After the Podcast Gold Rush, Is Audio Too Corporate to Be Cool?

Back in 2005, podcast was the New Oxford American Dictionary’s word of the year. That June, pacing in his signature black turtleneck, Steve Jobs presented podcasts as an integral part of Apple’s future. “What is podcasting?” he asked. “[One way] it’s been described is Wayne’s World for radio, which means that anyone, without much capital investment, can make a podcast, put it on a server, and get a worldwide audience for their radio show.” Jobs declared that it was “the hottest thing going in radio.”

Nearly two decades later, a great deal of podcast strategies have still hinged on the idea that anyone can make a podcast. Though, to streamers, that’s often meant investing in people who already had worldwide audiences but minimal familiarity with the medium. There was a not-too-distant time when every celebrity, their mother, and a former president wanted a podcast, and signed multimillion-dollar deals to do it. But now, although listenership is consistently up year-over-year, and podcasts are still projected as a billion-dollar industry, the once new media darling seems to have lost its cultural cachet. I would know, I’m one of many people who followed the podcast gold rush west. Shortly after Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s blockbuster Oprah interview, I moved to Los Angeles to work as their head of audio. Skip ahead a couple years: Deals have dissolved, priorities have pivoted, shows have been killed, studios have shuttered, hundreds of people have been laid off, and the word podcast itself leaves some of us cringing.

Davy Gardner enjoys aspects of Jobs’s definition of podcasts. “It does remind folks that podcasting is specifically something that many people can do and many people have access to doing,” says Gardner, the head of Tribeca Audio. But when the Tribeca Festival partnered with Audible to include podcasts two years ago, they labeled the category “audio storytelling,” which Gardner says better encompasses “a whole lineage that approached it, like a piece of music or a script, or something that is a sculpture, in a way—a true art form.” Gardner thinks when people use the word podcast, they’re imagining unedited chat shows like The Joe Rogan Experience. “It’s like if people used the word television and their only thought was The View.”

These days, Sam Sanders also can’t quite pin down where his brand fits. “I’ve been in this existential place with titles,” the former political reporter turned podcast host tells me. “I’m not always just doing journalism anymore. I’m doing a lot of personal exposition about my life. I kind of see myself now as ‘I talk for a living.’”

I first heard Sanders’s voice on The NPR Politics Podcast, during the 2016 election. “Hey y’all!” he’d begin every episode, over upbeat patriotic theme music, bringing his Texas lilt to the stiff news coverage. Now, he hosts two podcasts, Vulture’s Into It, where he explores how to find meaning in pop culture; and the Stitcher weekly chat show Vibe Check, which he cohosts with two other Black queer creatives (an anomaly in the overwhelmingly white male podcast space). “If I feel good about what I’m making,” he tells me over dirty martinis, “I don’t care what you call it.”

Even so, Sanders knows what I mean when I say podcasting has lost its patina. “On the one hand, when I think of the podcasts I love, I have only warm feelings for them.” But when he thinks of podcasting as a term, he thinks it is “almost pejorative.”

To Sanders, perhaps podcasts have less of an image problem and more of a management problem. “This is where the conversation around podcasting has gotten effed up,” he says. “The conversation is all about what the people in charge of podcasting want and not enough about what listeners want.” He echoes a sentiment I have heard many podcast professionals share: “What none of us liked watching over the last several years was that it felt like the people who were getting the most power and money to make this stuff seemed to care the least about the craft.”

Drive down Melrose Avenue past the Paramount Pictures lot on any given weekday, and you’ll see that this cheapening of craft is not unique to the podcast sector. Hoards of picketing writers and actors across Hollywood share this strain. “We’ve lost an actual sensitivity to the fact that all of us involved in the making, and in the listening, are humans. Actual humans, with actual needs and wants,” he says. Sanders, whose main beat is dissecting our moment through a cultural lens, punctuated this point, looking me in the eyes across our shared booth. “It’s a privilege that I get to be a part of people’s lives. I don’t want to look at this work as just a business. It’s a service and a privilege. People listen to me, and take me with them in the most intimate parts of their day. What an honor.”

Like Sanders, my path into podcasts has its roots in public radio. And like many people who found a love for podcasts, the legendary host Ira Glass was responsible for my audio awakening. Glass’s voice is its own iconic brand. Close your eyes and you can probably hear it in your head: even-keeled, a bit nasally, equal parts measured and fluid, “From WBEZ Chicago, it’s This American Life. I’m Ira Glass.”

Yet Glass winces at his own name. “At some point I just have to acknowledge, I guess that’s my name. And in the same way, the name of our show, This American Life, I’ve never been crazy about,” he says. “But when you do something for a couple of decades, then it just becomes your name. It sticks, you know?”

“From the very beginning, This American Life has been a documentary show, but we never say the word documentary on it, because I don’t think calling the show a documentary helps you find an audience,” he adds. He summed up his job this way: “I make stories. I’m a journalist in the most traditional way, in that you go out and talk to people and write down what they say. We choose the best quotes, we put them in order.”

His show had already been airing for about a decade when the word podcast first entered the lexicon. At the time, he thought it was “kind of silly.” But like his own name, he thinks it just sticks with you. Still, he is curious to know some of the alternatives on the table. I tell him about audio storytelling.

“Can we take that apart for a second quickly?” he asks, as if I were a guest on his show. “Nobody wants to be called a storyteller. That’s not a job for an adult. A storyteller—I say with respect to the people who do this—it’s the person who comes in and talks to the kindergarten class,” he chortles. “Sometimes people write stories about our show and I get called a storyteller. And I just think, That’s not my job.”

That’s how I feel about podcast. It sounds like a basement hobby that a bunch of reality-TV executives sold out to oversaturated influencers as last season’s trendy toy. Who would be excited about funding that medium, now that the bubble has burst?

But Glass, a seasoned editor, suggests my thesis is misguided, maybe even banal. He says podcasts are simply having a revenue recession, that we’re all just “getting back to normal life.” “What you’re describing is you just feel like it’s uncool now,” he jabs at me. “And can I say, it doesn’t matter? I worked in public broadcasting from the time I was 19, and before that I did magic tricks at kids’ parties,” he says. “All you can do as somebody who makes stuff is just try to make something that’s actually interesting enough that another person wants to hear it.”

“It doesn’t matter to me if the idea of podcasts is uncool or the word podcast is uncool. Leave the cool out of it, Rebecca,” he continues. I flinched at the sound of my own name. Ira Glass—the Ira Glass—was holding up a mirror of where podcasts had taken me—and the reflection was unflattering. As we hang up, I admit that I used to have a lot more fun making audio before anybody cared. “So, your dream is coming true,” Ira Glass shrugs, “it’s going back to not being cool.”

That leaves me somewhere back at the beginning. I’m not sure if podcasts do indeed have a perception problem, or if we’re seeing a plain dollars-and-cents market correction, or if I’ve picked a perfectly neutral term like podcast to fuel my own existential crisis and the industry will restabilize tomorrow. But today, I started working on a story in the most traditional way: I went out and talked to people, writing down what they said, choosing the best quotes and putting them in order. As somebody who makes stuff, I hope that it’s actually interesting enough that another person wants to hear it—and that I can pay my rent doing it. I guess you can call that whatever you want.