When Sarah Koenig’s podcast Serial exploded into the public consciousness, it quickly dominated everything from water cooler chats to headlines in the New Yorker, the Atlantic and Time Magazine.
The massively popular, 12-episode program about the murder of a Baltimore teen proved that audio storytelling could strike a serious chord with audiences—especially in the form of an easily downloadable podcast, obtained with just the click of a mouse.
In case the Serial phenomenon isn’t enough to illustrate the ubiquity of podcasts in today’s digital world, former NPR correspondent Barbara Bradley Hagerty took a quick survey of a packed room at the George Washington University on Wednesday. “How many of you listen to podcasts?” she asked. The cluster of raised hands introduced a new query—what does the popularity of the new format mean for the future of radio?
The School of Media and Public Affairs convened a panel of some of the podcast world’s heavyweights to answer that question: Lawyer-turned-culture writer, Linda Holmes, leads Pop Culture Happy Hour, a 45-minute program that has garnered a cult-like following for its casual, conversational style. Veteran psychology reporter and former producer of This American Life, Alix Spiegel, recently launched Invisibilia, and watched it amass more than 5 million downloads in just its first month, ricocheting to the number one podcast spot on iTunes multiple times. Armed with a Kickstarter campaign and tons of ideas, Andrea Seabrook created DecodeDC to connect political issues to daily Washington life.
The panel also included two new additions to the SMPA family. Guy Raz, host of NPR’s TED Radio Hour, joined GW in January as a Maurice C. Shapiro Fellow, and the event’s moderator, Ms. Hagerty, is one of SMPA’s distinguished fellows for the 2014-15 academic year.
Each of the podcasts represented on the panel came to be in wildly divergent ways. Ms. Spiegel partnered with NPR’s science reporter Lulu Miller to make pilot episodes of Invisibilia, which revolves around “intangible” themes like ideas, emotions and beliefs. In the first episode, Ms. Spiegel gets deep into the mind of an obsessive-compulsive who has recurring thoughts about killing his wife. She and Ms. Miller pitched the idea to higher-ups at NPR.
“We said, ‘Please, please, please, please,’ ” Ms. Spiegel remembered. “And they said, ‘Sure.’ ”
Ms. Seabrook’s approach, on the other hand, was more rogue—she left her post as NPR’s political correspondent to work on DecodeDC on her own. The podcast has been the result of working creatively with a small budget and crowd-funding efforts. Ms. Holmes, meanwhile, started what Mr. Raz referred to as “a guerilla project in a corporate public radio setting.” She convened arts enthusiasts from all corners of NPR’s offices and found a young producer—Mike Katzif —willing to stitch the show together in his free time.
“Do not assume that every podcast has to be this big input, big preparation, large-staff institutional project,” Ms. Holmes said, encouraging people to try podcast ideas “that are low-input and don’t cost a lot of money, but come up with great conversations and introduce you to new stuff.”
Invisibilia and Mr. Raz’s TED Radio Hour all rank in iTunes’ top 10 most downloaded podcasts. But although many of these programs are attracting thousands of young, loyal listeners a day, no one has quite figured out a business model that would make them profitable.
“It’s hard to know if the podcast thing will be a huge success financially. Some will make money, most won’t. The question is if big media organizations will get into the act,” Mr. Raz said.
Serial was a “Hollywood-level” game-changer that showed podcasts will continue to draw in listeners, Mr. Raz added. But that doesn’t mean radio is doomed. He explained that generations who love tuning in to the airwaves will help radio maintain its longevity.
What podcasting does offer is a new way of telling stories to the public, Ms. Spiegel noted.
“Podcasting is a blank slate. What we’ve learned is that podcasting can accept a lot more detail and a lot more intimacy than radio can,” she said. “It’s not a new medium, but it’s a new format, and people need to explore what it can do in a whole variety of ways.”