The Routledge Companion to Radio and Podcast Studies

Mia Lindgren, Jason Loviglio, Mia Lindgren, Jason Loviglio

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000586701
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Journalismus

This comprehensive companion is a much-needed reference source for the expanding field of radio, audio, and podcast study, taking readers through a diverse range of essays examining the core questions and key debates surrounding radio practices, technologies, industries, policies, resources, histories, and relationships with audiences.

Drawing together original essays from well-established and emerging scholars to conceptualize this multidisciplinary field, this book's global perspective acknowledges radio's enduring affinity with the local, historical relationship to the national, and its unpredictably transnational reach. In its capacious understanding of what constitutes radio, this collection also recognizes the latent time-and-space shifting possibilities of radio broadcasting, and of the myriad ways for audio to come to us 'live.' Chapters on terrestrial radio mingle with studies of podcasts and streaming audio, emphasizing continuities and innovations in form and content, delivery and reception, production cultures and aesthetics, reminding us that neither 'radio' nor 'podcasting' should be approached as static objects of analysis but rather as mutually constituting cultural forms.

This cutting-edge and vibrant companion provides a rich resource for scholars and students of history, art theory, industry studies, journalism, media and communication, cultural studies, feminist analysis, and postcolonial studies.

Chapter 42 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Part IUnderstanding radio and podcasting

1But is it radio?New forms and voices in the audio private sphere

Michele Hilmes

DOI: 10.4324/9781003002185-3

Broadcast radio presented the world with a wide range of new aural experiences, as Rudolf Arnheim noted in 1933 in his book Radio: The Art of Sound, the first scholarly work attempting to assess radio as an expressive form.¹ Detaching sound from its source and obscuring its origins, projecting it over previously unthinkable distances yet addressing the listener intimately, extending the boundaries of both factual and fictional storytelling into nearly endless serialization, intruding into politics, education, arts, and everyday life, radio as a medium was as eagerly embraced as it was resisted and debated, through a century-long series of technological, institutional, and cultural shifts.

From live to recorded, from primarily local to national and global, from centre stage in the world’s public venues and living rooms to transformation by television into a music-based medium everywhere on the periphery, radio adapted and changed. It is hard to think of another major cultural form that has gone through a greater series of awkward technological and social evolutions than radio. Beginning as a medium almost entirely live – transmitting a speaker’s voice into a listening ear at the same moment in time, no matter how many time zones crossed – the portion of the radio schedule recorded, time-shifted, and repeated began to increase in the late 1930s and accelerated dramatically in the 1970s and 1980s. But sound recording, across the fields of music, spoken word, and actuality or documentary recording, itself presented enormous challenges, morphing laboriously over the decades through multiple non-compatible technologies – wax discs, shellac discs, steel tape, coated film, reel-to-reel magnetic tape, vinyl discs, cartridges, cassettes, CDs – all of them intrinsically ‘non-eye-readable’ (to use an archivist’s term) and thus presenting this fleeting, invisible, ephemeral medium with a unique opportunity to make its own past inaccessible, difficult to research, and easy to forget. Television’s rise to dominance in the household and in the culture merely put the icing on the invisibility cake and provides a strong contrast to radio’s struggles to persist, since even much of TV’s live period was captured on film while videotape remained a relatively stable medium until the advent of digital recording.

With the advancement of digital technologies in the late 1990s, another shift began that has taken sound in sometimes unrecognizable directions, many of which stretch our previous understandings of ‘radio’ into previously unimaginable forms. As I have argued elsewhere, in the early 2000s radio became a screen medium, for the first time in its life (Hilmes, 2013). Now tied to a visual, material platform that could be accessed at any time from any place, radio could be stored, preserved, played multiple times, and even expand its once single audio stream into many different forms: visual materials, graphics, background information, outtakes, discussion, and exchange. And, as of 2004, the immensely innovative realm of podcasting began to break open radio’s traditionally restrictive institutional structures even as it expanded creative and participatory possibilities. Radio as a ‘live,’ regulated broadcast medium, accessible via our radio dials and streamed over the air (and through the wires) as it occurs, of course still exists and has not only survived but grown in influence and reach as a medium, with public radio audiences growing in the US and elsewhere and community radio strong in countries around the world. But it now inevitably does this in dialogue with the clamorous free-for-all that is podcasting, which has opened up new possibilities as well as reviving and expanding old ones.

This chapter’s main focus is the sound documentary, a genre of radio soundwork that gained a strong presence on radio in its earlier decades, fell into obscurity (especially in the US) in the second half of the twentieth century, but has been revitalized in the digital era in new, expanded, and sometimes strange forms. Along with discussing the innovations prompted by the capacities of digital production and reception by focusing on a few key shows, this chapter will also discuss emerging players in the soundwork field and their relationships with the existing radio industry. A brief overview of recent revivals in radio drama and spoken word/poetry will point towards other innovations prompted by podcasting and digital platforms. Can the now-century-old term ‘radio’ encompass all these challenges? I argue that it can, and that today’s innovative soundwork revolution has allowed radio to move in the rich and productive directions it has been waiting for all its life.²

Sound documentary

Sound has always had a complicated relationship to documentary reality. First coined to designate the astonishing new realism of the moving picture, especially after the advent of sound-on-film, the term ‘documentary’ was very slow to be applied to radio production.³ Early radio, bound to the studio by the need to broadcast live, innovated many speech-based forms of factuality: talks, interviews, discussions, eye-witness reports, even in-studio re-enactments of live events. But field recording – capturing and transmitting the voices and experiences of ordinary people, outside the studio, in their own environments – remained largely out of reach. Sound recording technologies were bulky, unreliable, and difficult to edit until the advent of magnetic tape recording after the Second World War. Though pioneers at the BBC in the UK, and a few in the US at the Library of Congress and New York City’s station WNYC, attempted in the 1930s to take radio out of the studio and onto the streets, far more prevalent was the dramatized performance of reality, emblematized by the popular March of Time news program brought to the air by Time Magazine in 1932. Its fifteen-minute re-creations of actual events were immensely popular with audiences but alarmed members of the Roosevelt administration, who worried that the show’s talented mimicry of real-life figures could cause serious confusion; NBC was forced to suspend its dramatic impersonations of the President and other key officials.

During the war years, similar techniques were brought to morale-building programs featuring dramatized accounts of real-life heroism at home and abroad. A new type of creative treatment of reality arose, the ‘radio feature.’ Norman Corwin, ‘radio’s poet laureate,’ may be the best-known American practitioner of this form. Combining factual elements with poetry, soaring music, and dramatized scenes from American history, Corwin’s immensely influential feature production ‘We Hold These Truths’ was broadcast over all three networks following Pearl Harbor, as was his equally well-received 1945 feature ‘On a Note of Triumph,’ celebrating victory over Nazi Germany.

As Mathew Ehrlick argues (2011), the immediate post-war period represents a kind of golden age of the radio documentary in the US, with major, multi-episode works commissioned and broadcast by all three major US networks, including Corwin (One World Flight), Edward R. Murrow (See it Now), Erik Barnouw (VD: The Conspiracy of Silence), Robert Lewis Shayon (The Eagle’s Brood), and Ruth Ashton (The Sunny Side of the Atom). Other notable independent series took on topics too controversial for the networks, such as Richard Durham’s Destination Freedom and, a bit later and even more independently, Langston Hughes’ The Negro in America, produced by the BBC.

Yet the development of magnetic tape recording during this same period created a counter-momentum for a new kind of audio documentary, taken out of the studio and into the field, rejecting the dramatized feature form in favour of a new, buttoned-down style that emphasized ‘what is said, rather than over-riding the voice with music or with sound effects of any kind’ (Murrow, 1947, p. 380). ‘Now the real reporter was the tape recorder gathering reality sound, to which narration as needed could be added,’ historian Lawrence Lichty writes. By 1960 attention had shifted to the development of televisual documentary techniques while radio turned to music formats, shunting sound documentaries to the margins of the dial and of public consciousness. As Lichty concludes, writing in the early 2000s, ‘there are now few stations where documentaries can still be heard’ (Lichty 2004, p. 476).

By the time Lichty made that observation, however, things had already begun to change. The 1990s brought a wider proliferation of programs and producing organizations to the American public radio universe, leading to the debut of a number of innovative programs on public radio stations that took the radio documentary in a new direction. This American Life and Radiolab are often cited as key to this movement, splitting the difference between the drama of the radio feature and the dry factuality of radio news through creative but factual storytelling. Soon after, as digital radio and podcasting opened up the radio universe in the late 1990s and early 2000s, ‘reality radio’ (to use John Biewen’s phrase) (Biewen and Dilworth, 2017) – transformed by new digitally-enabled storytelling strategies – emerged as one of the most consistently popular and award-winning genres (Bottomley, 2020). Many existing radio factuality programs found new audiences and new acclaim via podcast. But it was the breakout success of Serial in 2014 (produced by the This American Life team) that sealed the trend; it became the first born-podcast program to win a Peabody Award and to put the long-form serialized podcast documentary on the map, around the world. In some ways very different from traditional radio – independently produced, downloaded not broadcast, infinitely time-shiftable, not tied to broadcast schedule or content restrictions – it was immediately recognized as a new form of radio, extending the documentary form into new directions. What accounts for this phenomenon? What did podcasting bring to the soundwork scene that audiences around the world immediately perceived as something compellingly new?

Secrets and whispers

Radio has long been known as an ‘intimate’ medium; its ability to speak as if one-to-one, to enter the private space of the home, to let the individual imagination create its meanings, has been heralded by early audiences and by recent scholars alike. Of course, broadcast radio’s intimacy was in fact structured and contained by its publicness as an institution; its programs were built for a mass audience, listening simultaneously; and its range of content was correspondingly constricted by considerations of the larger public taste. Podcasting’s heightened intimacy as a medium has been much discussed, not simply as a style or a mode of address but as a broadening of the scope of soundwork to encourage a range of possibilities never fully represented on the airwaves, especially in the realm of the deeply personal, such as sexuality and intimate relationships, and highly taste-specific, such as fandoms, niche interests, and comedy (Spinelli and Dann, 2019).

But I argue that podcasting’s intimacy is based on something truly unique to this digital aural medium: its unprecedented enablement of privacy, a term that implies not only a relationship between hosts, guests, and listeners but between the personal and the public sphere. In its ability to speak in privacy – unseen, to an unseen audience – podcasting might be compared to the church confessional, traditionally a space where intimate details of life are revealed in whispers, in a darkened cubicle that obscures its occupants from each other and protects the identities of the individuals on both sides of the barrier. The experience of listening to certain kinds of podcasts recreates some aspects of this relationship. We as listeners hear deeply personal revelations of experiences, feelings, hopes, and fears of people whose names we may learn but who remain invisible and hidden from us, just as we are from them. The experience on both sides is guided by an invisible interlocutor who teases out the stories, often dealing with topics that are not only intimate but marked ...