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 term “broadcasting,” as you probably know, was borrowed more than a century ago from broadcast seeding, an agricultural method of scattering mixed seeds on a prepared field rather than planting them in the ground.
If you think of words and music as seeds, broadcast really does work as a metaphor. Sounds go out into the ether, some are heard, and a very few take hold and generate meaning in the minds of listeners.
With podcasting, we take packets of seeds and hide them deep within an RSS feed or streaming service, hoping sunlight (audience) will find them.
After a year of publishing this newsletter, I can compare notes between the media ecosystem I know best and newslettering. As I’ll get into below, some of energy around newslettering reminds me of podcasting more than a decade ago. But the two worlds are different in significant ways.
First, let me say that I really love writing this newsletter and reading many others. Most days, my inbox is filled with pieces that are well-reported, original, and/or useful. It’s amazing so many people are doing this work day in and day out, and we should all support the writers that we can.
I’m a member of Project C, a community of independent newsletter writers, and I’ve learned so much from this crowd. Much of what I’ve figured out is thanks to them.
To extend the agricultural metaphor of broadcasting, publishing a newsletter is more akin to hydroponics, a technique the USDA defines as “growing plants using a water-based nutrient solution rather than soil [but] an aggregate substrate, or growing media.” (media!)
Let me try to explain what I mean.