Those invisible signals provided our kitchens, living rooms, and bedrooms with access to jazz clubs, baseball stadiums, and symphony halls. For a century, they have been transporting us instantly to London, Cairo, or Tokyo, or back in time to the Old West or deep into the imagined future of interplanetary travel.

The reception of those radio, then television, signals didn’t just inform us, they shaped us. Everyone experienced broadcasting individually and collectively, both intimately and as members of dispersed crowds.

Radio and television fostered an ephemeral and invisible public arena that expanded our understanding of the world — and ourselves. Whether it was the final episodes of radio serials like “Gangbusters”, or television’s “M*A*S*H” or “Seinfeld,” Americans often marked the passage of time by shared broadcast experiences.

Even today, more Americans use standard AM/FM radio broadcasting than TikTok. At a time when most Americans get their news from local TV stations and broadcast television networks, and radio remains pervasive, it might seem frivolous to express concern about preserving technologies so deeply embedded in daily life.

Yet a media evolution is occurring, as paid subscription video streaming and audio services climb in popularity, and fewer Americans are consistently tuning in to broadcast media.

Demise of shared moments

The broadcasting era is becoming eclipsed by new media technologies. In the era of TV and radio dominance, “mass media” was defined by shared experiences.

But now, new media technologies — cable TV, the web, and social media — are changing that definition, segmenting what was once a huge, undifferentiated mass audience. All those new media fragmented what were once huge collectives. Bottom line: We’re not all watching or hearing the same thing anymore.

With fewer Americans simultaneously sharing media experiences, the ramifications of this evolution stretch beyond the media industries and into our culture, politics, and society.

The shared moments that electrified and unified the nation — from President Franklin Roosevelt’s fireside chats to TV news coverage of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination and up through the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks — have become more rare. Even national events, such as a presidential election, are different today in that our collective experiences now seem more individualized and less communal. People get their news about presidential elections from sources with radically different perspectives on what used to be shared facts.

The very idea of collectively tuning in to history as it happens has been altered, as the profusion of channels and platforms now funnels audience members into self-segregated affinity groups where messages are shaped more for confirmation than enlightenment.

How to remember

As we move into this new media world, broadcasting risks being relegated to the rustic past like other old media such as the rotary telephone, the nickelodeon, the 78-rpm phonograph, and the DVD.

That’s why, from April 27–30, 2023, the Library of Congress is hosting a conference, titled “A Century of Broadcasting,” that invites scholars, preservationists, archivists, museum educators and curators, fans and the public to discuss the most effective ways to preserve broadcasting’s history.

The goal of the conference, convened by the Library of Congress’ Radio Preservation Task Force, is to begin envisioning the future of this technology’s past. As a radio historian and member of the Radio Preservation Task Force, I was invited to serve on the conference organizing team. Panels, papers, and presentations will look at how broadcasting is currently being archived, and how we, as a society, can think more systematically and formally about how we’ll remember broadcasting. While the task force is primarily concerned with broadcasting’s inception as radio, aspects of television’s past will be included as well.

Preserving radio — and TV — is not as simple as storing machines or tapes. To understand broadcasting history, preservationists must try to describe an experience. It isn’t enough to show somebody the printed script from a 1934 Jack Benny radio program, or the theatrical stage set used when “All in the Family” was taped before a live studio audience in 1973. To comprehend what Jack Benny, Gracie Allen or Jackie Gleason meant to the people of the United States involves trying to imagine, and almost feel, an experience.

“Essential” first step

The Radio Preservation Task Force seeks to go beyond the big corporate commercial collections that already exist. NBC’s radio and TV archives, as well as the Radio Corporation of America’s and others, are already well-preserved and housed at repositories like the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institution.

The Radio Preservation Task Force is concerned with the diverse universe of broadcasting, including the many types of stations and networks that defined American broadcasting.

“Millions of Americans listened to college, community, and educational radio stations that were less famous than CBS and NBC but still played an important role in daily life,” notes University of Colorado scholar Josh Shepperd, chair of the Radio Preservation Task Force. “Preservation projects associated with the Radio Preservation Task Force have revealed to us that African American radio stations played an important role in helping catalyze the Civil Rights Movement by fostering and inspiring community.”

Shepperd added that “those are just two examples of often-overlooked but essential components of our nation’s broadcast history.”

At the Century of Broadcasting conference, scholars will examine such varied topics as how gender roles were performed on the air and how Spanish-language radio maintained listener identity with the community while broadening outreach. The conference also includes discussion of international and global radio communities, with scholars presenting on broadcasting history from France, Germany, and Latin America.

“There’s even a panel on preserving the history of unlicensed and illegal ‘pirate’ radio,” says Shepperd.

Our media remains so atmospheric — it’s everywhere, all the time — that we too rarely pause to concentrate on how it evolves and how those transformations ultimately influence us.

Radio and TV might not technically be “endangered” right now; after all, we all still use telephones even if they look completely different and serve functions largely unimaginable 40 years ago.

Yet moving beyond the broadcast era holds important ramifications for all of us, even if we cannot precisely discern them in this moment. Recognizing the need to preserve radio and TV’s past marks an essential first step, so that the future will be properly informed about how we lived and communicated for over a century of American history.

Responses to the decline have ranged from luring billionaires to buy local dailies to encouraging digital startups. But the number of interested billionaires is limited, and many digital startups have struggled to generate the revenue and audience needed to survive.

The local news crisis is more than a problem of shuttered newsrooms and laid-off journalists. It’s also a democracy crisis. Communities that have lost their newspaper have seen a decline in voting rates, the sense of solidarity among community members, awareness of local affairs and government responsiveness.

Largely overlooked in the effort to save local news are the nation’s local public radio stations.

Among the reasons for that oversight is that radio operates in a crowded space. Unlike a local daily newspaper, which largely has the print market to itself, local public radio stations face competition from other stations. The widely held perception that public radio caters to the interests of people with higher income and education may also have kept it largely out of the conversation.

But as a scholar who studies media, I believe that local public radio should be part of the conversation about saving local news.

Advantages are trust, low cost and reach

There are reasons to believe that public radio can help fill the local news gap.

Trust in public broadcasting ranks above that of other major U.S. news outlets. Moreover, public radio production costs are relatively low — not as low as that of a digital startup, but far less than that of a newspaper or television station. And local public radio stations operate in every state and reach 98% of American homes, including those in news deserts — places that today no longer have a daily paper.

Finally, local public radio is no longer just radio. It has expanded into digital production and has the potential to expand further.

To assess local public radio’s potential for helping to fill the local information gap, I conducted an in-depth survey of National Public Radio’s 253 member stations.

The central finding of that study: Local public radio has a staffing problem. Stations have considerable potential but aren’t yet in a position to make it happen.

That’s not for lack of interest. Over 90% of the stations I surveyed said they want to play a larger role in meeting their community’s information needs. As one of our respondents said, “The need for the kind of journalism public media can provide grows more evident every day. The desire on the part of our newsrooms is strong.”

To take on a larger role, most stations would need to expand their undersized news staff.

Sixty percent of the local stations have 10 or fewer people on their news staff, and that’s by a generous definition of what constitutes staff. Respondents included in this count broadcast and digital reporters, editors, hosts, producers and others who contribute to local news and public affairs content in its various forms, as well as those who directly provide technical or other support to those staff members. In addition to full-time employees, stations were asked to include part-time employees and any students, interns or freelancers who contribute regularly.

The staffing problem is most acute in communities that have lost their newspaper or where local news gathering has been sharply cut back. Many of these communities were judged by the respondents to have a below-average income level, which limits the local station’s fundraising potential.

Although the staffing problem is more pronounced at stations in communities where local news is in short supply, staff size at nearly every station falls far short of even a moderate-sized daily newspaper.

The Des Moines Register, for example, has a daily circulation of 35,000 copies and a nearly 50-person newsroom — a staff larger than 95% of local public radio stations.

Limitations on potential

One consequence of the staffing problem is that local public radio is actually not all that “local.”

The survey found that in the 13-hour period from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m. on weekdays, only about two hours of locally produced news programming was carried on the average station, some of it in the form of talk shows and some of it as repeat programming. For stations with a news staff of 10 or fewer people, the daily average of locally produced news — even when including repeat programming — is barely more than one hour.

This is only one indicator of the limitations of an undersized newsroom.

Stations with a news staff of 10 or fewer people, for example, were only half as likely as those with more than 20 to have a reporter routinely assigned to cover local government. Some stations are so short of staff that they do not do any original reporting, relying entirely on other outlets, such as the local newspaper, for the stories they air.

A small news staff also means it’s hard to create content for the web, as illustrated by stations’ websites. The stations with 10 or fewer people in their newsroom were only half as likely as those with a staff size of more than 10 to feature local news on their homepage. A local station’s website cannot become the “go-to” place for residents seeking local news on demand if the station fails to provide it.

The stakes for democracy

With more staff, local public radio stations could help fill the information gap created by the decline of local newspapers. They could afford to assign a reporter full time to cover local government bodies like city councils and school boards.

It would still be a challenge for stations in rural areas that include multiple communities, but that challenge is also one that newspapers in rural areas have always faced and have in the past found ways to manage.

With adequate staff, local stations could also make their programming truly “local,” which would broaden their audience appeal.

Programming created by NPR, PRX, and other content providers accounts for much of the appeal of local stations. But it can be a handicap in areas where many potential listeners have values and interests that aren’t met by national programming and where the station offers little in the way of local coverage. As one respondent noted, stations must provide coverage “that reflects the entirety of their communities.”

How much new money would local stations require to expand their coverage? Based on our respondents’ estimates and a targeting of the funding for the communities most in need, roughly $150 million annually would be required.

Given that these communities tend also to be the ones in below-average income areas, the funding would have to come largely from outside sources. That won’t be easy, but it needs to get done. As the Knight Foundation’s Eric Newton noted, local news gives people the information they “need to run their communities and their lives.”

With satellite radio, podcasts, and Spotify, a lack of terrestrial stations might not be something most people worry about, but I wondered why options were so limited. Turns out, as most people who live in this part of the country know, the cause of this radio silence is a matter of a couple of facts that far predate the existence of smartphones. Out west, where the population is sparser, the distances are greater, and the landscape itself is larger, radio stations have always been hard to come by.

Geography is one thing (mountains = interference), but population density is a less obvious cause of empty airwaves. To explain this, it helps to think of radio’s underlying structure as a kind of natural resource. Radio is just one sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum. To borrow a phrase itself co-opted from the telecom world, its bandwidth is limited. Sections of it (frequencies) are parceled out by the FCC for public and private uses, and the metric for determining which areas get more or less is the number of people who live there. Christopher Terry, an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota’s Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication, says that most FM radio allocations were made in the 1960s and early 70s, when populations in Western states, especially the Southwest, were much lower.

By the time the Telecommunications Act was passed in 1996, wiping out restrictions on how many radio stations a single company could own, radio stations in all parts of the country were primed for consolidation. Today, big radio companies Audacy, iHeartRadio, and Cumulus syndicate the bulk of their programming, which is why it can feel like every classic rock station in the country is playing the same catalog of 100 songs — they probably are. So even when you can pick up a signal, it’s less likely than it used to be that you’re hearing a locally-produced program.

But as the events of the past year have shown, when people need information about what’s happening in their communities, radio is one of the first places they’ll go. Kate Concannon, managing editor of the Mountain West News Bureau, a consortium of NPR stations that serve New Mexico, Nevada, Montana, Colorado, Utah, Idaho, and Wyoming, cites the region’s “shared issues” as the reason why her team has found success and relevance across such a broad area. She manages six reporters embedded in public radio stations, plus one roving reporter who travels the region, sometimes by bike — more on that later.

“During the pandemic, we made all of our content free to smaller, community radio stations that don’t have a news budget,” says Concannon. “We also shared it with small newspapers, and we’ve continued that.” Small affiliate stations who can’t afford a reporter but want access to the bureau’s content pay fees on a sliding scale. “We’re really trying to get the content out, we’re all about collaboration and sharing.” Public land management, conservation, the environment, the fossil fuel industry, Western culture, mental health (“we have more suicides in this region than any other part of the country”) — these are some of the topics Concannon’s reporters cover. With the bureau now going into its fourth year, and getting nearly “100% carriage,” Concannon says that she and her team are finding their niche, content-wise.

Given the size of the region and those spotty terrestrial signals, getting the Mountain West Bureau’s stories onto different platforms is important. Lately, the team has been producing in-depth reports that stations can run on-air, which can then be shared as podcasts. The first of these is the award-winning Facing West, a four-part series hosted by Nate Hegyi, a reporter (and cyclist) who biked around four states this past summer, interviewing people about the upcoming election. “We’d been talking about him traveling the mountain region before the pandemic,” says Concannon. “He came up with the idea of doing it on a bike.” The goal was to “slow the journalism down,” and make people more willing to engage with a reporter riding in at 10 miles an hour rather than “parachuting in an SUV.”

Sharing reporting resources across platforms has become more common across the country as a whole. There have been a number of collaborations between public broadcasters and other media in recent years: See WAMU’s acquisition of DCist, WNYC’s acquisition of Gothamist, KPCC’s acquisition of LAist, and Colorado Public Radio’s acquisition of Denverite. Townsquare Media, a radio network based in New York State, has been investing in local news sites to pair with its radio brands. (It owns over 300 radio stations across the country, mostly in small- and medium-sized markets.) Jackie Corley, Townsquare’s director of digital, says there’s revenue potential in extending radio brands digitally in markets where there are news vacuums. “We’re one of the very few companies expanding and leaning into local news site creation because there’s nothing like the marketing reach of radio.”

Despite the trend toward syndication nationally, a localized approach really does play to FM radio’s strengths, both for advertisers and listeners. By design, it’s a localized medium — signals can only travel so far. As a technology, radio matches the expectations the internet has set for modern media consumers. It’s free to use and — in most parts of the country — easy to access. You don’t even need an internet connection to consume it. You just turn on the tap and it’s there. In this way, radio is uniquely positioned to fill in local news gaps. And when shared on digital platforms, stories can go beyond individual communities and into larger regional and national conversations.

Whoa, the new @MorningEdition theme leaked and it is indeed “warm, fresh, modern and human” pic.twitter.com/vnxxL5iUA9

— Bobby Lord (@mysweetlord) February 9, 2019

J/k, here it is:

The change is being made, of course, for the kids:

The new theme is intended to attract a younger and more diverse audience, while also aligning with the evolution of “Morning Edition” into a newsier program, said Kenya Young, the executive producer.

“I wanted a sound and a mood and a tone and a feel and a vibe all mixed in one,” she said.

I don’t know that there’s anything that sounds particularly “young” or “diverse” about it — but it’s probably the fact of the change rather than its content that matters. To younger potential Morning Edition listeners, the old theme sounds like Dad’s radio show. Stripping away that layer of auditory reference might let a few people listen with fresh ears.

As you’d expect on the Internet, people don’t like change. (Remember when 280 characters in a tweet was the apocalypse?) So some of the reaction is no doubt occasioned by the general strangeness of a new theme more than the theme itself.

I feel personally attacked by this new Morning Edition theme

— jacqui shine (@DearSplenda) May 6, 2019

Hearing that new Morning Edition theme song like… pic.twitter.com/BamuZUaQrJ

— Justin Hendrix (@justinhendrix) May 6, 2019

NPR's 'Morning Edition' debuts its new theme song this morning. I've listened for more than 35 years. So a new song is definitely…different. It doesn't seem so much a song as a composed set of signals of increasing urgency.https://t.co/axgJGX4SFp

— Charles Fishman (@cfishman) May 6, 2019

.@adprock this morning: The new @NPR morning edition song sounds like The Newsroom theme song.

Bring back that jazzy saccharine coffee brewing sweetness of the old song! pic.twitter.com/8wAGaOWvwp

— Dr. Katie Bird (@ArtHouseDirectr) May 6, 2019

I do not approve of the new theme to Morning Edition. It sounds like John Tesh wrote it. pic.twitter.com/VV1eHiIhbS

— dave (@daveamp) May 6, 2019

I tend to come down on the side of The Atlantic’s Rob Meyer — who got his bachelor’s studying classical choral music education, fer cryin’ out loud — in that the new theme seems likely to sound as dated to today as the old theme does to its era.

Very considerate of NPR to use a 2005 iMovie production bed as the new ‘Morning Edition’ theme https://t.co/NrbBbQZEva

— Robinson Meyer (@yayitsrob) May 5, 2019

The new theme really says: Morning Edition, one of the country’s best daily news programs, is for people who use ‘track package’ to see when the new Putumayo CD is going to show up https://t.co/NrbBbQZEva

— Robinson Meyer (@yayitsrob) May 5, 2019

The crazy thing is that the theme is so absurdly generic and 2010s-sounding that it will age like an autotuned angry bird

— Robinson Meyer (@yayitsrob) May 5, 2019

But more significantly, I think the new theme is worth noting as a going-away present to NPR CEO Jarl Mohn, who is leaving the job next month after a five-year stint. He’s apparently been pushing for a new theme song that whole time.

I confess that when Mohn was named to the post in 2014, I was skeptical: first, because his background in commercial radio and TV didn’t immediately seem like a good fit for public radio; second, because he seemed to be more focused on the terrestrial radio side of NPR rather than the digital; and third, because, well, it just felt like it’d been a long time since any NPR CEO had ended his/her term in office with head held high. (He was the eighth CEO in eight years.)

One of Mohn’s signature efforts was to boost NPR’s two flagship news shows, Morning Edition and All Things Considered. He launched a “Spark Project” in which he asked local stations committed to what felt (at least to me at the time) relentless overpromotion of Morning Edition — about 100 promo spots a week.

The thing is, it worked; as he said in 2015:

Ratings for KPPC in Los Angeles are up 30 percent in morning drive. KUT in Austin, Texas, is now No. 1 in the market. Other stations are up as much as 70 percent. In overall ratings, our control group of stations that haven’t gone along with the concept are down 13 percent, while those that went with Spark are up 2 percent. Hey, haters gonna hate.

When his departure was announced in December, audiences for ME and ATC were up “more than 20 percent for listeners over the age of 12 from spring 2014, the last period before Mohn’s appointment took effect, to this past spring, the most recent comparable stretch.” And I haven’t seen any evidence that shoring up the radio side has hurt NPR’s digital efforts, where it very much remains a leader.

Jarl Mohn has been a much better NPR CEO than I'd expected, to be honest. I didn't think it was possible to raise Morning Edition/All Thing Considered ratings that much (and frankly still don't understand how it happened) https://t.co/hRLKclaV1A

— Joshua Benton (@jbenton) December 4, 2018

Here’s what I think Mohn saw then. Podcasts and other forms of streaming audio had enormous growth potential, yes. The share of Americans listening to online audio each week went from 36 percent when Mohn took office to 60 percent today. That’s been deeply transformative in people’s homes, where smartphones and smart speakers have relegated a lot of AM/FM radios to the attic crawlspace. (In 2008, 94 percent of people aged 18 to 34 had at least one radio in the house. By 2018, that number was down to 50 percent.)

But the car has remained stubbornly attuned to traditional radio. 81 percent of Americans say they’ve listened to an AM/FM radio in their cars in the past month — versus just 28 percent for online radio and 26 percent for podcasts. (CD players and “owned digital music” — both considered deeply last century by the digerati — are both way ahead of their digital peers.)

Why? Maybe it’s that live radio performs a companionship role in drivetime that podcasts can’t as easily. Maybe it’s that connected-audio systems in cars can still be kinda clunky. Or maybe it’s that radio is still profoundly simple to navigate when in motion — just turn it on! — as opposed to fiddling through a podcast queue or waiting for an app to launch.

In any event, radio has proved sticky, and large amounts of podcast/digital audio listening have proven to be additive to rather than substitutions for the radio dial. In 2017, the audiences for every major form of news media declined significantly year-over-year — except for radio, which was flat.

At a time when digital outlets are trying to build regular consumption habits in their readers, it’s hard to beat the established habit of…listening to the radio while you drive to work. At a time when digital outlets are trying to figure out how best to build a business model that ensures both maximum distribution and significant revenue from your best customers…public radio’s had that figured out for decades.

I know there’s (always) lots to gripe about within NPR or the public radio system more broadly, and Mohn’s leadership has not been controversy-free. People complaining about a new Morning Edition theme is pretty natural.

But I do want to give a tip of the cap to the departing CEO. In a time of digital transformation, it’s very easy for folks like me to see things like “promote the hell out of a morning radio show” as a retrograde commitment to old ways. But he proved to be more right than I could have imagined. Maybe we’ll end up liking the new theme, too.

On midterm election night last year, NPR carried out its usual live coverage, coordinating stories from its reporters and from member stations across the country. Most of the audience followed along via these stations’ broadcast signals.

But those not listening to the radio could get updates, too, by asking Amazon’s voice assistant Alexa for an update on election news from the NPR One app. The response to this request was a short report with the latest news.

“Obviously, there are people that are going to be just glued to election returns,” says Tamar Charney, managing director of personalization and curation at NPR. “But we also know there’s a lot of other people who have a lot of other things going on in their life. They’re dealing with their kids, they’re getting ready for the next day, but they may still want to be able to be plugged in.”

The goal of the Alexa offering was to test two hypotheses: Would listeners find an option like this useful? And could NPR give it to them?

The answer to the second question was yes: A staff worked until about 3 in the morning to make updates available twice an hour.

But as to the first question, whether listeners would find it useful — it’s not clear how many found it at all. NPR won’t say how many people tried listening to the news this way, but, then again, the original commercial radio news broadcast in 1920 didn’t draw a massive audience either. “It was our first time trying this out and it was successful because we developed a workflow and best practices for election night so that we are ready for the volume of listeners we will get in the presidential elections in 2020,” Charney says.1

At least 21 percent of Americans own a voice-activated smart speaker — Amazon’s Echo is the most popular, while Google, Apple and other tech companies make such devices, too. And sales are climbing: In 2017, only 7 percent of Americans owned smart speakers. Meanwhile, radio ownership and social media use are dropping. The speakers and the artificial intelligence that powers them can replace or augment the functions of a radio or phone. By voice, users can ask their smart speaker assistants to play music, find recipes, set timers, or answer basic questions.

Users can also ask for news. And this simple request has the potential to challenge the foundations of radio, turning broadcasts into conversations, changing the stories people hear, and creating individualized streams of information.

Smart assistants have long been a feature on mobile phones, but with smart speakers proliferating in homes and the technology coming pre-installed in cars, voice is pushing to the final corners of consumers’ connected lives, creating new habits and leading users to rethink how they interact with their devices. And news outlets are racing to find a place on the platform. “If [voice] does become an ever more dominant interface, then it will probably have quite profound effects on the way that information and content is consumed,” says Mukul Devichand, executive editor of voice and AI for the BBC.

For many publishers, there’s not much question if voice will grow. The question is whether news will grow with it.

Keep reading at Nieman Reports →

1. Disclosure: While reporting this story, I was on the staff of the show “1A,” which is distributed by NPR and produced by member station WAMU. I am now a senior editor at the station.

As recent research by Nic Newman — published by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, and written up by us here — shows, consumers aren’t the biggest fans of the sort of news briefings that publishers have been pushing out. Common complaints: The briefings are too long. They’re not updated frequently enough. They’re too repetitive; when bulletins from different news providers run together, stories get duplicated. And it’s hard to skip stories you’re not interested in — or hear more of the kind that you are interested in.

Google is hoping to address some of these concerns with a new experiment, announced today, that will deliver more personalized audio news feeds through Google Assistant. “We are combining Google News with the interactivity and voice experience of Google Assistant,” said Liz Gannes, a former reporter for Recode, Gigaom, and AllThingsD who is leading the initiative. The company has spent the past year working with around 130 publishers to build a prototype of a news radio station that customers can control — using voice to skip stories, go back, or stop and dive further into a given topic. It’s built using each story as an individual chunk, rather than a briefing of stories chunked together. This video helps it make more sense:

“Imagine if you ask for news and get a quick update on the stories of the moment, then you get stories that speak to your personal preferences and interests. It’s like your radio station,” said Gannes. If you tune in in the morning on your phone, you might get a quick update. If you listen in your car — or anywhere else throughout the day — stories you heard earlier won’t repeat.

“To benefit the industry as a whole, we have together drafted an open specification for single-topic story feeds,” Google wrote in a blog post announcing the effort. “We have also worked closely with publishers” — including the Associated Press, CBS Local, and KQED — “to develop ways for an aggregated audio feed to serve as a discovery platform for their owned-and-operated sites.” Google is now looking for more publishers to submit their single-topic story feeds and try the technology. Being part of Google Assistant means this product could end up available on millions of Google Home speakers, Android phones, and a range of other devices for the home and car. But for now, Google says, it’ll “only be heard be a very limited number of people on phones and speakers,” only in English and in the United States.

Longtime observers of podcasting may recognize some of this new effort’s DNA from a couple other recent projects. The idea of assembling a rolling, radio-like feed out of individual stories and segments was key to the startup 60dB, which promoted itself two years ago as a “service for high-quality, short-form stories,” with an emphasis on short. (No two-hour bro-chats about movies here.) There the connection is genetic — Google acqui-hired 60dB’s team, including Gannes, a little over a year ago, and this is something of a successor product. As Nick Quah wrote at the time, the aim of 60db — a company started by former Netflix employees as well as NPR veteran Stephen Henn — was

some combination of solving the inefficiencies ingrained in the traditional broadcast radio experience — if you’re hearing something that you don’t want, your moves are either to switch across a relatively limited selection of channels or wait for time to pass within the confines of a specific station — and the newer inefficiencies that have emerged from the theoretically infinite choice horizon introduced by the Internet, including breakdowns in discovery and curation. The nature of the solution is twofold: (1) to usher in an audio creation environment in which the atomic unit of content is not an individual episode (whose lengths, as any podcast listener can tell you, range widely) but a short, individual story piece; and (2) to match listeners with appropriate stories through ‘algorithmic personalization’…

The theoretical upside for publishers is also familiar: in theory, these short-form audio pieces, should publishers choose to produce them, will (presumably) be consumed by more listeners as a result of these solved inefficiencies.

The other clear antecedent to Google’s effort is NPR One, the public broadcaster’s popular app that also itemizes individual stories into streams that can be personalized based on user behavior. (We first wrote about it way back in 2011, in its previous iteration as the Infinite Player. Yes, enjoy that rarest of moments: Google catching up to an idea public radio had 7 years ago.) About 19 percent of NPR streaming now goes through smart speakers, up from just 4 percent a year ago. NPR One, though, is mostly (if not entirely) about the broader public-radio universe of audio; Google’s effort has no such boundaries.

“News on smart speakers is not living up to the promise of what it could be,” Gannes told me. “Publishers are super savvy about smart speakers, but they don’t necessarily feel that they have the development resources to build the whole thing for themselves.” Smaller outlets, for instance, may not have been able to experiment with voice because of the infrastructure and skill required to produce audio; the hope is that if Google helps on the tech end, more publishers will be able to get their content out.

Google will offer participating publishers some analytics — to start, how and where people are listening. Some advertising will also be added eventually. “We have made a commitment to participating publishers that we do expect to monetize this product and support their existing monetization methods,” Google spokesperson Maggie Shiels told me.

Like Google News, this audio venture will ultimately be available to pretty much any news publisher that can work with Google’s open standard and adheres to Google News’ basic (and vague) content standards. In other words — from what I can tell at this early point — it isn’t impossible that some garbage news will slip in.

But “we want to balance inclusivity with making sure that we’re delivering a real news product and not something that misleads users,” Gannes said. “We’re balancing personalization and giving people what they want with the fact that this is a news product, so we want to tell you what we think are the top stories of the day, based on what the top outlets are telling us are the big stories of the day.”

The show didn’t have a phone line because of the data costs. The station was powered by a transmitter run off a generator. And no one had any consistent way to keep track of what was said on the air.

“The guy who was the presenter would have to run out and pour out more benzene into the generator,” McNally said. That stretch of people seeking help in person “was the lightbulb moment: The audience is there and the infrastructure is there.”

McNally has a tool that might be able to help bring that all together. But first, let’s get a refresher on the community radio scene: Since its beginnings in the country’s post-apartheid era, community radio has been intended to serve “the multilingual and diverse nature of South Africa by promoting the entire spectrum of cultural backgrounds and official languages in the Republic.” South Africa has more than 200 community radio stations, and a good chunk of the country tunes in regularly: The most popular stations draw audiences ranging from 200,000 to nearly 600,000 listeners.

Community radio serves the information needs of residents without phones, Internet access, or ways to connect beyond a basic radio — frequently in rural areas where the stations themselves don’t have more than the basic necessities. “We might cover residents protesting at the nearest clinic because they don’t have medicine, or they lack electricity due to cable theft,” Cliff Shiko, senior reporter at the community radio station Alex FM near Johannesburg, told me. “Or we’ll report on how the garbage collectors did not take the refuse, or the water shortage. People always want immediate attention on these issues.” And, unsurprisingly, it helps to be local to report on them. That means the information listeners get is relevant, but not always thorough or communicated beyond the immediate area. And advertisers aren’t banging down the door to target those audiences when there’s no system to prove their ads were aired.

Less than 14 percent of community radio’s news content is local, according to McNally, though the average listening duration of a loyal listener is three hours. And the country’s 11 official languages can make finding news you can understand tricky: “That’s why the listeners, even if the content isn’t great, they stay, because it’s the only place they can hear content in their home language,” he said.

So back to the lightbulb moment. McNally, a journalist who started in magazines and switched to community radio a few years ago (disclosure: he was also Knight Visiting Nieman Fellow in 2016), recognized the gap between the news aired on community radios and national broadcasters. So he and Roland Perold, who previously worked on mobile health solutions in Kenya and South Africa, tried building a plug for that gap, called Volume.

“The original idea was to get mainstream media to somehow pay for stories that they got through a wire service from the community newsrooms,” Perold said. But McNally articulated their shift: “You can’t bridge mainstream to community media when the community doesn’t have the ability to present their reporting.”

Many stations have a basic desktop computer, so Perold and McNally (plus an intern) created structure via software and some hardware to help bolster the community radio stations’ capacities. The software helps the presenters log their radio segments, track the editing process, and use a newswire to share their clips with others. Internet access for many of these stations isn’t reliable, and data allotments can be expensive. So Volume also offers a custom router that lets users get onto Volume’s platform but restricts browsing elsewhere.

That might sound basic, but it’s important. “We’re not trying to introduce blockchain or AI into the community radio stations in South Africa,” Perold said. “We’re really trying to use technology in a meaningful way where the baseline is so low that even simple tools like an information system and a sharing system make a big impact.”

They’ve been testing the platform with 10 stations around Johannesburg’s province of Gauteng and near the city of Durban along the coast. Shiko, the reporter at Alex FM, is one of those testers. Alex FM broadcasts to 130,000 listeners (“last year we had a problem with our signal and our number dropped,” he told me) with only 10 staff members. They start with a 5 a.m. current affairs show and then read bulletins each hour from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., he said.

“Remember, Volume is not only working with us in Alexandra [Township, their neighborhood of Johannesburg], they’re working with different townships and communities,” Shiko said. “A councilor being corrupt in the south of Joburg can also happen in another part of South Africa.” He also said he appreciates the pool of soundbites, of protests and politicians elsewhere in the country, and the archive of his stories on Volume.

Volume has been incubated through JAMLAB, a media accelerator based at Wits University, and funded as part of the South Africa Media Innovation Program for now. Perold and McNally have also brought in some money through training organizations running citizen journalism programs on the platform and hosting them (not the community radio stations) on Volume. They’re trying to wedge Volume as an intermediary between the community radio stations and larger media buyers, to cut out internal station politics and individual pricing models, as well as uncertainty around whether an ad was actually aired.

“Our mission is to really grow the pie for everybody,” Perold said. “By attracting more advertisers to the sector and convincing them that it isn’t the Wild West, the sector will be more sustainable and less susceptible to political interference.”

What else is happening in South Africa media news?

The good news is that women are slowly seeing themselves reflected in a wider variety of broadcast newsroom jobs. The bad news is that people of color are still struggling to reach proportional numbers of representation in newsrooms.

RTDNA and Hofstra surveyed 1,683 non-satellite TV stations and a sample of 3,542 radio stations in the fourth quarter of 2017. 1,333 TV stations responded (79.2 percent of those asked), and 415 radio news directors and general managers representing 1,110 radio stations responded.

TV broadcast

More women of color are in TV management than ever before — barely. Beating the record of 24.6 percent in 2001, this year 24.8 percent of respondents in local TV news are people of color. That’s up from 17.8 percent in 1990, but it’s not representative of the general U.S. population, which is 38.3 percent non-white.

Women are better represented in TV and radio newsrooms than in previous years. The percentage of women in the local TV news workforce was 44.4 percent in 2017, up 0.4 percent from 2016. But as markets get larger, the percentage of women in the newsroom gets smaller: Women made up 47.2 percent of TV newsroom staffers in markets 101-150, 44 percent in markets 51-100, and 43.1 percent in the top 50 markets.

“A few stations with newsrooms staffs of up to 20 or in markets 151+ still report no women on the news team.”

More people of color are TV news directors than ever, up about 10 percent since 1990 and up 2.5 percent since 2016. But this hasn’t kept pace with the growth of the non-white population in the U.S.

Regionally, the survey found that “stations in the South and West were far more diverse than stations in the Northeast or, particularly, the Midwest, as has generally been the case in past years.” Also, “Fox affiliates were about 50 percent more diverse than any of the other network affiliates.”

And “among people of color in newsrooms, women of color are now better represented in newsrooms
overall than men of color, particularly among Asian Americans and Native Americans.”

You might expect general managers at Spanish-language stations to be Hispanic, considering that “overall, 93.6 percent of the TV news workforce at Spanish-language stations are Hispanic, up from 87.6 percent in 2016.” But no: “A surprisingly low 63.6 percent of general managers at Spanish language stations are Hispanic, up a point from a year ago. The rest are white.”

Radio

“The big picture for people of color in local radio news shows an industry going nowhere.”

Radio station leadership in 2017 included fewer people of color, and fewer women, than in 2016.

Less than half of radio news staffs have even a single woman on the team. The percentage of staffs with any women at all dropped nearly four percent between 2016 and 2017. While more women are becoming station general managers and news directors (up 1.2 percent and 5.3 percent, respectively, over 2016), women are twice as likely to be news directors at non-commercial stations than at commercial ones — though “overall their representation decreased at non-commercial stations, too.” And, overall, the percentage of women working in radio news is slipping: “Women fell from 36.1 percent of the radio news workforce [in 2016] to 34.3 percent” in 2017.

Though women are making up a larger portion of the workforce in some newsrooms, that doesn’t necessarily translate to leadership roles. In major markets (of more than 1 million listeners), women made up 40.7 percent of the newsroom, but only 25.8 percent of news directors.

Radio newsrooms are also doing poorly when it comes to racial diversity. People of color made up 11.3 percent of radio newsroom staffs in 2017, down from 11.7 percent in 2016. “The percentage of staffs with any people of color dropped for both commercial and noncommercial stations. Commercial stations’ number of news directors of color and people of color as a percentage of the work force improved, but non-commercial stations grew less diverse across the board.”

It’s frustrating that newsroom diversity is making little headway year after year, though with more women of color taking up leadership roles, there is the chance that more room will be made at the top. Audiences are growing more diverse for broadcast news, and it’s a business imperative to reflect the customer base.

A couple of tidbits and trends from the two posts:

— All nine public radio stations that Gupta spoke with run pledge drives at least once a year. But pledge drives don’t have to be long:

New York Public Radio (WNYC) told us about the abbreviated, “warp speed” pledge drives the station hosted before and after the 2016 presidential election. Anne O’Malley, vice president of membership, said that as part of these pledge drives the station was open about why they shortened the pledge drive. “In response to needs from our newsroom we cut the time, and we used that in a very transparent way [to tell listeners] ‘you guys are depending on us to make a decision in this critical election,'” Anne says. The subsequent pledge drive broke a record that had been standing since 9/11.

— The shift toward online listening and donations changes the relationship that public radio stations have with members. Pledge drives don’t work well in the podcast world: “No one would download it,” said O’Malley. (That said, Slate has experimented successfully with urging listeners to subscribe to Slate Plus within its own podcasts.)

— Some work can be outsourced, but listener relationships should be managed by individual stations. WGBH’s Michal Heiplik is also the executive director of the Contributor Development Partnership, a collective that currently runs 19 membership programs (“direct mail, pledge processing, pledge gift fulfillment, canvassing, and other practical elements”) for about 130 stations. But, Heiplik said: “We can’t replicate relationships at a national scale and we’re not trying to…Just because someone responds to your renewal mail, that isn’t a relationship.”

— Stations should rely more on their listeners’ professional expertise. As Osnos surveyed 50 public radio stations, she found that most of them aren’t looking for non-obvious ways their listeners could help them. Instead, “volunteering” tends to mean things like answering phones at pledge drives or mailing thank-you gifts. But could listeners help in different ways, too? “We’re hopeful that more station staff will get creative about how they might strengthen their journalism by bringing listeners closer to the work as sources, volunteer fact-checkers, and more.”

The posts are here and here.

A discussion of the Berlin state secretary’s proposal that all immigrants to Germany, including refugees, visit former Nazi concentration camps. An interview with the Berlin DJ duo SpatzHabibi. A profile of the Benjamin Franklin Hospital in West Berlin, designed by New Orleans architects.

So many pieces had to fall into place to produce the unusual amalgamation that is KCRW Berlin, Berlin’s newest English-language radio station that covers Berlin affairs exclusively in English — and they did.

First, there was a vacancy: NPR, which had operated a station called NPR Berlin as its only non-U.S. affiliate, closed its operations at the end of last summer after more than a decade. (NPR had already been evaluating its Berlin station’s “long-term financial sustainability” and finally appeared to have decided the station was too costly to continue running. It was the only station in the world actually operated by NPR, as opposed to being an NPR affiliate.)

The Friends of NPR Berlin group, which included people like former ambassador John Kornblum, had been in touch with KCRW before seeking help improving NPR Berlin’s offerings. (Step one: Probably don’t play a ton of bluegrass music in a city famous for its EDM scene.) Nearly a dozen groups ended up applying for the frequency NPR Berlin was vacating (it would be going to “one of the allied powers“). Then KCRW Berlin won a seven-year license. It went live with its first broadcast in mid-October.

“Berlin is a gathering place for people to come from all over Europe to start art careers, which reminded me of Los Angeles,” KCRW’s CEO Jennifer Ferro said. “I think a lot of our programming at KCRW already translates there — we’ve always had international reach with our music, for instance. We want to get it known as a community institution — to do events, to partner with people who are doing events, to bring Berlin voices in.”

KCRW Berlin sends pieces of content to L.A., where KCRW handles the actual programming and sends it back to Berlin, where it’s then broadcast. But now the Berlin station has a studio — in an office center where several other German radio stations are also based — so now “we’re working on being able to transmit from there, and developing local programming in Berlin, finding hosts that are local,” Ferro said.

An initial grant from major donors is keeping KCRW Berlin going in its “startup” period, as the team figures out the needs of the Berlin-focused shows it wants to launch and what funding it will need to support each. A four-person team in Berlin (only one full-timer), a journalist on a Fulbright through this summer, and a coordinator based out of Santa Monica in California are putting together all the station’s programming, KCRW Berlin COO Susan Woosley, previously with NPR Berlin, told me. Currently, it’s airing short daily local segments, but it’s planning for daily newscasts and a current affairs and culture show, gradually “inserting local shows as we go along and as we get more funding and add more team members.” (Currently at 104.1 FM you might hear NPR news shows and KCRW shows, as well relevant programming from other NPR affiliates like WNYC, or shows from PRI, APM, and PRX.) Both Ferro and Woosley spoke excitedly of a potential show focused on techno music.

Berlin is a city full of English speakers, native, bilingual, or multilingual. But “because of the European Union situation, many thousands come to Berlin each year, but many don’t come speaking German fluently,” Woosley said. “We also want to help integrate the English-as-a-common-language community, by giving them needed news and information about Berlin, who might otherwise remain siloed. The more information they have about their city, the more they fit in with their city.” Outside of KCRW Berlin, the BBC has a frequency in Berlin and broadcasts in English, though it isn’t based in the city.

“When NPR Berlin was still airing, we put out a question on Facebook asking our followers what they thought of [Germany’s Social Democratic Party leader] Martin Schulz, and someone wrote, ‘We’d love to tell you, but we don’t have enough information in English to let you know,” Woosley recalled. “So we took that as a sort of mandate that we really inform the people in this city about what moves it, from issues local to national.”

Ferro and Woosley mentioned leaning heavily on events at the Berlin station in the future, particularly music-related ones. They also discussed continued, and more frequent content-sharing between KCRW in Kalifornien and KCRW Berlin, including a sort of exchange program for hosts — swapping DJs between the two stations, for instance.

“We look to L.A. for a number of things, for their technical expertise, for their general radio knowhow,” Woosley said. “We have daily contact with all different facets of the station. They’ve really opened their doors to us. They’re helping us build a stellar station, and we want them to be proud of us!”

If these don’t seem like questions we need to worry about yet, they should, according to Umbreen Bhatti and Kristen Muller. Bhatti, the manager of KQED Public Media for Northern California’s innovation lab, and Muller, the chief content officer at KPCC Southern California Public Radio, have for the past several months begun studying the role that public radio will play in a world of self-driving cars. (“Autonomous vehicles” is the preferred industry term.) “It feels distant for people,” said Muller. “But for Umbreen and me, it felt very much like a now question.”

California, where both women live and work, has granted 42 companies permits to test autonomous vehicles on the road. Bhatti and Muller see driverless cars on the road regularly (which surprised me, an East Coaster). They especially saw them around Silicon Valley when they were Knight Fellows at Stanford (Bhatti in 2014, Muller in 2016). “I instantly made the connection: That person is reading while their car is driving. I can’t read and listen to the radio at the same time. The car is where I listen to the radio, as do many of our audience members at NPR,” said Muller.

They and Liz Danzico, NPR’s creative director, received a $9,500 Jim Bettinger News Innovation Fund grant to start thinking about how driverless cars will disrupt public media. They’d expected to find some existing conversations to join, but soon realized that most conversations about driverless cars have centered around repercussions for traffic, urban planning, and car companies, and most of the focus is on getting the technology right.

“You can’t mess this up,” Bhatti said. “One mistake — one self-driving car’s technology is hijacked by a hacker and someone dies — [these companies] can’t risk that. When you’re prioritizing the safety experience, you’re not thinking so hard about the entertainment experience.” But, she added, “the connection between cars and public media is so strong. What happens when that connection is shaken a little bit?”

It’s still not clear what the entertainment systems in driverless cars will look like. The women have seen mockup designs that are very preliminary. “We don’t know if we’re essentially going to be presented with a platform from car companies where they’ll say, like, ‘Here’s your screen. Put what you want to put on it’ and now we’re competing with Netflix and Hulu,” said Muller. “Or is there a way to be part of the conversation, help shape what the entertainment experience is like for people?”

(There was a small stir in car circles yesterday when several sources reported that the new Tesla Model 3 — which has limited self-driving capabilities — comes with no AM/FM radio at all. Tesla later said FM radio, at least, would be turned on via software update at some point in the future. But the company is also reportedly negotiating directly with music labels to create its own proprietary streaming service for its cars — more evidence, if we still need it, of the power technology companies have over media consumption decisions.)

The women have talked to researchers and transportation and design experts, including those at Pasadena’s ArtCenter College of Design, which has the leading automotive design program in the country. “We’re exploring what this means for consumers by talking to experts first — this is such a new technology that it’s hard to ask [consumers] what they might want, or how they might think about something that they can’t even really wrap their minds around,” said Bhatti.

An MIT survey of about 3,000 people earlier this year found that 48 percent said they would never purchase a car that “completely drives itself.” Then again, there’s that off-cited Steve Jobs quote: “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. That’s why I never rely on market research.” It’s hard to know how consumers will react to autonomous vehicles until they actually have the opportunity to ride in them. “Is this really that different from a bus or a train or a plane? We don’t know yet,” said Bhatti. “We’ve circled around that a bit.”

“It’s very difficult to anticipate how people will adapt to this,” Muller said.

And so when Muller and Bhatti have brought the topic to people in public media, they’ve started breaking the question down. Asking “what opportunities do driverless cars represent for public media?” is too overwhelming a question. Instead: “How do we reimagine what the morning commute looks like?” “How do we help people feel prepared for this new technology?” “What programming opportunities do autonomous vehicles present?”

The team has had a couple of useful realizations. “We heard repeatedly from people that maybe they don’t want something that immersive, that the car is a sanctuary,” Bhatti said. This again seems like an area where people’s minds might change quickly — people who take public transportation to work seem to do just fine catching up on Netflix — but if it’s true, there might be ways to make the audio experience better instead of “just producing a whole bunch of video,” and ways to make the car “continue to feel like a sanctuary.”

Another way to think about autonomous vehicles is through the lens of community. “We think of people as lone commuters in their cars, but I think that we’re going to see autonomous vehicles alongside the rise of ridesharing,” Bhatti said. “Hardly any of the prototypes envision somebody by themselves in a car.” That means opportunities for connection. And then there are possibilities in biometrics. Could your car “know” the stressful point in someone’s commute, delivering content that addresses their moods and emotions in that moment?

“There are a lot of people who are not very excited about this transition to autonomous vehicles,” Muller said. “That means there may be a role for us to play in getting our audiences more familiar with the idea,” even just through reporting — KPCC is already covering it a fair amount, but Muller suggested public radio could be a guide to help audiences get ready.

Muller and Bhatti’s research continues, and they’re looking to hear from people in other parts of media who are interested in joining their conversation. “When walked into this thinking about the opportunities for serving audiences in driverless cars, and the dimensions really are so much more vast,” Bhatti said. “It’s about helping people feel prepared for a new technology, which includes just simply reporting on it. It includes this convening of communities. It includes things, physical structures — so much more than we initially thought.”

Oh, and it includes nausea. “One of the insights we got from a couple of the designers was that no matter what the technology is, humans are humans and motion sickness will persist,” Muller said. “If X percent of the population still gets motion sickness whether they’re driving or not, the audio will still be their friend. Video’s not gonna help them.”

Hoaxes and Hurricane Harvey. The Washington Post’s Abby Ohlheiser has a running list of all the Hurricane Harvey hoaxes and unverified viral stories. “Why do hoaxes go viral during natural disasters?” wonders The Verge’s Alessandra Potenza. A few reasons: People are checking social media more for news and updates, so there’s a larger captive audience; people want to feel as if they are helping in some way and also feel more vulnerable; and, well, people are people and “want to feel like they’re part of the event.” It’s “the same psychological motivation that drives gossip,” First Draft News’ Claire Wardle tells Potenza.

Also, as usual, some dudes are kinda jerks. (“Of course I knew it was fake, it was part of the reason I shared the bloomin’ thing.”)

What old fears about The Radio! teach us about fake news now. In The New Yorker, Adrian Chen writes about early radio’s parallels to the Internet. “Everywhere you looked in the thirties, authoritarian leaders were being swept to power with the help of radio.” The same fears now apply to the Internet, where “stanching the torrent of fake news has become a trial by which the digital giants can prove their commitment to democracy. The effort has reignited a debate over the role of mass communication that goes back to the early days of radio.”

Also, this!

The Institute for Propaganda Analysis, co-founded by the social psychologist Clyde R. Miller, with funding from the department-store magnate Edward Filene, was at the forefront of the movement. In newsletters, books, and lectures, the institute’s members urged listeners to attend to their own biases while analyzing broadcast voices for signs of manipulation. Listening to the radio critically became the duty of every responsible citizen…much of the progressive concern about listeners’ abilities stemmed from the belief that Americans were, basically, dim-witted—an idea that gained currency after intelligence tests on soldiers during the First World War supposedly revealed discouraging news about the capacities of the average American.

Chen’s story draws on a wide range of sources, like ProPublica’s recent investigation into Facebook’s racist censorship policies, and is a helpful as well as interesting read.

How to make fake news spread fast on Facebook. Bloomberg’s Mark Buchanan distills a dense paper by Christoph Aymanns, Jakob Foerster, and Co-Pierre Georg on the spread of fake news in social networks.

They found that the most important catalyst of fake news was the precision with which the purveyor targeted an audience — a task that can easily be accomplished using the data that tech companies routinely gather and sell to advertisers. The key was to seed an initial cluster of believers, who would share or comment on the item, recommending it to others through Twitter or Facebook. False stories spread farther when they were initially aimed at poorly informed people who had a hard time telling if a claim was true or false…

It’s hard to see how this can change without altering the advertising-centric business model of social media. Aymanns suggests that big social media companies could counteract fake news by preventing advertisers from targeting users on the basis of political views, or even by suspending all targeted ads during election campaigns. But this might be impossible, given how important such advertising has become to the economy.

How do academic studies define fake news? A paper in the journal Digital Journalism (paywall) looks at how the term “fake news” has evolved across scholarly studies. Edson C. Tandoc Jr., Zheng Wei Lim, and Richard Ling, all from Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University, looked at 34 papers on fake news published between 2003 and 2017. They found that “fake news” was most often used to refer to satirical “mock news programs” like The Daily Show, or parodies like The Onion — followed by “(3) fabrication, (4) manipulation, (5) advertising, and (6) propaganda.” But any definition needs to take into account both “level of facticity” and “author’s immediate intent to deceive.” Parody and satire rank low for “intent to deceive,” and it seems safe to assume that most scholarly studies moving forward will be looking at numbers 3-6. “Fake news needs the nourishment of troubled times in order to take root,” the authors write. “Social tumult and divisions facilitate our willingness to believe news that confirms our enmity toward another group. It is in this context that fake news finds its audience.”

Three podcasts for your Labor Day travels. First, a conversation between BuzzFeed’s Charlie Warzel and Craig Silverman. (Also, if you’re interested in pro-Trump media more generally, Recode’s Peter Kafka talked to Warzel and CNN’s Oliver Darcy about it.)

ive been obsessed w/ idea that fake news is going to get worse & worse & so I made @CraigSilverman talk to me abt it https://t.co/f6ouELLPlK

— Charlie Warzel (@cwarzel) August 25, 2017

Second, Brooke Binkowski, the managing editor of Snopes.com, discusses fake news with Rewire’s Lindsay Beyerstein on The Breach. Binkowski:

This is exactly how propaganda gains a foothold. If you study the patterns of how propaganda is used and weaponized, it starts out with flooding techniques so that people have so much going on that they’re confused all the time. They’re emotionally overwrought. They don’t know what’s real or what’s not. Finally, they’re just reacting to whatever they hear. To me, it just sounds like it should all be called propaganda at this point, or disinformation.

Third, MIT’s Ethan Zuckerman talks on Dig Deeper, a monthly podcast about critical thinking in the digital age, about why digital literacy may not be the answer to fake news. From a writeup of the episode:

The central problem, Zuckerman argues, is that one of the supposed antidotes to fake news — increased digital literacy — doesn’t always work in today’s hyper-partisan political environment. “We tell people to triangulate, look for a piece of information from at least three different sources,” he notes. “And what’s problematic about that is that depending on what you’re searching for, you might find three sources all repeating an untruth.”

This particular meeting is centered on chatbots — namely, the chatbots being built by a small team of engineers at Radio-Canada, the French-language arm of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Digital research and development director Thomas Le Jouan’s Macbook display is up on the TV; in the left-hand column of his iMessage window are texts from chatbots at ABC, BBC, CNN and the Guardian.

It’s still early days for Radio-Canada’s chatbots; the project only began in earnest at the end of March. The team has just one full-time engineer (and two part-time engineers borrowed from other departments) working on it, looking like a startup within the much larger Radio-Canada — an organization that counts about 3,000 employees, most of whom are in Montreal. (CBC/Radio-Canada as a whole employs just over 7,200 people, according to last year’s annual report.)

The chatbots project is an effort of the Digital R&D Lab. Known publicly as RC Lab, the Lab mainly oscillates around its two core actors: Le Jouan and coordinator Xavier Kronström Richard.

They’re able to borrow support staff from other parts of Radio-Canada, and occasionally hire freelancers to help with things — like VR video stitching, for example — that fall outside of staff’s expertise. The two of them are working on multiple projects at any given moment, from chatbots to developing a Radio-Canada Google Home app to a machine-learning partnership with Montreal-based deep-learning specialist Element AI.

“We know we can use technology to enhance what we’re currently doing as a public broadcaster,” said Maxime St-Pierre, the head of digital at Radio-Canada, and Le Jouan’s and Kronström Richard’s boss. He’s been at Radio-Canada for a year, after many years in the private technology sector. Inspired by virtual reality efforts from The New York Times and innovation projects at the Washington Post, his mission has been to make an octogenarian public broadcaster more digitally agile and creative.

“It’s not digital first,” he said. “It’s digital always.”

Teaching an old broadcaster new tricks

Kronström Richard founded what today is RC Lab five years ago, as a way to establish a community within Radio-Canada that was interested in news industry innovation.

At the time, he worked under Le Jouan as a community manager in the TV news department. He came up with the idea to merge his work and his personal interest in technology while after attending SXSW. (“Xavier came back from SXSW and came into my office and said, ‘We have to do an RC Lab!'” Le Jouan recalled.)

Kronström Richard set up social channels for the Lab and began posting. RC Lab remained a social media–driven community for its first two years, with the occasional event or workshop for people to attend in person. But as more global media outlets began experimenting with digital storytelling and operational tools, Kronström Richard’s vision for the lab also evolved.

“I wanted to become a real lab, where we could experiment ourselves and not just talk about other media outlets’ great ideas and initiatives,” he said.

Expanding RC Lab from an employee’s pet project to an official, integral part of the Radio-Canada digital reinvention took some effort.

Kronström Richard and Le Jouan had an idea for an internal accelerator that would enable Radio-Canada employees to launch digitally minded projects and products — but they knew they couldn’t do it without their larger organization’s financial and organizational support. They spent a year and a half putting together a proposal and budget request; at one point, their pitch deck was more than 60 slides. The Ideas Accelerator was born in February 2015.

Radio-Canada employees submit ideas to the accelerator program that need to be digital, prototype-able, and more broadly useful to Radio-Canada. After a selection process by jury and then a public vote, the finalists are paired up with developers (which the R&D Lab pays for) and given three months to make their idea a reality. The Lab currently has enough funding to finance four prototypes a year (each of which is allocated $20,000 CAD). Some of the funded (and more widely propagated) projects have included an anonymous information-drop site, a podcast series called “Journal intime” and radio-frequency identification technology to track lost or stolen TV equipment. Each prototype is evaluated on its own set of metrics, according to Kronström Richard.

The Accelerator is now entering its fifth season at Radio-Canada — and its second season at the CBC, after the English mothership adopted the idea.

“The Accelerator came from the ground up,” Le Jouan said. “We would never been able to do the accelerator without management on board. It would have stayed a nice little initiative.” The work done through the Ideas Accelerator secured recurring funding for Le Jouan and Kronström Richard, and eventually led to the formal establishment of the Digital R&D Lab.

Innovating inside any large and established (and bureaucratic) company can be difficult, and a crown (state-owned) public broadcasting corporation — one that saw many significant budget cuts in recent years — is certainly no exception. It’s only been a year since Kronström Richard and Le Jouan’s endeavors officially became the Digital R&D Lab. Says Kronström Richard, “Now we can finally dig in.”

The funding allows RC Lab to run several internal and external projects and partnerships. The Ideas Accelerator and chatbots are two of about nine ongoing projects. Another is a 360-degree VR app developed in partnership with a group of Concordia University software engineering students.

On a summer evening at Chez Roger, an airy bistro pub in the Montreal neighborhood of Rosemont, the din of clinking glasses and jovial laughter served as the perfect backdrop for the experiment to come. People had congregated to witness a special live taping of La soirée est encore jeune, a popular radio program at Radio-Canada.

The Concordia software engineering students have spent the past 10 months working on their capstone graduation project: An interactive 360 virtual-reality app to bring the popular show into people’s homes. One of the students, Olivier Brochu Dufour, had come up with the idea after failing to secure tickets to previous La soirée live broadcasts.

“We found a solution, which was livestreaming the show in VR,” he said. “It was as simple as sending an email — ‘Hey, do you guys want to do your show in VR?’”

Brochu Dufour and his classmates — Rahul Malik, Joseph Atallah, Roberto Ruffolo-Benavides, Wing Long Chung and team leader Ihcène Cheriet — made the app in partnership with the Digital R&D Lab.

“Whenever an obstacle came they were there to help us,” says Atallah of Kronström Richard and Le Jouan. Adds Ruffolo-Benevides, “They pushed for the project to succeed.”

But there’s a problem. When the broadcast begins, their app doesn’t work. Kronström Richard’s brow furrows as he pecks at his iPhone, to no avail. Over Slack, the team discusses that the app has blown through its YouTube request cap. In the end, only a small handful of people got to experience it. The students were deeply disappointed, Kronström Richard told me a few days after the failed attempt, “but failure is a part of our work.”

The students have a shot at redeeming themselves this month at another taping of La soirée est encore jeune. The experience of collaborating with students was still largely positive, and Digital R&D Lab intends to continue bringing on innovative student projects as well.

Ambitious projects like these help Kronström Richard and Le Jouan secure more money and resources needed as they work toward not only helping modernize Radio-Canada, but putting it on the cutting edge of news and storytelling innovation.

“The ideal for me is to know that if I and Xavier left tomorrow, that the program would still exist,” Le Jouan said.

A week later, the New Haven Independent, the nonprofit online news outlet founded in 2005, published a long piece examining the history and efficacy of these types of police sweeps in the city, which included an interview with, and a photograph of, one of the women, nicknamed Face, arrested that night. The piece details her experience leading up to the arrest, as well as her childhood, full of abuse and drug use.

“The NHI story is helpful to humanize the people who are being treated like criminals,” one commenter on the story wrote. Many others disagreed with spotlighting one of the women from the sting and publishing her back story online. “Did she get paid for the interview?” one commenter wrote. “Seems to me that your news site benefited while she did not. Some could call that the very definition of exploitation.”

New Haven Independent editor and founder Paul Bass, who wrote the story, replied: “I feel strongly that if the press quotes police officers and experts about what [should] be done with/for people who get arrested and are in hard times, we should try to have those people’s side of the story included as well.”

It’s a policy that the New Haven Independent has had since its founding, Bass told me: The outlet will not run photos of or name people who’ve been arrested — unless they’re public figures, the arrest is judged to be a public emergency, or the Independent is able to interview the accused person directly. When police departments release crime briefs, for instance, the Independent scrubs them of names before publishing. (Compare, for instance, the New Haven Independent and the New Haven Register’s stories on the same arrest.)

It’s a relatively uncommon crime reporting policy. “With the advent of the Internet, what’s online becomes people’s main or only source of news,” Bass said. “People’s reputations are at stake, and often the arrest itself and not the outcome is what is known about them.” The online-only Independent, which also operates the low-power FM community radio station WNHH, depends on the surrounding New Haven community for readership and financial support, as well as content. Many of the radio shows on WNHH, for instance, are run by community volunteers. (The station has some runway thanks to a Knight Foundation grant and another grant from a Connecticut-based foundation.) It’s moved from being funded largely by organizations outside Connecticut to being funded around 75 percent through local philanthropic support.

In New Haven, Bass pointed out, black people are disproportionately searched at traffic stops compared to white people, yet are less likely than white people to be carrying contraband. The mugshot-publishing business, too, is ethically shaky, with cheap-to-produce slideshows generating significant traffic for publishers while the people depicted, absent all context and without followup, are entombed in Internet search results. An investigation by Fusion last year found that of the 74 American (mostly chain-owned) newspapers it examined, 40 percent published mugshot galleries, including prominent papers in large cities, such as the Chicago Tribune and the Tampa Bay Times. (The Tribune, like many papers, includes a small disclaimer at the bottom of its galleries: “Arrest does not imply guilt, and criminal charges are merely accusations. A defendant is presumed innocent unless proven guilty and convicted”).

Markeshia Ricks, a New Haven Independent staff writer, has been a reporter for about 15 years, working at news organizations from the Sarasota Herald-Tribune to the Air Force Times. Every place she’s worked previously has named people who’ve been arrested, “with no question or discussion,” she told me. “This is the first place I’ve worked where we don’t publish someone’s name until the person is convicted.”

“In those 15 years, I’ve also never worked in a newsroom that had the resources to follow every arrest that we initially reported until it resulted in acquittal or conviction. All we were telling readers is that someone had been arrested and they’re in the local lockup on a certain bail,” Ricks said. “And I’ve always felt really weird about it, mostly because we don’t often come back and tell the story of what happened to that person, or even ask them their side of the story. So the only thing that is usually out there is that a person was arrested on some charge.”

The Independent’s debates on its own policy carries over into radio as well, Ricks said, pointing out a “Pundit Friday” segment about its story featuring Face. Had the sting specifically focused only on johns, would the Independent apply its policy to johns? Is applying that policy fair to the women who were arrested for selling sex? It’s a policy, Bass said, “we think and talk about a lot here.” (Dan Kennedy also discussed the Independent’s policy in his 2013 book, which we excerpted here.)

The Independent’s policy is unmatched in New Haven. Helen Bennett Harvey, executive editor of the New Haven Register, another major outlet in town, said that the Register doesn’t “necessarily have a specific policy” like the Independent’s, and just tries to consider the news value of each crime story before publishing. The Register, for instance, avoided publishing the names and photos of those arrested in the October prostitution sting in New Haven. (Bennett was recently named executive editor for Digital First Media’s Connecticut Group, so she is now also supervising newsrooms beyond the Register. She spoke to me based on her experiences leading the Register newsroom.)

“It sounds like it’s intended to be really, really, really fair,” she said. “We [at the Register] are careful with names. We do not publish names unless someone has been charged already, though there might be exceptions to that — if for instance, there were, hypothetically, someone who was wanted for something serious and there was a warrant issued for that person.”

“The Indy’s policy brings up an key point: that news organizations have to consider what’s newsworthy, and also what are people’s rights to know how justice is being carried out, who is being arrested,” she added. “We in Connecticut have had issues in the past of more people of color being pulled over at routine traffic stops than other people. News organizations do have a legitimate need to let people know who is or who is not being arrested, but we also need to be fair to people we cover.”

Ad-skipping. I wasn’t able to cover this last week, but it’s a topic you shouldn’t sleep on: The Wall Street Journal declared two weeks ago that “Podcasting has an Ad-Skipping Problem, Too,” and though I didn’t find the evidence provided by the article substantial enough to justify its strong headline — it drew upon an anecdote, a marginally representative Spotify data pool for a single Reply All episode, and the ubiquity of the skip-button feature across podcast apps — I did appreciate how the article is drawing more attention to a potential problem that the industry will have to deal with one way or another. (I myself have found this issue to be on the minds of several folks in the agency and advertising worlds, based on conversations I’ve had over the past several months.)

Two things on this:

• Though I personally want to know the real magnitude to which ad-skipping is a problem, the actual severity of the problem is much less important than the perception that there could be a problem. As a relatively new medium with a fairly messy and opaque past, the podcast industry has to work twice as hard to win the trust of advertisers inclined to avoid spending money outside channels that more aggressively provide satiating feedback loops (like, say, Facebook) or that possess more buzz (like, say, Snapchat) or prestige (like television). And so articles like this from the Journal serve as a very good signal of the trust gap that the industry as a whole needs to beat in order to meaningfully grow the size of its advertising spend year-over-year.
• In a lot of ways, the focus on ad-skipping — which is tied to larger concerns about meaningful impressions and potential count inflation — is a proxy in and of itself, because the real goal for any company spending advertising money to market its goods and services is conversion, either in the short-term or in the very long-term (as in the case of brand advertisers). Which is to say: You could beat this trust gap by hacking away at the ad-skipping fear, but you could also render that fear moot by strengthening the narrative around and belief in conversions, broadly defined.

Cool? Cool.

Another Upfront. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is holding its second annual podcast upfronts on September 7 at Time Inc.’s Henry R. Luce Auditorium in New York. All eight presenters from last year — NPR, WNYC, ESPN, CBS, AdLarge, Panoply, Midroll, and Authentic (Podtrac’s advertising arm, now rebranded) — are returning, with four new additions in the mix: Time Inc., HowStuffWorks, PodcastOne, and Wondery.

I found last year’s proceedings to be somewhat chaotic but more or less successful in what it was trying to achieve, which was to familiarize advertisers with the podcast medium and a selection of its companies.

But despite the table-setting achievements of last year’s festivities, I’ve always found the general idea of podcasts — and new media formats, more generally — appropriating the ritual of upfronts…well, a little cute. The upfront model, which seeks to artificially create an acute and hyped-up advertising marketplace for upcoming content, is a carryover from the broadcast television industry, and the entire value proposition, structure, calendar schedule, and general lavish feel of the modern upfront is structured and optimized around the television industry’s particular traits, financial context, and history. I found this Adweek feature, written by Anthony Crupi and published in May 2011, about the television upfronts’ early years very instructive, particularly in this discussion on how the modern upfront was conceived:

At the time (1948), the network schedules were unfixed; rather than running on a September-to-May calendar, programs premiered at various times throughout the year. Upfront negotiations were synched to the studio development cycle; as such, upfronts would begin the week after Washington’s Birthday, wrapping up by month’s end. Then, in 1962, ABC forever altered the advertising landscape: In a bid to create a showcase for American automakers, the network shifted its entire programming lineup, setting its premieres for a single week in the fall. In so doing, ABC not only invented the broadcast TV season as we know it, but also ushered in the era of the modern upfront.

This passage illustrates an intentionality — and a tad bit of aggression — within the television industry to create and augment demand among advertisers where previously there might have been none. (Man, those folks knew how to sell.) And back then, television had the clout, cultural buzz, and resources to throw its weight around and do just that.

The podcast industry, on the other hand, is starting out on its back foot. It’s a relatively modest offshoot of digital audio that’s finding its legs in an era of increasing uncertainty in the value provided by media and publishing industries. And so it’s interesting, to me anyway, to see how podcast companies adopting the upfront model — aside from the IAB’s event, we’ve seen one organized by a consortium of public radio stations and a “NewFront” that mixed Gimlet with other digital media companies — actually reflects a more conservative stance: one that operates off the sense that you win trust by performing the rituals they do and by the looking the way they look, as opposed to creating new rituals, spaces, and market expectations of their own.

Planet Money has a new senior editor. And his name is Bryant Urstadt, formerly a features editor at Bloomberg Businessweek. Urstadt worked with several of the magazine’s most prominent writers, including Megan McArdle and Brad Stone (whose book on Amazon The Everything Store is one of my all-time favorite reads). His editorship also produced writer and developer Paul Ford’s “What is Code?” issue-length essay for the magazine’s June 11, 2016 edition — a thoroughly enjoyable package that remains one of the most clarifying and anxiety-inducing things I’ve ever read. To put it another way, Ford’s piece was perfect Planet Money material.

When I spoke with Neal Carruth, NPR business desk supervising senior editor, and Alex Goldmark, Planet Money’s supervising producer, about the hire, they expressed admiration over Urstadt’s body of work. “We looked really far and wide — we looked in longform radio, we looked at TV, we looked at the magazine world,” Carruth said. “And what we found in Bryant was strength in two things: the first is smarts about business and economics, and the other is just really great longform editing skills.” Carruth further pointed out that, under Urstadt’s influence, Businessweek consistently produced stories that the Planet Money team wished they did first — always a good sign of compatible sensibilities.

Urstadt isn’t unique in his transition as an editor from magazine features into longform narrative audio. The same arc can be found in This American Life’s Joel Lovell, who joined the team from The New York Times Magazine in late 2014. One could also argue that Hanna Rosin, currently the third cohost on the second season of NPR’s Invisibilia, followed a similar trajectory; Rosin is a veteran magazine journalist who has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post.

I asked how a magazine background like Urstadt’s (and Lovell’s and Rosin’s) would inform the aesthetics, sensibilities, and structures of future Planet Money stories, and how that would differ if the team had recruited an editor from, say, the television world instead. “I think a worthwhile question to ask is: Which is closer to longform audio — short-form audio, like what you get from station reporters, or print magazines?” Goldmark responded, going broader. “Which two sets have more in common, and which show greater differences? I’m curious what people think.”

Remembering a recent Poynter column by Alison MacAdam of NPR’s editorial training team, which raised concerns about a systemic editor shortage, I asked Carruth and Goldmark whether they feel such a shortage exists. “I think it’s fair to say there is,” Carruth said. “I don’t see how it can be otherwise, given the explosive growth in the industry. There’s so much hiring happening, but there isn’t very much training up of editors…and even if we’ve been good about building an editor pipeline in the past, the rapid growth automatically makes great editors more scarce.”

“It’s not that there aren’t great editors out there,” Goldmark said. “They just aren’t in podcasts yet. It’s also not a question about where they are, it’s about how we find them — in magazines, in television, in documentary film — and make that transition into audio as smooth as possible.” Carruth concurs, adding: “It’s likely that a lot of them are already in audio, but it’s incumbent on us to make it a more attractive role. A lot of people want to be the voice of something, but we need to convey that there’s a lot of pleasure in being off-mic as well.”

Urstadt started work yesterday.

Gimlet’s Slack experiment. It’s been about a year since Gimlet first launched its membership program, and that span of time has seen early members (who pay $5 a month or $60 a year) being treated to an eclectic string of benefits: sneak previews of upcoming shows, t-shirts for annual subscribers, a few live Q&As, and even some bizarre yet enjoyable bonus content like the pilot of the reality TV-esque The Hunt, a project that came out from the company’s Mix Week. However, despite those deliveries, the program never felt particularly endowed with substance or intent. As a paying member myself, the returns struck me as afterthoughts, the releases way too sporadic to integrate into my (admittedly extensive) consumption calendar.

But ultimately, that never really mattered. Perhaps it’s the organization’s roots in public radio — a heritage that expresses itself on so many levels, from aesthetics to sound to the spirit of its marketing material — but at some point my brain just automatically filed my Gimlet membership expense away into the same cabinet as my annual pledges to WNYC, WBEZ, and Radiotopia. I’ve come to perceive it to be part of a larger act of “paying it back,” an indication of support for a service well provided and hope for more service to come. Of course, understanding my Gimlet membership in this way is a little troublesome, given the company’s activities with fundraising through venture capital. (Deep down inside, my capitalistic fairness calculus convulses.)

Anyway, that’s all a long preamble to talk about the new experiment that the company is rolling out for the membership program: a Slack group that connects members with each other and, to some extent, the Gimlet team itself.

“There’s a large precedent of media companies trying to engage [its communities] in a forum format, but the thing that feels so fresh from our standpoint is that, because Slack’s tech is so flat and because our team is basically already on Slack all day, it’s easier for us to mesh with the community,” explained Chris Giliberti, Gimlet’s chief of staff who was recently put in charge of the membership program, when we spoke over the phone last week. “It feels like we’ve invited them into our newsroom. That’s what I think is so special.”

The Slack group is certainly a kick, with flurries of conversation spontaneously erupting throughout the day across its 35 (and growing) channels — which greatly range in topic, from episode discussions to local meetup planning to breaking news observation. Frankly, it’s a little exhausting, but it’s a fascinating community to lurk around and watch nonetheless.

“Weirdly, it feels like Second Life,” Giliberti said. “People are making their own spaces and architecting their own program.” But of course, the experience isn’t meant to be entirely user-driven. The Reply All team has already tried crafting an interactive “call-in” episode off the Slack group, and an advice show is in the works using the platform. Giliberti expressed hope that the Slack will continue generating future opportunities for projects, both for the community and the company.

When I asked about how much the membership program is generating in revenue, Giliberti declined to discuss specifics. (Totally fair.) But he did point out that the Slack group displays about 1,300 registered members, and that this number represents merely a portion of the membership. (If you wanted to eyeball, you’d find that the program is generating at least $78,000 a year.) “It’s a small part of our business compared to advertising, but it’s a really meaningful part,” he said. “I think there’s a thought that it could be a much bigger part of the business in the future, but in the meantime, it’s a way for us to really connect with our audience.”

We’ll see how the Slack group fares over time, and whether it’ll eventually become the core that gives the membership program its shape, substance, and heft — a sort of center for its universe. But for now, it feels to me like a step in the right direction, and I’m really hoping the team figures it out as a viable alternative revenue stream — given that it isn’t entirely healthy for media companies to be overly dependent on advertising and it’s always important to diversify your business model, y’know?

“We fronted the costs of producing the show,” said Jacob Weisberg, chairman and editor-in-chief of the Slate Group, responding to a question about Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History during a recent episode of Recode Media. “Which, for something like his show that’s highly produced, are not insignificant.”

The Slate Group is the publishing entity of Graham Holdings, and it is the corporate entity that houses Panoply, which produces and distributes the hit podcast, which has been sitting pretty at the top of the iTunes hotness charts for almost two months now (at time of publication, the podcast has been on the charts for 52 days). According to the interview, Gladwell was not given a big advance to make the show — which, one expects, is a deviation from his deals in the publishing world — and is instead operating on a revenue share basis, which is how Panoply works with most of its publishing partners. File that away in your notes, folks.

NPR partners with iHeartRadio for distribution. The agreement would let the public radio mothership and its wide network of member stations distribute its live news/talk programming over the iHeartRadio platform, according to the press release. This comes weeks after iHeartRadio announced a similar partnership with Libsyn, one that sees iHeartRadio being a distribution point for the podcast hosted on the Libsyn platform. At this point, I’d like to re-up a point I made back in March about an impending structural convergence and reorientation of on-demand audio conceptualizations:

For what it’s worth, I’m fairly certain that, with its liberation from an infra-structurally imposed definition, the word “podcast” will lose all of its original meaning by the end of the calendar year. My sense is that it will likely become an identifier for a certain corner of a reconstituted landscape of all non-music audio content that’s created and distributed digitally. It’s a scope that will not only include the new podcasting companies of the last year or so, public radio, and digital media companies developing new audience development channels in the audio space (which have been my topical biases, in case you haven’t already noticed), but also commercial radio powers, streaming and Internet radio companies like iHeartMedia and SiriusXM, and community radio infrastructures.

And to remind you on what I think the landscape will look like beyond that point:

Audio content produced for the Internet and distributed through the Internet will soon no longer be identified based on a singular technological method (the aforementioned “podcatcher”), but to the #content itself. And when that happens, what we’ll see is a narrative that’s less of a clash between an insurgent and an incumbent (“the future of radio”), but rather, a clash between content factions defined by generations, communities, and cultures (“a type/genre/kind of radio”).

Implicit in these hypotheses is an understanding that the core assumptions that make up the economics of the industry — the high CPMs relative to other audio and digital formats, the “intimate,” “opt-in,” and “highly engaged” narrative points in podcasting’s value propositions, and so on — will be fundamentally altered, and the onus should be on podcasting companies to both craft a new, evolved narrative as well as develop more involved methods of ad verification and impact assessments.

Bites:

• Podcast collective The Heard adds two new projects to its lineup: Erica Heilman’s Rumble Strip Vermont and Sara Brooke Curtis’ Today’s Special. The collective, which also home to Jonathan Hirsch’s ARRVLS and the wonderful How To Be A Girl, recently saw its first show graduation with Tally Abecassis’ First Day Back being picked up by Scripps. Keep an eye on this crew. (The Heard)
• Speaking of Scripps: Katie Couric, the former television journalist and Yahoo’s current global news anchor, now has a podcast of her own with Earwolf, and she popped up as a guest on The Longest Shortest Time, another show on the network, which one presumes is a concerted marketing effort. (Earwolf)
• Current.org is running a special coverage series on diversity in public media. Check it out, won’t you? (Current)
• The grand opening of PRX’s Podcast Garage, billed as “a recording studio and educational hub dedicated to supporting to supporting audio makers at all levels,” will take place next Wednesday at Aeronaut Allston in Boston. (Boston.com)

This version of Hot Pod has been adapted for Nieman Lab, where it appears each Tuesday. You can subscribe to the full newsletter here. You can also support Hot Pod by becoming a member, which gets you more news, deeper analysis, and exclusive interviews; more information on the website.

Whether or not video is the next big thing, it’s working for now. We decided to take advantage of this by making short clips of our podcasts in combination with a still image and a compelling quote. These are posted to Facebook as videos (we call them audiograms) and we’ve been encouraged by how they fly…

[I]f there’s one thing that verges on a safe bet it’s ‘Game of Thrones.’ Our other social posts promoting articles on the economics and politics of Westeros have been among our most popular of the year, and our audiogram for a podcast on the topic also performed above average for a social post.

The Economist’s most popular audiogram so far, based on reach, engagement, and overall audio plays, was from an interview with editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes, featuring her stance on Brexit. “Given that our social feeds had been so filled with Brexit articles, this audiogram gave our followers something a little different: the opportunity to stop and listen to our elevator pitch on why we supported Remain, without having to leave Facebook,” Reid wrote.

Reid also suspects that image and quote quality affect the success of the audiogram. “A user may share the post based on the image and quote without even having heard the clip. That is clearly possible with the audiograms on Trump, ‘Game of Thrones,’ and Zanny [Minton Beddoes]’s comments on Brexit.”

WNYC and NPR have both dabbled in the world of audiograms, acknowledging that many social users tend to spend no longer than a couple of minutes on clips in their social feeds. Both have found success with quick turnarounds, interviews with high-interest individuals, and breaking news.

Reid encouraged Economist readers to provide feedback on what works with audiograms, and to reference how other publishers are successfully bringing attention to their podcast base in a volatile social media world with ever-changing algorithms: “Now we’ve got some early signs, it will be interesting to see how we can develop this concept further.”

What, exactly, is going on here? I think what we’re seeing is USA Today possibly interpreting downloads in a way that’s significantly more liberal than other podcasters and podcast networks. Which isn’t to say that there is any intent to mislead — I’m not in any position to accuse anybody of ad fraud or inflated numbers at this point in time. Rather, it just may well be the case that this is a situation of misinterpretation. Or maybe, indeed, the team over at USA Today has figured out some novel way of obtaining audiences, perhaps through another platform that portends a different kind of listening relationship. The fact of the matter is: We don’t know, and we’re presented with downloads that look the same as any other kind of download.

In any case, I’m just pushing for more clarity and specificity to what we talk about when we talk about podcast listenership data; to clearly articulate the value provided, to embrace whatever nuance may exist. We’re about a year and a half into this podcast-renaissance racket, but even with all this talk, a download still doesn’t necessarily mean a download, and an impression still doesn’t necessarily mean an impression.

(By the way, did you hear? There are no gods in digital media.)

Remember, folks: Ask more of your data, your platforms, your reporting, and your networks.

Anyway, I’ve sent USA Today a request asking whether we could go through those download numbers through their submission form, but at this writing, they haven’t gotten back to me yet.

That description of intent matches what Elias Roman, a product manager on the Google Play team, told me when we spoke back in November. Roman, who previously ran the music concierge app Songza before it was acquired by Google in the summer of 2014, explained Google Play Music’s approach as being built on the notion of introducing podcasts to non-podcast listeners who aren’t already looking for them. “I love the concierge format,” he told me. “It’s something that anticipates what you need and then serves it to you. Interviews and podcasts are a big leap into that direction.”

Is this an inflection point for podcasts? A premature question, truly. (Why did I even ask it?) I’ll be keeping my eye on this, which reminds me: Perhaps it’s about time I check in with how Spotify is doing.

“We are a huge part of the story”: Q&A with Night Vale’s Joseph Fink on independent podcasts. Here in Hot Pod, I pay a disproportionate amount of attention on the bigger institutions — the public radio stations, the Gimlets, the Midrolls — and I do that, I’d argue, for a fairly simple reason: The narrative hook I often seek when sourcing out stories is the measure in which a given entity or development may potentially influence the configuration of the larger podcast ecosystem. And more often than not, companies that command more money and labor and scale tend to fit that bill.

(I also have some quirks that dictate my coverage: I’m particularly emotionally invested in journalistically oriented media companies, for example. Also: The Ringer.)

But I am cognizant that there are tremendous limits to this approach, for placing too much attention on the bigger institutions runs the risk of unconsciously internalizing them — and, by extension, representing them — as proxies for that larger ecosystem, when in fact that’s not always the case. And for podcasting, this is particularly not the case, given the combination of the relative immaturity of the space and the formally organized companies within it.

Furthermore, as Welcome To Night Vale co-creator Joseph Fink argues, independent podcasts (which is to say, podcasts produced outside the bigger companies) wield considerable influence over the aesthetics, current and future, of the medium.

Over email, Fink was kind enough to clue me in on his thinking about the state of indie pods.

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The audio listening habits that we’d acquired during years of public transportation-and-walking commutes came into our new car with us. We listen to the radio if our phones are low on batteries or if we’ve forgotten to download podcasts. Our two-year-old hates the radio and only wants to listen to music we’ve saved offline to our phones from Spotify. In dire tantrum situations, we’ll stream music, data plan be damned. Our car is the basic model — it doesn’t have its own Internet connection or anything like that. But its in-dash entertainment is good enough to let us skip the radio completely if we feel like it, and we usually do.

We’re used to hearing that young people are no longer reading newspapers or subscribing to cable. Logic would suggest that a similar transition is inevitable for radio. But radio is also in a unique, lucky spot because it’s usually free, it’s ubiquitous in cars, and it can be listened to as a form of background entertainment. So will it manage to escape newspapers’ fate?

There’s good news and bad news. Ninety-three percent of U.S. adults listen to radio weekly, according to Nielsen. But a great deal of listening is shifting online. Fifty-seven percent of U.S. adults ages 12 and over had listened to online radio in the past month, according to the 2016 Infinite Dial report from Edison Research and Triton Digital, and the number of people who own a radio at home is decreasing: 96 percent of U.S. adults (and 94 percent of 18- to 34-year-olds) owned a radio in 2008; today, 79 percent of adults do, and just 68 percent of 18- to 34-year-olds do. (I had to wrack my brain to remember whether my household owns a radio besides the one in our car. We do, I realized — a clock radio whose clock has been broken for months. If we replace it, it will be because we need a new bedroom clock, not because we need a new radio.)

Pew noted in 2012 that the percentage of Americans who get news from the radio has “steadily declined over the past two decades.” In 1991, 54 percent of Americans said they had listened to radio news “yesterday.” By 2012, that figure was down to 33 percent of Americans and just 20 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds. 2012 is the most recent year that Pew asked this specific question, but it seems safe to assume that the figures have continued to fall.

Look at the big commercial radio companies in the U.S., and you get a pretty gloomy picture. iHeartMedia (formerly Clear Channel), the largest radio company in the U.S. with 850 stations, currently trades for just around a dollar a share, down from around $6 last April. The company is loaded down with debt, and restructuring or bankruptcy could be in its future. Cumulus Media, which owns 454 stations, trades at just $0.54 a share, and NASDAQ has warned that its share price is so low it could be delisted. Emmis Communications stock trades under a dollar. And CBS announced last month that it is planning to sell off its radio stations.

CBS “marks the last of the legacy network broadcasters — NBC, ABC, and now CBS leaving the business,” Steve Goldstein, the CEO of podcast company Amplifi Media and a longtime radio exec, told RAIN News. “In that sense, it is a huge story. Even in a world in which big media is focused on multiplatform solutions, linear radio doesn’t seem to be a priority.”

But what does the decline of these big companies really signify about radio’s overall situation in the U.S.? “If you look at the commercial end of things, your big publicly traded companies, I do not think that you can look at their stock situation or their profit situation as an indicator of the health of radio as a medium,” Paul Riismandel, the cofounder and operations director of radio news blog RadioSurvivor.com. “When you look at how many people actually listen to the radio every week, every day, those numbers are very healthy. The problem with looking at commercial radio, specifically the biggest companies, is that they were built on debt.”

The decline in commercial U.S. radio stocks appears to be “partially driven by a belief that things are changing rather faster than they actually are,” James Cridland, a radio analyst (and “radio futurologist”) based in Australia, told me.

But even if change is slow, as Cridland argues, it is happening. For its ongoing “Share of Ear” study, media research firm Edison Research does quarterly polling of a group of 2,021 Americans ages 13 and older about their audio listening habits. Edison asks respondents not just whether they listen to the radio at all, but how much they listen to it compared to other forms of audio.

Here you can see habits changing. For the quarter ending December 31, 2015, Edison found that, among all ages polled, Americans spent 54 percent of their listening time on AM/FM radio, with streaming audio at a distant 15 percent.

Among 18- to 24-year-olds, however, for the first time, streaming audio beat out AM/FM radio as the top source of listening. (For teens ages 13 to 17, the listening habits are similar. The 25- to 34-year-old age group is the next highest in terms of streaming, and streaming becomes progressively less popular with each older age group.)

“This advantage comes despite the fact that for audio consumption in the car, streaming is as yet quite small,” Edison Research cofounder and president Larry Rosin wrote. “Streaming wins at home and at work in sufficient amounts to surpass radio overall.”

The car factor makes things tricky when it comes to analyzing the future of radio listening. Half of all AM/FM radio listening in the United States takes place in the car. As younger groups start entering the workforce in larger numbers — and, presumably, driving to work in larger numbers — will they start listening to the radio more often, as older generations do?

“That’s totally plausible,” Rosin told me. “Working full-time definitely does seem to be a factor in radio listening, almost entirely because [people who work full-time] spend more time in their cars.” Still, he pointed out, young people take their new media consumption habits with them as they get older — as my husband and I did when we bought a car for the first time in our 30s.

He elaborated on this idea in a podcast interview with the website Hypebot: “Radio does better and better as people get older and older. I do not think this is a function of people liking radio more as they age. I think this is a function of the younger you are, the more likely you are to have explored other options for the audio consumption.”

Cars will change, too: With newer cars come more advanced dashboards, more compatibility with smartphones, and more independent Internet connections. (And, though miles driven has rebounded in the last couple of years, Americans are still driving less than they did before the financial crisis in 2008.) So the U.S. industry might want to take a cue from Radioplayer, a nonprofit partnership between the BBC and commercial radio stations in the U.K. that is expanding its model to other countries.

“We’re a bunch of broadcasters who got together about five years ago and said, what if we worked across the industry on stuff where appropriate, but continued to beat the hell out of each other in competition in other areas. The mantra was: Collaborate on technology, compete on content,” Radioplayer U.K. managing director Michael Hill told me. Radioplayer’s first product was a web player and search engine for live and on-demand content; it’s now used by 400 stations across the U.K. Next up came mobile apps; now Radioplayer is working on radio in cars and on hybrid radio, which is a mixture of broadcast and IP-based radio.

Radioplayer has since licensed its technology to other countries, including Germany, Austria, Ireland, Belgium, and Norway; Hill is also in talks with other countries, like Canada. What about the U.S.?

Whenever I speak to radio professionals from America, even though on the face of it they’ve got all these aggregation, digital, and commercial models going, they are universally pessimistic about the future of American radio,” Hill said. “They’re so down on themselves. I wouldn’t claim that Radioplayer singlehandedly boosted the attitude of European radio, but it was a part of it: Choosing to work together in a spirit of optimism is a part of having a successful future as a medium. Whereas all choosing to sit in their own buckets and die alone is how it feels like some of American radio sees its future.”

Hill sees particular opportunity in cars. New cars are increasingly built with touchscreen dashboards and integration with smartphones and various web apps — all listening choices that compete with terrestrial radio. “The biggest danger to radio in cars is not people stopping listening because they like other things. It’s car companies failing to understand the importance of radio in cars to their consumers, and leaving it out, or designing it badly — putting on the seventh screen down in a menu, failing to evolve the interface so it still looks like something out of the ’80s while all the other music services look great with album art and Now Playing information on the screen,” Hill said.

When Radioplayer began setting up meetings with car companies, execs — not surprisingly — asked for proof that radio was important to drivers. Radioplayer didn’t have that research, and couldn’t find it previously published, so they went out and conducted it. The company sampled 1,500 people across the U.K., German, and France (the three main car markets in Europe), all of whom had bought a new car in the last three years, with the aim of proving how important radio is to drivers. (Of course, they’re an interested party here.)

What they found was that “radio was overwhelmingly the most popular medium in the car,” Hill said. In the survey, which concluded in December, Radioplayer found that 82 percent of drivers said they wouldn’t consider buying a car that didn’t have a radio. Of all in-car listening, 75 percent was to the radio (even in these modern cars equipped with other entertainment options in the dashboard), and 84 percent of respondents said they always or mostly listened to the radio on every journey. When Radioplayer asked respondents which entertainment option they’d choose if they could only have one, 70 percent chose radio. (Eleven percent chose CDs, and 1 percent chose music streaming.)

There were few differences in preference by age (78 percent of 20- to 29-year-olds, the youngest group surveyed, said they wouldn’t buy a car without a radio in it) or by the kind of car the respondent owned.

I asked Hill what his ideal car dashboard would look like. “A huge radio and nothing else!” he said — joking, sort of, but serious that “radio would still have primacy, front and center.”

“That’s always been the problem with radio: We’re taken for granted,” he said. “That’s a good thing, but a bad thing when it comes to people making critical decisions about the future of car dashboards.” People in the U.S. drive their cars for, on average, 11 years. If carmakers “make the wrong decision, we’re locked into it, and radio starts to become harder and less safe to use in the car.”

So Radioplayer is talking with individual car companies. “We’re not just talking to the engineers who make the dashboards, but with the tuner guys, the guys who make the antenna on the roof, the marketers, the product development guys, the bosses of the car companies,” Hill said. “They are the ones who are deciding on the future.”

That’s assuming that the people who will be buying their cars one day aren’t already choosing a different future for themselves. Still, Edison’s Rosin noted, there might be room for everything. “The pie is getting bigger,” he said. “The total amount of audio usage is clearly growing because audio is available in more ways. If one form goes up, the others don’t have to go down.”

That said, there might be room for everything in a dashboard interface — but there’s usually only room for one thing in your ears at a time. And the “young people will eventually come around to old media” story is one newspaper veterans will remember — and not in a good way.

“How many times have you seen something in the news and thought to yourself, I want to know more?” said McEvers, who was sent to Baghdad in 2010 and covered the unrest in the Middle East from the Arab Spring to the beginnings of the Syrian conflict, until she returned to the U.S. in 2013. Last September, she and Ari Shapiro were added as cohosts of NPR’s midafternoon newsmagazine All Things Considered. “We go to that place, we choose a corner, a person, a house, a block, and go in there until we’ve answered all the natural questions that come up from that news story.”

Embedded is fundamentally intended to be a news podcast, and an expansive one — affording McEvers, her producers, and other reporters time to explore one specific area and follow up with its characters, sometimes even without the certainty of a story. (All Things Considered radio stories might run longer than most NPR news pieces, but 10 or 11 minutes is generally the upper limit.) It’s produced virtually all in the field. It’s a podcast that makes good and full use of NPR’s newsroom resources — “this is a podcast that from the get-go has come from the newsroom” — and versions of the stories will also appear on All Things Considered. McEvers herself will also join Tom Ashbrook on On Point to discuss episodes.

McEvers spoke with me this week ahead of the podcast’s launch about the podcast’s very newsy origins, the way her radio and podcast experiences have been mutually beneficial, and letting listeners into the room where the journalism sausage is made. Our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity, is below.

Immediately I was like: Let’s go out and report some stuff and see where we go from there. Here’s what makes NPR different from other places making podcasts — we have a full newsroom. That’s just not something you can wave a magic wand and have if you’re a startup. I was already working in a newsroom. You’re surrounded by people who are covering the news and talking about the news and thinking about how to cover the news and have just reported on something. It was my newsroom colleagues who said: Why don’t you pick a story we’ve covered well in the news magazine, but you want to go deeper on?

This is how I’ve always done things as a reporter: I listen and I read and I try to find the whole story. The idea of having 100 percent field reporting — this is just what I love to do.

One of the early experiments that lead to this happened last year. It was one of the early shootings by police of an unarmed black man and it was in Los Angeles on Skid Row. My editor at the time when I was a correspondent on the national desk said, grab this very talented producer we have here who’s already done a bunch of pieces, and just go and hang around Skid Row for a bunch of time, and see what it feels like to go and spend longer reporting something and turning it into a longer form story. And that’s how this all got started. This is exactly how we do our news coverage, but it’s just a few extra days to spend to see what we might find.

We came back and put together a piece, and that piece will be in the first season of Embedded. It was only then that we realized that going out and choosing a place, based on a story you’ve seen in the news — that could be a cool format. How many times have you seen something in the news and thought to yourself, I want to know more? We go to that place, we choose a corner, a person, a house, a block, and go in there until we’ve answered all the natural questions that come up from that news story.

If I was a freelancer sitting at home in my office, I could never have done this. What is the benefit of being surrounded by hundreds of people who are working in the news all the time? This is it. It’s people who are smart enough to say to me: Take some extra time, think about these other opinions around a news story.

My podcast is a news podcast. I’ll wake up every morning and go to a meeting with all the people who run All Things Considered, really smart people, whose job it is — and some of them for as many as 30 years — to do nothing but think about the news. That skepticism and contextual analysis is always going through my head when I’m doing a podcast. The same when I come to All Things Considered: How can I be a conversational person on a radio show? How can I make this something people might want to hear, in their earbuds?

A lot of the great storytelling podcasts happen in the studio. I hope ours opens the door to people thinking more about what you can do in the field, when things don’t go as planned and are unexpected. Part of what we do is get embedded somewhere and just see what happens. That’s a little scary, a little risky, because sometimes things don’t happen. You might just have to be there until something does. I like that it’s riskier.

Hopefully this will spark others to do the same, to get out there, instead of planning it out in the studio, and finding that right person who’s going to say that perfect thing. This is something off of the news, something you know that there’s this initial interest for. You take that as your cue, go into the world, and wait for something to happen. It’s also a fun way to live.

Alpert is the managing producer for program development at WBUR, and for the past several months has been working on a podcast series with The New York Times called Modern Love, adapted from the wildly popular Times column.

The podcast, which launches Thursday, is one part celebrity-read (or more precisely, performed) Modern Love columns and one part intimate interviews with the writer, hosted by WBUR’s Meghna Chakrabarti with Modern Love column editor Daniel Jones. The celebrity read section is a full-fledged audio performance, complete with background music and ambient sounds (footsteps, women laughing, a bubbling fish tank).

The postscript interview is about ten minutes long and gets to the meat of what every reader and listener wants to know: what happened after the events described the column? The essay writers who are interviewed don’t get to hear their essays read in advance — they hear the performance for the first time when their podcast episode is posted.

The idea for a Modern Love podcast came from WBUR’s Lisa Tobin, out of the station’s iLab, and Tobin and station general manager Charles Kravetz first pitched the idea to the Times two years ago. Development on the podcast began last September, with the team reading and re-reading and exchanging notes on hundreds of essays from which they could pluck the 48 that would eventually be paired with a celebrity reader and transformed into a full episode. The column has been around since 2004, so there are a lot of essays to choose from: Jones receives about 7,000 submissions a year and publishes 52.

“Not only are we picking them for their strength in terms of translating them into sound, but we also wanted a diversity of writers, of stories, of perspectives,” Alpert said. “It’s a really a careful dance. We’re building a new brand here, when it comes to the podcast. So we want to be as deliberate as possible.”

As the column’s editor, Jones had additional insight into these writers and took into consideration what he knew about the writers’ lives that didn’t ultimately run in the printed column.

“Was there more to the story than originally appeared in the column? Or a follow-up in terms of what has happened since?” he told me in an email. “Some stories would seem to yield more for that conversation than others.”

Jones helped (re)connect with the writers. As WBUR producers began casting for the celebrity-read component, they relied first on cold-calling actors and other performers they had in mind as the voices of the characters in the essays. Judd Apatow was the first yes.

The two episodes that dropped Thursday will also air on the WBUR shows Here & Now and Radio Boston, though the podcasts won’t necessarily have a permanent slot on regularly scheduled programming moving forward.

“Other programs I’ve worked on, you have a clock. It’s really different to have this ability to say, it’s going to be this long, because it needs to be this long,” Alpert said. “You still have to be disciplined, of course. If a segment is seven minutes long — does it need to be seven minutes long? It has to be exquisite. But this podcast — it breathes.”

WBUR provides the staff for the production side of things: in addition to Alpert, there’s producer Amory Sivertson, senior technical director at Here & Now John Perotti who works on mixing (the podcast is mixed in stereo), and Iris Adler, the podcast’s executive producer who also oversees all of WBUR’s new programming initiatives. Neither WBUR nor the Times shared any specifics on how revenue or costs are divided, but the podcast contains advertising sold by WBUR.

For its part, The Times has also thrown a lot of marketing muscle behind the project, promoting in print, in banner ads on their website, and on social, offering art, and more. The episodes live on WBUR’s iTunes channel, but the Times will present the episodes in its own player as well. New episodes are available each Thursday, in all the usual places podcasts live.

“We’re trying to touch people just through sound,” Alpert said. “I want people to feel something when they listen.”

Why audio doesn’t go viral, revisited. Do you remember what you were doing back in January 2014? I do. I was freezing my butt off in one of the colder New York winters, working on weird projects while collecting a meager paycheck from a strange little job that seemed to go nowhere, fast. But for one Stan Alcorn, then a staff writer at Fast Company and all-round multimedia journalist, it was a month that saw the culmination of a substantial investigation that he’d been bubbling over. On January 15, 2014, the media curation site Digg pubbed an Alcorn article that still haunts some corners of the audio/podcast community to this day.

The article posed a simple question at the very top: “Why does the Internet so rarely mobilize around audio?”

Or, to put it another way: “Why doesn’t audio go viral?”

Alcorn’s investigation ultimately concludes by gesturing towards to the problem of structure — the Internet as it exists today simply does not privilege audio as it privileges visual media as its dominant unit of information transmission — coupled together with the relative high demands that audio typically makes of users. It was an unsatisfying answer, at least to me, but everything I’ve seen thus far has suggested it to be nothing but completely true.

Cut to the present tense, and it would seem that relatively little has changed over the past 22 months. Sure, we had Serial and the explosion of the professional podcasting industry, but audio remains resistant to being as rapidly transmittable across the Internet as static or video visual memeography. Indeed, Alcorn’s basic concepts appear to remain as true now as they were back then. This suggests that, despite everything new we’ve seen in the space over the past year or so, there hasn’t been an actual piece of real, substantial, game-changing innovation. That there hasn’t actually been a true multiplier of on-demand audio, that whatever value that’s in these new companies still hasn’t been properly unlocked. (There’s also a possibility that I’m just incredibly optimistic, but whatever, I’m young, leave me alone, go away *hides under blanket*)

Anyway, 22 months seemed like as good a time as any for Digg to revisit the article with Dialog, its new discussion feature. The conversation was fun and great and informative and went to some really, really interesting places. I highly recommend you check out the whole thread — lots of interesting stuff in there! — but if you don’t have time, check out the thread that Digg highlighted as their favorite here.

So two quick things.

Firstly, I just want to put forward my belief that, as far as so-called “podcast virality” goes, Serial wasn’t a podcast that went viral. It was the conversations around Serial — and certain derivative elements from the pod, like the Mailkimp meme — that went viral, propelling the existence of the podcast in front of greater and greater concentric circles of people. That might sound like splitting hairs, but the distinction is important. Similarly, True Detective didn’t go viral; the phrase “Time is a flat circle” and the countless McConaughey-isms did.

Alcorn makes the very same observation and point in the dialog with a discussion of Welcome to Night Vale and its growth among the Tumblr community. I mean, this is maybe the most obvious point to make for some people, but I have a sense it’s still an idea that has yet to be properly internalized in the audio community.

Anyway, on to the second point: It seems to me that the core question — why doesn’t audio go viral? — stems from a larger, more systematically-inclined concern: Why can’t audio benefit from the full distributive power that the Internet has been able to bestow visually-based content like articles, pictures, and videos?

A common refrain, both back when the piece first published and now during its second go-around, is that the Internet is principally a visual medium. But it is also true that the accessories most commonly found coupled with phone use are headphones. Audio may not be very well accommodated by the Internet, but it’s certainly effectively assisted by the mobile device — which, as we all know, is increasingly becoming the dominant mode of consuming the Internet. There is, then, a clear and discernible gap between audio and the Internet; both things are delivered on the same device, but they’re not properly integrated.

This is untapped territory, where the gambit is to close the space between the two things within the mobile context. A really smart person once told me of his belief that the podcast format (and on-demand audio more generally) is just “one UX innovation” away from being vaulted into technological modernity.

I suspect that, whatever that innovation ends up being, it’s probably going to be simple and elegant — and, most importantly, it’s going to sound and look a little strange at first.

(More on the strange, next week.)

Public media executive pay. Current, your friendly neighborhood media entity covering public media, kicked up some dust last week when they put out a reporting series on public media executive compensation. That series included a handy spreadsheet that lists how much the head honchos at the largest public media organizations makes, at least based on 2013 filings. The compensation numbers are publicly available, by the way, but Current’s piece consolidates them and allows you to see some of the contours of the wider context.

On the very top of the list is Laura Walker, the CEO of WNYC who, in 2013, made slightly under $800,000 running a station that cost around $65 million to operate. The numbers struck a nerve among some in the New York radio community. When I sent out a call for responses on an email listserv that serves that community, I received a fair number of messages reacting with great frustration, especially given the fact that many who do work for WNYC are not paid adequately, if at all.

(On that subject: Great chunks of the work are done by interns, who I’m told get paid $12/day. I’m also told that WNYC also makes robust use of per diems, who are essentially permalancers who work without benefits. Many per diems work with the hope of someday being taken in full time, which often does not happen — or so I’m told, again.)

Every single person who wrote me asked to be anonymous. Most wrote just wanting to vent, and they did not want the specifics of their notes made public. Like many creative industries, the radio scene is an exceedingly small world, and many folks who wrote in still work at WNYC. This state of affairs also says a lot about the current state of creative labor among audio folks: Despite the boom we’re currently living through, WNYC is still the center around which the NYC radio scene revolves, and the labor pool still has not seen any significant increases in power.) But the ones who were comfortable with being printed pretty much said the same things. One email was particularly effective in capturing all the broad strokes — you can find the full note in this Google Doc, but here’s the highlight:

It should go without saying, but it’s so hard to make $12/day three days a week and live in New York City. Not only does it put tremendous financial strain on interns, but it sends the message that our work isn’t valued. WNYC tries to justify this by framing the internship as a public service of sorts — an offering of time and support to interns, a way that the shows “give back.” (I’ve actually heard HR talk about the internship in this way.) But in many if not all of the internship job postings, they write about how integral the work of interns is to each show. I don’t think the station could actually function without its interns.

It’s just so fundamentally exploitative. I’ve accumulated more credit card debt this fall than I’ve ever had before. I live with constant anxiety about money.

All right, I’m going to stop this line of inquiry right there, for three reasons. First of all, I don’t have the full, documented, and publicly shareable information about wages and work culture in WNYC. Most of this is hearsay. Secondly, I’m not qualified at all to discourse publicly at length about labor inequities, rights, or notions of fairness. I have no formal training in any of those topics, and I have been told in the past that my moral compass is occasionally broken. And finally, I’m just an able-bodied individual of sound mind that doesn’t have much cash for legal counsel if I so needed it. So.

But clearly, this is not okay. You can cut the situation a number of different ways, but the fundamental tension of a cause-driven/public service organization not adequately supporting its own people is not just hypocritical — it’s a self-defeating proposition. It’s also bad for its own industry at large. I don’t particularly care how much money a CEO pockets; regardless of that number, there simply has to be a baseline decency to how laborers are being compensated in general and, for me at least, that baseline originates from a two-prong logic: Can the laborer literally live and not made to feel devalued into an object. And does the compensation arrangement structurally exclude huge communities of people?

Anyway, before moving on, I just wanted to say that this issue is probably the second-most talked-about topic whenever I get into natural conversation with current and former public radio folk. (The first is Ira Glass.)

NPR is getting old. If you don’t subscribe to the amazing American Press Institute newsletter, you might have missed this whopper that they highlighted yesterday: a Washington Post piece titled “NPR is graying, and public radio is worried about it” — thus making something we’ve all known and groaned about old-media official.

I highly recommend that you read the whole thing (give the click!), but here are the particularly salient bits to me:

• Some historical context: “What they didn’t realize at the time was that what they were inventing was programming for people like themselves — baby boomers with college degrees.”
• “Overall, audiences are growing on digital devices, said Emma Carrasco, NPR’s senior vice president for audience development. She estimated that 32 million people per week, about 1 in 10 people in the nation, hear or read (via NPR.org) something NPR has produced.”
• “A sustained promotional campaign paid off with a modest 2 percent gain in the audience for “Morning Edition” during the first six months of this year.” Interesting! *scribbles on notepad*

And here’s a line that stood out to me: “No one knows, for example, how many people actually listen to the podcasts they download, or whether podcasts — still a small share of all listening — are a passing fad or an enduring format.”

Fad! A fad! Don’t you see? It’s not about whether it’s a podcast! It’s not about the format! It’s the fact that the audio is served online! Onliiiiiine! DIGIITTAALLLL $*$&@%$*

In other news, there was a chicken hanging out by the NPR offices the other day. No, but really.

StartUp episode on branded podcasts. Don’t miss the latest StartUp episode, folks. It’s about the new form of native advertising that’s steadily making its way into the podcast form — sponsored/custom podcasts, a show that’s fully commissioned and editorially guided by advertisers.

And once you’ve listened to that, read this FT piece on the matter, “Brands tune into podcast production.” (Shannon Bond, again, with the sweet beat coverage.)

And once you’ve read that, check out the podcast discussed in the article, The Message. (See that? Plugged a podcast by my day-job employer. My ethics, they are compromised.)

And once you’ve listened to that, pat yourself on the back. It’s Tuesday, AND TURKEY DAY IS TWO DAYS AWAY!!

Nieman Lab on the state of the pod. So I figured that it was only a matter of time that Joshua Benton, the director of Nieman Lab, would school me at my own game. Last week, the man himself put on a bandana and blogged it out, publishing a column titled “Podcasting in 2015 feels a lot like blogging circa 2004: exciting, evolving, and trouble for incumbents.” It was comprehensive, concise, smart, sharp, and incredibly insightful, establishing an evolutionary parallel between the blog ecosystem of yester-year to the podcast ecosystem of today.

Essentially, Benton breaks the situation down to three major spheres: professionalization, platforms, and incumbents (i.e. their probable disruption). Money quote, for me:

For all its successes, podcasts have offered no solution to the crisis of local news. I expect we’ll continue to see the gap between the WNYCs and their smaller public radio peers expand.

Great stuff. Happy Turkey day, folks!

Is this your first time reading Hot Pod? You can subscribe to the newsletter here, which mostly features irrelevant exclusive content (mostly different GIFs and stuff about what I had for lunch but whatever that’s the newsletter strategy I’m rolling with).

Gimlet has built up an acclaimed lineup of podcasts that now regularly land on most-downloaded lists and which have smart integration of advertising. Other companies like Panoply (from the people at Slate) and Midroll (now owned by Scripps) are doing something similar, building up podcast networks that can both professionalize and make more efficient the production of on-demand audio. Gimlet may want to be another HBO, but to my mind, they’re more of an audio Vox Media — marrying content smarts, production skill, and an agile business strategy.

Platforms

When it comes to platforms, podcasting has been a remarkably open one. All you need is access to a server and you can publish to the world.

I suspect we’re going to see that openness come under pressure soon. Nearly all audio podcasts are MP3 files — the same format that filled up your iPod with Nelly and NSYNC back in the day. Once they’re downloaded, MP3s are opaque from a publisher’s perspective: There’s no way to tell if they’ve been played once, a hundred times, or never. Tracking individual listeners’ habits — seeing what other podcasts they listen to, which ads they skip, or which episodes they bail out of early — is impossible for a podcast producer.

One possible reaction to that: Great! I don’t want some rando podcast bro tracking my activity! But the web has taught us that many people — especially advertisers — want that sort of data, and we can be sure that there will be attempts to harness it.

Doing so would probably require a new format for podcasts — something beyond the MP3. The Swedish startup Acast promises an enhanced podcast experience by integrating images and video at points within an audio podcast — if you listen to certain podcasts within their app. Of course, that complexity can also be used to push more sophisticated advertising; Acast tells companies it can provide “dynamic targeting” of podcast advertising within a given episode.

The optimist’s view of Acast (and other companies entering the space) is that the empty-headed MP3 is limiting what podcasts can do, and that we need to move past it for the field to flourish. The pessimist would note that whatever promising new technology comes along is unlikely to be as open as the RSS-plus-MP3 tech at the core of podcasting. And that could mean private platforms taking over.

Marco Arment, who makes the popular Overcast podcast app for iOS, argues that this coming wave of companies aims to “lock down this open medium into proprietary ‘technology,’ and build empires of middlemen to control distribution and take a cut of everyone’s revenue. That’s how you make Big Money. And it usually works.”

Look to blogging again. In the mid-1990s, if you had a blog, you probably wrote the code for it by hand. By the early 2000s, you likely used a webhost like Blogspot — reducing technical complexity by handing over the backend to a company like Google. Fast forward to today and the vast majority of what would have been considered “blogging” 10 years ago now happens on social platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

Podcasting is open, but it’s also complicated and limited by its technology. Some middleman will come along to improve that — and grab a piece of the business.

Incumbents

So where does this all leave public radio — the part of the business most important to those of us who care about journalism? NPR and its member stations have survived the digital transition better than most news outlets, but its broadcast audience has plateaued and there are troubling signs that it’s losing younger listeners. Podcasts are a piece of that erosion, as commuters use their phones and connected cars to tune into WTF with Marc Maron instead of their local FM morning zoo, or Reply All instead of All Things Considered.

Of course, many of the top-rated podcasts are produced by public radio outfits. But they’re mostly still driven by the demands of terrestrial radio. Shows are an hour long because that’s the only kind of slot available on Saturday afternoons. They’re produced by an expensive infrastructure that’s tied to broadcast. They’re limited in their flexibility, because adding a new radio show at a station usually means removing an existing one. (Any of this sound familiar to print veterans?)

There are public radio podcast success stories, of course: Serial most obviously, but also NPR shows like Invisibilia and Hidden Brain. And several of the largest local stations are betting big on podcast production. (In October, WNYC announced a $15 million project called WNYC Studios devoted to developing new podcast programming.)

But it’s not hard to forecast the impact a shift from broadcast to podcast will have on public radio stations. There are over 900 public radio stations in the United States, and most of them are nothing like WNYC — they survive in large part as the best available delivery mechanism for national NPR content. In most markets, public radio stations face little to no real news competition on the dial. If Morning Edition becomes just one among many high-quality options for newsy audio during drivetime, what happens to the rest of their work — and their business model?

In newspapers, a few giants like The New York Times could respond to the challenge by building up top-notch digital teams and competing toe-to-toe with the newcomers. But there are nearly 1,400 daily newspapers in America, and most don’t have the resources, skills, or strategy to keep the attention of their audiences online. For all its successes, podcasts have offered no solution to the crisis of local news. I expect we’ll continue to see the gap between the WNYCs and their smaller public radio peers expand.

The future history I’m outlining isn’t all bad. For the listener, there’ll be more great shows than you know what to do with, just as there’s more quality stuff to read online than ever before. But the same trends we saw 10 years ago — professionalization on one hand, platformization on the other — sure seem to be playing out again. And that promises to disrupt yet another part of the journalism business — for all the good and bad that implies.

“When The New Yorker started, they didn’t nail it on week one,” editor David Remnick told me.

The magazine is now facing a similar situation as it tries to transition into a new format: audio. The New Yorker Radio Hour debuts tomorrow to terrestrial audiences in cities like New York and Boston and to the wider world as a podcast. But what does The New Yorker sound like? While he’s open to experimenting with the form, Remnick knows at least one thing the new show won’t be: “The most foolish or arrogant thing we could do is get on the air and read New Yorker pieces,” he said.

Instead, Remnick expects a process closer to cooking: “All the elements of the crazy recipe of The New Yorker should be in there. The basics: There should be depth of discussion, depth of reporting, accuracy, humor, and range,” Remnick said.

The New Yorker is not unfamiliar with podcasts; the magazine has a handful of shows dedicated to politics, culture, and fiction, among others. But The New Yorker Radio Hour will be a hybrid of sorts, coproduced by WNYC Studios and distributed to public radio stations around the country. In the first two weeks, the show will debut on 26 stations, from New England to Portland.

In collaborating, the magazine and the radio station are trying to combine elements that regular readers of The New Yorker will recognize with new offerings. Remnick will be hosting each week’s episode; in the premiere episode, he sits down for a discussion with The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates. Cartoonists Matthew Diffee and Drew Dernavich will discuss the process of how they create their work each week.

The first episode also features the initial installment of a narrative piece from Jill Lepore about her search to find her best friend’s biological father.

In discovering what The New Yorker is as a radio show, the staff will be the connective thread between the two worlds. “We’re trying to learn the medium,” Remnick said. “The New Yorker is what we do and we’re learning how to do this thing together and merge these different skills.”

That’s where WNYC Studios, the station’s recently created podcast unit, comes into play. More than a home to new podcasts, WNYC Studios is meant to be a place to develop programming that fits on airwaves and in earbuds. Using the knowledge that comes from creating and, more recently, distributing shows like Radiolab and On the Media, WNYC wants to provide a launchpad for audio producers, said Dean Cappello, head of WNYC Studios.

“This is probably the most enthusiastic reception we’ve received to anything we’ve done. It’s a credit to the regard people have for The New Yorker,” said Cappello.

Breaking into the weekend schedule on public radio is not an easy thing to do. For many stations, shows like Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me, This American Life, and The Best of Car Talk are still the foundation of Saturdays and Sundays.

Cappello said public radio listeners are looking for more great shows, either on radio or on demand. The New Yorker, which can alternate between serious and satirical in a single issue, has many of the elements necessary to create the type of show that people want to listen to on weekends, he said. Combine that with the magazine’s name recognition and audience (which, it’s fair to say, overlaps with NPR’s), and you have a good base for a show.

“There’s a natural affinity between what The New Yorker does and what public radio does,” Cappello said.

In developing the show, there were some practical considerations. Even though The New Yorker and WNYC’s offices are not that far from each other, shuttling back and forth to record episodes would have been annoying. Instead, engineers from WNYC set up an audio studio with broadcast-quality equipment at the magazine’s offices in Condé Nast’s new 1 World Trade Center headquarters.

Getting those details right was relatively easy, but finding the right tone for the show was more of a challenge, David Krasnow, executive producer of The New Yorker Radio Hour, told me. While the show may include stories connected to the news, it won’t exactly be a news program. Instead, Krasnow said, it’s about finding the small, audio-friendly window into what may be a 10,000-word magazine story. Think interviews and personal narratives more than than long-format audio stories.

What the magazine provides in editorial variety each week, the show will aim for in a mix of interviews, personalities, and voices. “We talked about it as being inspired from the magazine, rather than listening to the magazine,” he said.

Krasnow and the rest of the producing team are working with Remnick and other editors to identify stories in the editing pipeline, or from previous issues, that might be a good fit for radio. But they’re also on the lookout for pieces that were an odd fit for the magazine or the website. Lepore’s feature in the first episode grew out of a memo she sent to her editor about an idea she’d had that wasn’t quite right for the magazine.

The producers are also trying to bring the literal tone of the magazine into the podcast, by incorporating actual everyday sounds: side conversations, phone calls, the uneven drumming of typing. “We developed a soundscape that is built from recordings taken here in the office,” Krasnow said.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is WNYC Studio’s first test as it enters an increasingly competitive market for podcasts. The studio is not just going up against NPR, which has recently launched new shows like Invisibilia and Hidden Brain, but also companies and networks like Panoply, Acast, Radiotopia, and Earwolf.

That competition, as well as the growing appetite for on-demand listening, is why WNYC wanted to create a division that focused entirely on podcasts. But having a separate division also allows for more flexibility in setting the advertising around shows that will live on public radio and as podcasts. While there are clear guidelines that restrict the types of marketing done over public radio, there are no corresponding rules for public radio podcasts. That’s a challenge and an opportunity for shows that exist in both realms.

Advertisers that already have a relationship with The New Yorker may also be interested in radio, Cappello said. And as WNYC finds new ways to deliver ads on The New Yorker Radio Hour, those ideas could also end up being used in other shows from the studio.

“There’s no shame in trying to leverage the dollars available and plow them back into our productions,” he said. But, despite the experimentation, WNYC will remain mindful of how sponsorships align between the radio and digital versions of the show, and whether that presents any conflicts.

Similarly, for The New Yorker, the radio show is part of the magazine’s continuing experiments and reinvention. In the past few years, it’s relaunched its website and seen subscriber growth after introducing a paywall. It’s built out a successful events business and turned The New Yorker Festival into its own franchise. In February, Amazon gave a full series order to The New Yorker Presents, a documentary-style series based on the magazine.

All these efforts have a similar, straightforward goal, Remnick says: “To reach new people. To reach more people, and to reach the people who already read us in different ways.” And while all of these projects seem to be unfolding at the same time, Remnick is cautious, noting that it takes time to learn any new medium. It was the same when The New Yorker first went online, and when it first went into print.

“This used to be an institution that put out a print magazine once a week. And that was interesting and complicated enough,” Remnick said.

“It’s your show and it’s your microphone and they are your guests. You need to be the gatekeeper,” said Dankosky, vice president of news at Connecticut’s public radio network WNPR and host of the daily public affairs program Where We Live.

Dankosky was leading a session of Radio 101 for WNHH, a low-power FM (LPFM) community station scheduled to make its debut on August 11. The station is being launched by the New Haven Independent, a pioneering online nonprofit news site that debuted 10 years ago next month.

For Independent founder and editor Paul Bass, WNHH is a logical next step. The station — in partnership with La Voz, a Spanish-language newspaper that is also the Independent’s landlord — will broadcast weekdays from 4 a.m. to 4 p.m. and stream online 24 hours a day. Programming will include six or seven hours a day of local music, talk shows with newsmakers (including a weekly call-in show with Mayor Toni Harp) and a variety of other features, with Spanish-language shows from La Voz on weekends. Content will be repeated to fill out the schedule.

“It’s not going to be like Serial,” says Bass. “It’s going to be like local radio. It’s going to be down and dirty.”

Coco amplifies his news coverage with a strong web presence — something Bass plans to do as well. WNHH will not have a separate website, Bass told me, because he wants people to think of the Independent and the radio station as one entity. Arts coverage in the Independent — already far stronger than it was several years ago because of an infusion of grant money — should become even more of a presence, Bass says, as radio stories are repositioned as Independent articles with embedded audio.

Nearly 60 percent of New Haven’s 130,000 residents are African-American or Latino, according to federal census data. WNHH’s programming will reflect that diversity with offerings such as a hip-hop show hosted by local DJ Joe Ugly (his Ugly Radio Internet station will be simulcast from 6 to 9 a.m.); shows hosted by New Haven police officer and social activist Shafiq Abdussabur and his wife, Mubarakah Ibrahim, a well-known fitness advocate for Muslim women; and interviews with local entrepreneurs, a joint venture with La Voz aimed at highlighting success stories both within and outside the Latino community.

“I bring the diverse lens of being Muslim, being a woman, being African-American,” Ibrahim says, “and so all of that I think lends me a different version of how reality intersects for me and for people like me.”

Adds Norma Rodriguez-Reyes, president of La Voz: “I think this is going to be interesting because a lot of people are going to be educated as to what America is all about.”

Independent staff reporters will be on the air as well. For example, one of the issues Markeshia Ricks wants to explore is the reentry of former prison inmates into the community. “Apparently they drop folks off at six in the morning and say, ‘Here you go, have a nice life. Don’t come back to prison,’” she says.

Amplifying the civic conversation

From the beginning, the Independent has emphasized civic engagement through its closely monitored comments sections and its attention to the details of neighborhood life. WNHH is an opportunity to build on that. Josh Stearns, director of journalism and sustainability for the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, believes that LPFM stations represent new opportunities for local conversation.

“LPFMs can be platforms for new modes of community participation,” he says. “There is something really powerful about hearing the voice of your community, your neighbors, especially for communities who often don’t see themselves reflected in the news.”

Overseeing all this is Lucy Gellman, a 25-year-old art historian who’d moved to New Haven to run the print room at the Yale University Art Gallery. She began writing music reviews for the Independent. And when Bass offered her the job of WNHH station manager, she took it, even though she had been planning to move to North Carolina to pursue a Ph.D. at Duke University.

“For him to put trust in me for one of the very big jobs kind of blows my mind,” says Gellman, who’s been teaching herself radio through owner’s manuals and YouTube. “I know there are big expectations. I’m very nervous, but I’m also very excited for the creative potential of this position.”

Among her goals: capturing an audience that doesn’t necessarily read the Independent. “I believe really fiercely in what we do as the New Haven Independent and what it stands for. I love the voice that the Independent has,” she says. “But I don’t have friends who read the Independent in New Haven. Some of New Haven’s young population is transitory. They come, they stay for two to five years, then they go.”

For John Dankosky, who has featured Bass often on his radio program, helping with the launch of WNHH is a way of fostering collaboration in a time of diminishing resources.

“As we all shrink, as the overall landscape shrinks, it doesn’t make as much sense to beat each others’ heads in as it does to really try to work together,” he says. “I think there’s something real and positive about bringing together a voice around community. I think that the Independent did that in digital form. What would happen if it’s now in radio form, too? What if it’s actually a place where people can talk to each other?”

Barring any last-minute glitches, the talking begins next week.

The nonprofit Independent is one of three groups asking the FCC for a low-power FM (LPFM) license in New Haven, Conn. If successful, editor and founder Paul Bass says that “New Haven Independent Radio” could make its debut at 103.5 FM in about a year.

“It would be a fun thing if we get it. I’m told it’s very hard,” Bass says. “We’re by no means talking as if we’re going to get this license. We thought it would be worth a shot.” He envisions a mix of news from the Independent and La Voz Hispana de Connecticut, the Independent’s content partner (and landlord), as well as music, public affairs, and shows produced by local nonprofit organizations. The station would be on the air at least 16 hours a day.

The three New Haven applications are part of the FCC’s great LPFM land rush. Legislation signed by President Barack Obama in 2011 eased restrictions on low-power stations, and the FCC is expected to approve about 1,000 applications sometime in 2014. More than 2,800 applications were received by the deadline last month, according to the website Radio World. (Thanks to Aaron Read of Rhode Island Public Radio for tipping me off about the Independent’s application.)

According to the Prometheus Radio Project, a longtime advocate of expanded community radio, “the over 800 low-power stations currently on the air are run by nonprofits, colleges, churches and emergency responders.” For years, the radio industry and (believe it or not) NPR fought the expansion of LPFM, arguing that new stations would interfere with established broadcast frequencies — a concern that advocates say is unwarranted.

Like all LPFM stations, New Haven Independent Radio’s broadcast footprint wouldn’t extend much beyond the city limits, although it would stream online as well — which could be significant, Bass says, given predictions that most cars will have streaming Internet radio within a few years.

Inspired by Haverhill

Bass says he got the idea from WHAV Radio in Haverhill, Mass., a nonprofit online community station (it also has a weak AM signal) whose volunteer general manager, Tim Coco, is seeking to expand with an LPFM license of his own. (I wrote about Coco’s radio ambitions last summer.) Coco, who runs an advertising agency and is a local politico of some note, is also among a group of residents working to launch a cooperatively owned community news site to be called Haverhill Matters, under the auspices of the Banyan Project.

“I’m happy I provided some inspiration,” Coco told me by email. “I believe the more local voices, the better for the community.”

Although Bass, if he is successful, may be the first hyperlocal news-site operator to start an independent radio station, the connection between the two media is a natural one. For instance, Howard Owens, publisher of The Batavian, a for-profit site that covers Genesee County in western New York, has partnered since 2009 with WBTA, an AM station with a strong community presence. An even more ambitious project is under way in the heart of the country, as the St. Louis Beacon news site is merging with St. Louis Public Radio.

Donna Halper, a longtime radio consultant and historian who is an associate professor of communication at Lesley University, says a multiplatform presence of the sort Bass envisions is crucial at a time when the audience has become fragmented.

“These days, it’s a multimedia world, and even a low-power FM station can get people talking” about your work, she says. “In this kind of environment, the more platforms you are on, the more you have top-of-the-mind awareness.”

On the other hand, industry observer Scott Fybush, who writes about radio for his own eponymous website, warns that Bass may not quite realize what he is getting into.

“Twenty-four hours a day of radio is an unforgiving taskmaster,” Fybush said in an email. “There are lots of applicants in this LPFM window who have what appear to be noble ideas, but keeping a station going with engaging programming day in and day out isn’t easy to do.”

Three-way contest

But that’s getting ahead of things, because first Bass has to win the three-way contest for the New Haven license. And that is by no means assured. (Bass’s application was filed by the Online Journalism Project, the nonprofit entity that acts as the Independent’s publisher of record.)

According to documents on file with the FCC, the other two applicants are a Spanish-language organization and a Christian broadcaster called Alma Radio. Even though LPFM is intended to encourage localism, Alma proposes to broadcast nationally syndicated religious programs, including “Focus on the Family,” hosted by the controversial evangelical leader James Dobson. Alma Radio’s oversight board, according to a “Purposes and Objectives” document it included with its application, is “composed of members who believe and have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.”

Although Bass says his ideas for the station are still evolving, he included a detailed proposal with his FCC application, with such diverse offerings as a morning news program; a daily “La Voz Latino Community Hour”; a collaboration with The Inner-City News, a local African-American publication; community theater; and a two-hour evening program to be called “Joe Ugly Presents Local Hip Hop.” (Joe Ugly is the nom de rap of a New Haven music impresario who runs an Internet radio station called Ugly Radio.)

One of the New Haven Independent’s funders has already put up $3,000, which paid for legal and engineering services. If Bass wins the license, he estimates it would cost $30,000 to build the station and $60,000 to $70,000 to pay a full-time employee to run it — a substantial amount over the approximately $500,000 a year the Independent now receives in donations, foundation grants, and corporate sponsorships.

The opportunity is clear enough. Done right, it would enable Bass to bring New Haven Independent journalism, with its hyperlocal emphasis on neighborhoods, schools, and city politics, to a new audience — and to entice that audience, in turn, into sampling the Independent.

The danger, of course, is that the radio project would drain resources and attention away from the Independent itself, diluting its mission with a gamble on a new platform that may or may not succeed. Bass’s answer to that challenge is simple and direct: “We have to make sure it doesn’t.”

Photo by pyrosapian used under a Creative Commons license.

Matt Thompson, a name likely familiar to Nieman Lab readers or future-of-news watchers, is helming the effort. As manager of digital initiatives (“and mischief,” he adds), Thompson has been a part of a number of new endeavors at NPR, including Project Argo. What makes Code Switch unique, Thompson said, is that it promises not only to jump headlong into discussions about race and culture, but also find draw new voices into the mix. “We’re seeking to reach and bring into the conversation more and more people who are, by dint of demographics, somewhat younger than the population as a whole and are more likely to be using mobile technologies for more of their media consumption,” Thompson said.

When I spoke to Thompson, we talked about the development of the Code Switch team, it’s mission, bridging the worlds of audio and digital, and how NPR is moving into the world of mobile. Here’s a slightly edited transcript of our conversation.

Thompson: Jason Collins is a really good example, because one of the fundamental, definitional things that we had to do is figure out what about Jason Collins is just interesting, and what about Jason Collins is interesting because he’s black? Or what about Jason Collins’ blackness is interesting about this story? That lens allows us to ask the question, as Gene did last week — there is this specter in all these stories and all the coverage of this issue of “Jason Collins is black and everybody knows that black folks have an extra special problem with homosexuality.”

Thompson: I think the content is part of it. The way we deliver that content and the way we tell our stories, all of those things are part of it.

But, just to make it vivid again for a second, we know we’re reaching, and we’re seeking, an audience that is more likely to use social media than the full general population. This means that social media is incredibly important. It’s an important place for us to be looking for stories and to be reporting. It’s also important to factor social media in, to build that into our editorial planning as a place where we’re telling stories.

So we have a member of the team, Kat Chow, whose primary outlet, the arena in which she spends most of her time, is social media. She’s working closely with our folks in broadcast. There’s a lot of cross-fertilization and mixing. Social media is uniquely one of these spaces where you can actually reach out and touch the people you actually want to reach out and touch.

Ellis: I did want to ask you about the element of building a community with this. You guys had the post about the comments you remove, and you’ve been active talking to people through the Twitter account. How are you thinking about those tools and how they can feed into growing an audience?

Thompson: We’re still very much figuring it out. Almost the biggest thing you want to do when you’re covering race, ethnicity, and culture is foster a fantastic conversation. One of the most delightful pictures of success for us, I think, is having people around a dinner table talking about stories, questions, seeds of things that we’re bringing into their lives.

We knew from the outset that it was incredibly important to foster a really robust and vibrant conversation on these issues, and we knew, also, that it’s really easy for conversations about race, ethnicity, and culture to go off the rails. So we wanted to take a very active stance in our discussions all across the blog but also in social media, online, and all the places folks were discussing our work.

Ellis: Is that kind of freedom typical of different projects at NPR? You guys are being very deliberate in your approach.

Thompson: I would say absolutely. So my title is manager of digital initiatives and mischief, but I am by far not the most mischievous person in this organization. I think generally there is a lot of trying and breaking and fixing things here. We definitely enlisted our social media team early on — Kate Myers, and Wright Bryan, and Andy Carvin, to say, “Hey, folks, we want to take the NPR discussion guidelines and interpret them very strictly and aggressively. We just want to let you know you’re going to be removing some comments.” And Kate and Andy and Wright were like, “Awesome, you guys, go nuts — let’s play and learn about what’s working and figure out what we can try to take from this universe and apply to our work elsewhere.” It’s a hugely encouraging environment in which to experiment to try stuff, break stuff, fix stuff, and make stuff.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2013/05/monday-qa-nprs-matt-thompson-on-code-switch-covering-race-and-culture-and-developing-a-mobile-audience/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2013/01/rootio-wants-to-take-radio-back-to-the-local-level-in-uganda/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2013/01/rootio-wants-to-take-radio-back-to-the-local-level-in-uganda/#comments Fri, 18 Jan 2013 16:00:59 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=74868 Is it possible to create community radio without a studio or a tower? With his Knight News Challenge project, RootIO, Chris Csikszentmihalyi wants to enable neighborhoods and other small communities to develop a network of radio stations using mobile phones, simple transmitters, and other low-cost tools.

Csikszentmihalyi plans to run a pilot project for RootIO in Uganda, partnering with Uganda Radio Network, UNICEF Uganda, and the UNICEF Innovation Unit to research information needs in the country. RootIO was awarded $200,000 from Knight, which Csikszentmihalyi says will help in the prototyping phase of the project.

“In the back of my mind, I’ve been trying to think of how radio could benefit from things like telephony and networks,” Csikszentmihalyi said.

As proposed, RootIO would be a combination of open-source software and other tools, like portable transmitters and a power source, that would allow people to use their phones to host shows and broadcast information on low-power radio stations. As Csikszentmihalyi describes it, hosting a radio show would be similar to holding a conference call, with the host and guests on different phones, broadcasting out to the greater community.

But the project is far away from that point. Csikszentmihalyi said they’re in discovery mode, where they’ll assess the available technology in communities and see how RootIO can take advantage of existing networks.

As a medium, radio has shown remarkable resilience, enduring both technological shifts and natural disasters. It’s that durability, which becomes apparent in emergencies like the earthquake in Haiti, that makes it a useful platform for delivering vital information to people. But community stations in particular, Csikszentmihalyi said, can play a different role than most radio outlets, through offering intensely local information and offering a tangible connection to place. Local radio, he said, “supports the ability of the community to inform itself and help decisions.”

Radio has a strong presence in Uganda, Csikszentmihalyi said, but as stations grow and become successful, they can shed their community focus as they try to appeal to broader audiences. Local stations would be able to focus on reports for farmers, as well programming for minority language communities, he argued. Using phones as a delivery and production point becomes important because it ties people to a place, but using mobile is also crucial because of its ability to deliver an audience. The network effects that come from mobile devices create a potentially large audience of radio producers and listeners. “There’s something really interesting going on in Africa right now,” Csikszentmihalyi said. Phones potentially make it easier for listeners to participate in shows, using SMS to take part in polls, alert producers to guests, or to send basic advertising to stations, he said.

By some estimates Uganda has 60 percent mobile penetration, which would make phones an ideal device for producing and listening to radio around the country. Phones end up serving multiple purposes, as an access point for banking, or a source for emergency alerts in a community. RootIO could potentially make mobile-based radio a familiar feature to phone users as well.

Aside from figuring out the technology aspects of the project, the other goal will be defining stations and networks. By partnering with the Uganda Radio Network they’ll be able to figure out what resources small stations could use, and whether additional services, like cloud-based production tools, would be needed. Building out or strengthening networks would let producers share content among each other, which would help propagate stations.

Csikszentmihalyi said the network piece is important because it could allow community stations to tap into news programming from elsewhere around the country — or maybe global players like the BBC or Al Jazeera in the future. “For this to work, right away, we have to work with the existing stations to make sure this is useful to them as well,” he said.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2013/01/rootio-wants-to-take-radio-back-to-the-local-level-in-uganda/feed/ 1 https://www.niemanlab.org/2012/07/deutsche-welle-and-how-its-taking-advantage-of-the-mobile-boom-in-africa/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2012/07/deutsche-welle-and-how-its-taking-advantage-of-the-mobile-boom-in-africa/#comments Fri, 20 Jul 2012 16:30:18 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=64401

As the fastest-growing mobile market on the planet, Africa is facing huge opportunities — and distinct challenges — in news dissemination.

By the end of the year, it’s estimated that more than three-quarters of the population will be cell phone subscribers, including in places where literacy rates are low and electricity is unavailable. To better serve that demographic, German media giant Deutsche Welle is using over-the-phone voice technology to deliver news.

No Internet access necessary: Just dial a number to access the program Learning by Ear, an educational show for teenagers that mixes news and explainers having to do with health, politics, the economy, the environment, and social issues.

When the series launched in 2008, it was a radio broadcast. A podcast version followed two years later. Now, Learning by Ear is available on any kind of mobile phone. (Episodes are also available to download for those with smartphones.) Each episode is 10 minutes long, but those minutes cost the user less than talking on the phone would. (The specific lower rates vary by carrier.)

The show’s already available in languages like English, French, Hausa, and Swahili. In the past year, it was introduced in Tanzania and in Niger. The plan is to launch the program in four more nations — Ghana, Nigeria, Rwanda, and Liberia — “within the next weeks,” Naser Schruf, Deutsche Welle’s head of distribution for Africa and the Middle East, told me in an email.

The idea is to help give young people access to information that otherwise may not be available. One ongoing Learning By Ear series on women’s rights, for example, features episodes on topics like female circumcision, sexual harassment, child labor, leadership and “careers for girls.” “They are narrated by African native-speakers which makes it even easier for the audiences to identify,” Schruf said.

Deutsche Welle also gave the show an on-demand feel by enabling people to shift between episodes, as well as pause and later return to the point the show stopped. Essentially, Learning By Ear turns your phone into a remote control for audio, Schruf said. Deutsche Welle is also experimenting with news-by-text distribution.

It launched a Swahili-language pilot project called SMS News Services 18 months ago in Tanzania. The subscription service distributes two to five text-messaged daily news updates, with a focus on international and breaking news, at a cost of 100 Tanzanian shillings per day, or about US$0.06. Sports-related updates will be added in coming months. “For Deutsche Welle, it is crucial to provide Tanzanian info-seekers with the information they need and from a different perspective, that of an international broadcaster,” Schruf said.

Deutsche Welle wouldn’t provide subscription numbers but Schruf says the service is gaining momentum. “In view of the market and its limited resources, we can say that it is a successful story so far.” Many of those who haven’t yet connected to the Internet from desktop computers are now getting access via phones for the first time. The ability to get information to a hard-to-reach population is a victory in and of itself.

At the same time, Schruf acknowledged, Deutsche Welle is still trying to find new ways to facilitate more interaction through mobile phones, and give users “a ‘voice’ in current events,” possibly through features like SMS-based polling and commenting. The bottom line for Deustche Welle is to distribute news and information to the “widest possible audience,” especially in African markets where web penetration is low or non-existent. “Mobile phones have succeeded in an area where the web has found success difficult to come by,” Schruf said.

Photo of a boy in Arusha, Tanzania, listening to his radio by Charles Anderson used under a Creative Commons license.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2012/07/deutsche-welle-and-how-its-taking-advantage-of-the-mobile-boom-in-africa/feed/ 5 https://www.niemanlab.org/2012/07/radio-ambulante-wants-to-drive-narrative-journalism-in-latin-american-radio-via-the-web/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2012/07/radio-ambulante-wants-to-drive-narrative-journalism-in-latin-american-radio-via-the-web/#comments Fri, 13 Jul 2012 16:30:29 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=63042 Latin America has a long tradition of telling stories — and it used to have one of listening to them on the radio, too. For decades, “radionovelas” (radio soap operas) were a huge success across the region, but the rise of TV supplanted radio for broadcast storytelling. Radio is still big in many Spanish-speaking countries, but it’s dominated by music and live talk shows.

Radio Ambulante wants to bring those days back, but with a twist. The project’s goal is to catch the people’s ear with narrative journalism, not fiction. “It is a project to tell stories from all Spanish-speaking countries in Latin America, where people listen to radio every day,” Daniel Alarcón, one of its founders and a renowned writer himself, told me.

In other words, it’s trying to create a product that sounds like This American Life and Radiolab, a format rarely found on radio programming in Latin America.

To change that landscape, Radio Ambulante is betting on the web. It raised some of its initial funds via Kickstarter — $46,000, beating its goal by $6,000 — and it’s crowdsourcing reporters and stories.

“Without the Internet and without all the digital tools available now, Radio Ambulante wouldn’t exist,” Alarcón told me. The web, he explained, allows production to take place across multiple countries while maintaining low costs. “On the distribution side, it is very important also,” he said.

However, the web is not the only channel Radio Ambulante wants to be on. Alarcón’s ultimate ambition is to broadcast its content on radio stations across Latin America. The idea is to build sort of a syndication network of narrative radio journalism. “Latin America is a continent of narrators and storytellers, and for us it was obvious to put such oral tradition together with radio, and adding journalistic rigor to the mix,” he said.

The first episode of Radio Ambulante, which became available May 15, reflects that intention. The 50-minute-long program is dedicated to stories about moving:

• A man relives the 26-day trip he made from Perú to New York, hidden in a ship, in 1959.
• A woman tells the story of a friend returning to Perú, her home country, after years of living in Barcelona, Spain.
• Reza revisits his first day as an immigrant in a North Carolina high school and remembers how saying a forbidden word let him blend in with the crowds.
• Manuel Zelaya, former president of Honduras, describes intimate details of the day in 2009 he was ousted by the army and what happend during his two-year exile.

“Mudanzas” is the first of four shows Radio Ambulante plans to produce this year, one every two months. For now, the content is available at the project’s site or in iTunes.

When it comes to its audience, Radio Ambulante wants one that is “transnational and greographically diverse.” Alarcón emphasized that they are not only aiming at Latinos living in the U.S. “We are going to build an audience along the way. With digital platforms, we don’t need just one big market — we can have small niches in different cities,” he explained. As part of those efforts, Radio Ambulante is exploring distribution in the U.S. and alliances with radio stations in Latin America, Alarcón said. “Not everyone has an iPhone or a phone that allows to download audio. That’s why radio stations are very important for us.”

There’s nothing concrete yet, but Alarcón hopes the second season will be aired in different radio stations throughout Latin America, in 2013. “This year, the priority is focusing on producing high-quality content.”

To ensure the quality desired, Radio Ambulante is making use of a network of contributors, especially with experience in radio. Journalists and producers like NPR correspondent Manadalit del Barco and This American Life contributor Annie Correal advise the editorial team on various things from technical issues to creating the show’s sound aesthetic.

Helping me helping you

Collaboration plays a key role in a small operation like Radio Ambulante, which is based in Oakland, California, and wants to cover all Latin America on a budget. Producers invite story pitches on their site, including those related to upcoming episode themes. (The next episode is about names, so they’re asking for good tales behind aliases or surnames.) A Soundcloud dropbox lets you submit finished audio if you’d like.

Another form of collaboration is working with Latin American magazines specialized in narrative journalism, like Etiqueta Negra (from Perú) and Anfibia (from Argentina). When a reporter needs to travel for a story and there’s not enough budget, Radio Ambulante share expenses with the publication and they run the story adapted to its particular platform. Some stories originally produced for Radio Ambulante will end up having a magazine version, too, and vice versa.

The last but certainly not the least form of collaboration is donations. However, Alarcón is aware that won’t keep the project alive. For 2013, Radio Ambulante plans to produce 10 episodes, which requires an estimated budget of $450,000.

Alarcón knows that the audience has to grow in order to lure investors and commercial partners. Since the project was launched with a pilot in February, the site has had 20,000 visitors. “It’s not our goal,” he acknowledged, “but is it a good start. We want to have thousands of downloads.”

The biggest challenge so far, though, has been to learn and to teach a new way of storytelling. “We are based on long tradition of narrative journalism in Latin America — the small detail is that we are doing it on radio,” Alarcón told me. “We’re driving a new tradition.”

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2012/07/radio-ambulante-wants-to-drive-narrative-journalism-in-latin-american-radio-via-the-web/feed/ 1 https://www.niemanlab.org/2012/07/radio-ambulante-usa-la-web-para-impulsar-el-periodismo-narrativo-en-la-radio-latinoamericana/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2012/07/radio-ambulante-usa-la-web-para-impulsar-el-periodismo-narrativo-en-la-radio-latinoamericana/#comments Fri, 13 Jul 2012 16:29:56 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=65507 Latinoamérica tiene una larga tradición de contar historias y durante mucho tiempo tuvo una de escucharlas por la radio. Durante décadas, las radionovelas fueron un éxito a lo largo de la región, pero su vigencia desapareció con la aparición de la televisión, que suplantó a la radio como medio para contar historias. La radio, sin embargo, sigue siendo muy importante en muchos países de habla hispana, pero su programación está dominada por programas en vivo y música.

Radio Ambulante quiere revivir los viejos tiempos, aunque dándoles un giro. El objetivo del proyecto es captar la atención de la gente con periodismo narrativo, no con ficción. “Es un proyecto para contar historias de todos los países que hablan español en América Latina, donde la gente escucha radio todos los días,” me contó Daniel Alarcón, uno de los fundadores y un reconocido escritor en América Latina y Estados Unidos.

En otras palabras, lo que trata es de crear un producto que suene parecido a This American Life y Radiolab, dos programas muy populares en Estados Unidos y con un estilo difícil de encontrar en la programación radial latinoamericana.

Para cambiar ese panorama, Radio Ambulante está apostando por la web. Parte de su inversión inicial se recaudó a través de Kickstarter -$46.000, superando su meta por $6.000- y está reclutando reporteros e historias a través de una convocatoria abierta a todo público (lo que se conoce en inglés como crowdsourcing).

“Sin Internet y sin todas las herramientas digitales que hay disponibles ahora, Radio Ambulante no existiría,” reconoció Alarcón. La web, me explicó, permite producir desde diferentes países a bajo costo. “Para la distribución, es muy importante también,” dijo.

Eso sí, la web no es el único canal en que quiere transmitir Radio Ambulante. Alarcón sueña con que los programas se escuchen en radioemisoras de toda América Latina. La idea es construir una especie de cadena distribuidora de periodismo narrativo radiofónico. “Latinoamérica es un continente de narradores y cronistas, y para nosotros resulta obvio unir esa tradición oral con la radio, y agregar el rigor periodístico a la mezcla,” aseguró.

El primer episodio de Radio Ambulante, disponible desde el 15 de mayo, refleja esa intención. El programa, que tiene una duración de 50 minutos, está dedicado a historias sobre “mudanzas.”

• Un hombre revive los 26 días que pasó escondido en un barco que lo llevó desde Perú hasta Nueva York, en 1959.
• Una mujer cuenta la historia de una amiga que regresa a Perú, su país natal, después de años de vivir en Barcelona, España.
• Reza reconstruye su primer día como inmigrante en una secundaria de Carolina del Norte y narra cómo decir una palabra prohibida le facilitó pertenecer al “grupo.”
• Manuel Zelaya, expresidente de Honduras, revela detalles íntimos de aquel día en 2009 cuando fue derrocado por el ejército y describe qué pasó durante esos dos años de exilio.

“Mudanzas” es el primero de cuatro programas que Radio Ambulante planea producir este año, uno cada dos meses. Por ahora, el contenido está disponible en el sitio web del proyecto y en iTunes.

Cuando se trata de su audiencia, Radio Ambulante quiere una que sea “transnacional y geográficamente diversa.” Alarcón fue enfático al decir que no están interesados sólo en los Latinos que viven en Estados Unidos. “Vamos a ir construyendo una audiencia. Con las plataformas digitales no necesitamos un solo gran mercado, sino que podemos tener pequeños nichos en diferentes ciudades,” explicó. Como parte de esos esfuerzos, Radio Ambulante está explorando posibilidades de distribución en Estados Unidos, y alianzas con radioemisoras en América Latina, me dijo Alarcón. “No todo el mundo tiene un iPhone o un teléfono celular que permite descargar audio. Por es que las estaciones de radio son muy importantes para nosotros.”

No hay nada concreto todavía, pero Alarcón espera que la segunda temporada se transmita en diferentes estaciones a lo largo y ancho de América Latina, en 2013. “Este año, la prioridad es concentrarnos en generar contenido de alta calidad.”

Para asegurarse la calidad deseada, Radio Ambulante echa mano de una red de colaboradores, especialmente con experiencia en radio. Periodistas y productores como la corresponsal de NPR, Mandalit del Barco, y la colaboradora de This American Life, Annie Correal, asesoran al equipo editorial en diversos temas, desde aspectos técnicos hasta cómo crear la estética del programa.

Ayudame que te ayudo

“Colaboración” es una palabra clave en una operación pequeña como Radio Ambulante, que desde Oakland, California, pretende cubrir toda América Latina con bajo presupuesto. A través de su website, los productores piden a la gente que envíe ideas de historias, incluídas aquellas que se relacionan con los temas de episodios por producir. (El próximo capítulo, por ejemplo, es acerca de “nombres,” así que están pidiendo buenas historias detrás de apodos y apellidos). Un buzón de Soundcloud permite enviar la historia en audio si ustedes quieren.

Otra forma de colaboración es trabajar con revistas latinoamericanas especializadas en periodismo narrativo, como Etiqueta Negra (de Perú) y Anfibia (de Argentina). Cuando un reportero necesita viajar a reportear una historia y no hay suficiente presupuesto, Radio Ambulante comparte los gastos con la publicación y cada una produce la historia en su respectiva plataforma. Algunas historias originalmente producidas para Radio Ambulante terminarán teniendo una versión en revista, también, y viceversa.

La última y claramente no menos importante forma de colaboración son las donaciones. Sin embargo, Alarcón está conciente de que ese dinero no es suficiente para mantener el proyecto vivo. Para 2013, Radio Ambulante planea producir 10 episodios, que requieren un presupuesto estimado en $450.000.

Alarcón sabe que la audiencia debe crecer para lograr atraer inversionistas y socios comerciales. Desde que la iniciativa se lanzó con un piloto en Febrero, el sitio ha registrado 20.000 visitantes. “No es nuestra meta,” reconoce Alarcón, “pero es un buen comienzo. Queremos lograr miles de descargas.”

El mayor reto hasta ahora, sin embargo, ha sido aprender y enseñar una nueva manera de contar historias. “Nosotros nos basamos en una larga tradición de periodismo narrativo en América Latina, el pequeño detalle es que lo estamos haciendo en radio,” me dijo Alarcón. “Estamos impulsando una nueva tradicion.”

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