Welcome to Continuous Wave, your home for essays, histories, and reflections on modern media from the POV of audio — a project of story editor Julia Barton.
The spirit of ‘76
Once there was a place on Independence Mall in Philadelphia known as the Living History Center, built for the US Bicentennial in 1976. I never visited the museum, but much later, I worked in its ruins.
When I showed up for my first day of work at WHYY in the late 1990s, the local NPR/PBS combo-affiliate station was building itself a new headquarters atop the main site of the Living History Center. While the new facilities got built, the radio side of the company remained housed in the museum’s former cafeteria. I entered the station from the back parking lot through a plywood construction tunnel. The news director greeted me in the lobby (a plywood vestibule) and brought me to a warren of rooms and studios crammed with desks, chunky computers, and reel-to-reel machines.
Rancid Chinese-takeout and cheesesteak wrappers overflowed the trash bins. Everyone bustled past one another, ripping scripts off the dot-matrix printer, rushing them to the control room for the afternoon newscast. Terry Gross’s office sat pristine and remote at the end of a narrow corridor. But even Fresh Air’s hallways were piled with tape reels in boxes. Many reels did not even have boxes, just a piece of paper with the famous interviewee’s name in Sharpie. I’d started in radio at a sleepy Iowa university station, and this was not the vision of glamor I imagined at a major-market house of broadcasting.
Soon I learned to decode the station’s chaos and even enjoy it. When we did marathon coverage of local election returns, it was all hands on deck as we worked together into the night, calling races on air and slapping high-fives in the hall.
But for every fun late night, there were a dozen dreary ones cutting tape for the morning newscast. When the station started to digitize, things got worse as software and equipment constantly crashed. There was a lot of frustration and grumbling. I had once dreamed of reporting powerful stories for the network, but we hardly even had time for mediocre features. The local news hole emptied itself daily and needed to be refilled with voices and more voices.
At the time, I blamed the newsroom’s woes on WHYY’s bosses for understaffing the place — which, of course they did. But now I better understand the cognitive dissonance baked into all production, both broadcast and podcast. It takes hours and hours of effort to produce a thing that dissolves in an instant. “For air” is not a metaphor — it is an actual description of the work. Everything we make = nothing but air.
For every three who start
I bring all this up because of a new report called The Creators: Understanding the Modern Podcast Creator Landscape. It was just released by the audio and podcasting industry group Sounds Profitable. The report’s author, audience research guru Tom Webster (podcasting’s own Paul Lazarsfeld, you might say) ran a survey of more than 5000 podcast consumers, with a focus on those who had tried making podcasts themselves. What he found is that among those who try creating, there’s also a fair amount of quitting.