The Millennial Medium: The Interpretive Community of Early Podcast Professionals

Abstract

Through evidence gathered from sixteen interviews with producers and businesspeople in the podcast industry, this paper argues that the professionals that populated the early phase of the formalizing podcasting scene made up an interpretive community defined, in part, by their appreciation for, and experiences with, public radio. I chart how this interpretive community cast themselves against dominant public radio paradigms when they moved into podcasting, while also retaining much of public radio’s ethos, and I discuss what the central preoccupations of this interpretive community were. I assert that audio broadcasting as understood and practiced within the interpretive community is a particularly millennial medium, influenced by the norms of digital communication. And I make claims about how this is foundational to understanding podcasting’s political and aesthetic predispositions. Ultimately, this argument advances and nuances one connection between public radio and podcasting using qualitative interview data.

Infotainers, Mediators, or Watchdogs? Mapping the Field of News Podcasters and Their Role Conceptions in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland

“…Despite their initial appearance in the early 2000s (Bottomley 2015), podcasts have particularly gained prominence since 2014, emerging as the dominant form of audio content. At this point, media and journalism, beyond the early pioneers from the United States and Great Britain, also began to experiment with podcasts as a new innovative format in the field of audio (Körner and Graßl 2024;Laughlin 2023;Wild and Katzenberger 2021) and to use the potential of podcasts as a new distribution channel for news in the digital ecosystem (Leoz-Aizpuru and Pedrero-Esteban 2022; Legorburu et al 2021;Lindgren and Loviglio 2022). By now, podcasts have not only complemented already existing mass media (Lindgren 2016) but have become a "disruptive technology" in the context of information distribution via audio (Berry 2015), as Nee and Santana (2022) describe in the context of the "emergence of news podcasts".…”