliber publications such as the Atlantic Monthly and the New Yorker” (109).
In Narrative Podcasting in an Age of Obsession, media critic Neil Verma views podcasting’s “Renaissance-Gold Rush-Wild West” (2) hype that Dowling chronicles as an obstacle to understanding what made podcasting so special between 2010 and 2020. With the focus on business growth, the money pouring into the “hot” sector, and the emergence of Apple’s analytics (the result of its iOS 11 operating system), podcasting was covered primarily as a business story. And there seemed to be a lot of business going on: in 2018, Gimlet Media was sold to Spotify, along with The Ringer and The Anchor, for $800 million; the New York Times bought Serial in 2018 for $25 million; in 2020, Stitcher bought by Sirius XM radio for $265 million; and 2021, Amazon bought Wondery for $300 million (7). Clearly these companies had cracked the code of a new journalism business model!
Or had they? “Anyone with a passing sense of popular discourse surrounding media technology in the past two centuries will recognize the proleptic language, signifying that a medium is being rhetorically framed as emergent in nature, an ideological characterization that benefits investors and enterprising creative workers alike, usually abetted by mainstream press, where sanguine forecasts always sell more papers and earn more clicks than humble retractions of prior predictions,” writes Verma (5–6). He notes that podcasting’s Bar Mitzvah took place at the same time as the culture became entranced by esoteric technology like cyber-currency and non-fungible tokens (4). Maybe it’s Bitcoin rather than gold in “thar hills”? Verma is a scholar of audio fiction, sound studies, and media history, and cofounded Northwestern University’s Master of Arts in Sound Arts and Industries. He is best known for his 2012 book, Theater of the Mind: Imagination, Aesthetics, and American Radio Drama, and has consulted on radio and film projects, including Martin Scorsese’s 2023 film, Killers of the Flower Moon.
As per the book’s title, the idea of “narrative” plays a central role in Verma’s account of podcasting’s first decade, and in particular, “how narrative modes helped a new medium work out its youthful anxieties at a certain juncture in its ongoing identity crisis” (3). He wants to understand which strategies narrative podcasts used to navigate their new freedom from the technological and cultural constraints of radio. One disciplinary motivation for Verma’s forward-looking approach is to escape the fixation that radio studies have on defining podcasting and on distinguishing it from radio (8). Verma approaches podcasts as “texts” for literary and cultural analysis.
Chief among podcasting’s narrative techniques is the trope of “obsession.” More often than not, the narrative engine of a successful podcast is the obsession that a podcaster or surrogate has for something, whether that is a quest to solve a crime, decipher an enigma, or come to terms with a past wrong. “In many of these podcasts, the language of “obsession” appears at the start of an episode, season, or series, often to justify the existence of the podcast and to humanize both victims and reporters,” he writes (52). In Serial, Sarah Koenig analyzes every facet of a murder that took place years before; in Missing Richard Simmons, Dan Taberski tries to understand why the famously public fitness guru suddenly dropped out of sight; in Heavyweight, Jonathan Goldstein helps people understand when their lives went wrong and even helps them heal. The listener becomes obsessed with the story told by an obsessed host about the main character’s obsession. “It was a period in which podcasting in short, was obsessed with obsession,” Verma writes (25).
Verma agrees with Dowling that the medium’s “reflexivity” is a big reason for its success. One challenge that fuels narrative obsession is the way that our knowledge or understanding turns out to be wrong, propelling the narrator toward new pieces of information, which will themselves be proved wanting. Verma calls these “dramas of recessive epistemology” (26), and points to podcasts like Serial as examples of how the host’s “back-and-forth cognizing” (44) drives the podcast’s narrative drama. Serial is less about the crime allegedly committed by Adnan Syed than it is about the vagaries of Koenig’s investigation. “What we are listening to is Koenig and her team organize and reorganize an ever-growing wall of stubbornly ambiguous details, and value and devalue them, recursively, incredulously, passionately,” he writes (49). Narrative uncertainty is the engine that drives great podcasts. “There is perhaps no other period in the history of American audio in which more quality soundwork was created directly about the deep moral and cognitive frustrations of creating soundwork” (135).
Part of the reward of reading Verma’s book comes from the hard thought he puts into his analyses of the medium. He uses novel means to explain their structures. At one point he uses a pitch-tracking software program to analyze Serial, concluding, “By my count, Syed makes eighty-five total vocal cracks across the nine episodes in which he appears vocally in the twelve-part season” (69). The book (131, 153, 189) and accompanying website provide spectrograms that compare various podcasts’ wave forms to speculate about the sound design decisions they make.
Despite their different approaches, Dowling and Verma come to similar conclusions about the future of podcasting’s business model. With the success of streaming services like Spotify, the obsessional narratives that made podcasting so successful may be “less like a stable model and more like a transitory disruption,” writes Verma (80).
The hype surrounding podcasting always had as much to do with technology companies (Apple, Spotify) as it did with the content of the programs. That ended up being a double-edged sword; ultimately, tech companies care about tech, not content. In 2023, Spotify killed Gimlet Media, dramatically reduced the number of shows it produced, and soon after laid off 1,500 employees. Expensive, highly produced narrative podcasts were the first to go. It became clear that “the pact between the public radio and tech sectors that launched the narrative podcast boom was driven more and more by the logic, needs, and models of the latter,” writes Verma (87).
Dowling predicts that podcast journalism may sustain itself through a combination of subscriptions and advertising. He points to the examples of Netflix and satellite radio as evidence that people can be convinced to pay for superior programming (102, 107). But he, too, sees the threat of corporate ownership. “As acquisitions and vertical conglomeration increase,” Dowling writes, “more non-journalistic firms with no experience in the news industry find themselves in the position of gatekeeper for public information and on current affairs.” For both critics, the question remains whether a medium that excels in immersion can navigate a world that values clicks.