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Radio Stars to Video: Bite Me
Can we learn from the warnings of the past?
Julia Barton
April 17, 2025
Thanks to all who voted in my poll last week! The results confirmed what I suspected was on your minds: video.
I just got back from Podcast Movement in Chicago, where I smuggled in a panel with media historian and critic Neil Verma (more on that convo next week). Everything at Podcast Movement this year seemed designed to create excitement and anxiety about video. First the news, which is not so new, that more people than ever are finding and consuming media, including podcasts, via YouTube. There was plenty of agonizing over whether this presages the death of audio-first listening, or whether video on Spotify is a scam. And what are we even making anymore? “If it works with your eyes closed, it’s a podcast,” one keynote speaker declared, which is actually not a bad way to put it. The question is who gets to decide “if it works,” and how much they actually care.
I agree with those who say we have to meet audiences where they are. But there’s a difference between accessing stuff on smart TVs and YouTube because it’s visual, or accessing stuff on smart TVs and YouTube because they have become convenient media plumbing systems. I enjoy TV and reels and movies, but I don’t pretend to know how to make them well. I do know that video’s production needs are different than audio’s, especially when you get into the details of editing human speech. If you edit for the ear, you are not editing for the eye — not without extra labor and the skills that go with that. So full pods-as-vids face two editorial strategies: 1) basically no editing (static, as-live mic chats, or a static image over audio) or 2) the creation of an extra, hybrid version for video. See for example, the excellent treatment GBH News has given The Big Dig and Scratch and Win on YouTube. They prioritized the audio version by Ian Coss and his team. Thanks no doubt to being the beating heart of public television, GBH created something great with skillful use of B-roll and the same TV archives as the podcast. Respect!
There is one other strategy, but it is not an audio strategy. You become a video-first show. That is also OK, but you don’t need to call yourself a podcast anymore. If you think you can have it both ways, and make a show that’s equally great for listeners and viewers, you are fooling yourself.
How do I know? Because US audio producers have lived through this before, in the late 1940s and early 50s, when TV hit network radio like the recently-deployed atom bomb. The advertising market for radio cratered, shows were canceled or remade as TV-only, and the entire broadcasting live-programming audio infrastructure fell apart — all in the course of about five years.
Three things struck me as I read about this blow to US network radio in the early 1950s:
It wasn’t that sudden. Networks had been investing in TV technology for decades, promising yet failing to deliver on “the next big thing” for so long that audio producers basically ignored the threat.
Once those networks had the chance, they used profits from radio (and talent and formats) to turbocharge the quick rise of television.
Massive disruption can sometimes be liberating? But man, people were bitter.
I find bitterness a bracing tonic, so let’s start with that. You can find it aplenty in Michael C. Keith’s Talking Radio: An Oral History of American Radio in the Television Age (2000). The book is a running commentary by some of the best radio reporters, performers and scriptwriters about this era of turmoil, which actually started in the late 1940s and honestly, is still ongoing (hej! Spotify).
“Television put a lot of people out of work. The art of radio was put on permanent hiatus, too, when TV came along. The environment that had been so nurturing…was ruined. It was vanquished by the dull blue flickering light.”
“There were never couch potatoes in radio, only television. TV feeds the viewer everything. There is no need to engage the mind. Radio piqued the imagination. It was far more challenging and full of discovery.”
“I worked like hell and loved every minute of it, but when television began to glow in living rooms and radio was ditched, it felt to me and many of my colleagues as though we’d been equipped with marvelous horses to ride and had ridden them far and fast, and then suddenly they were shot out from under us.”
The photo-radio stepchild
I had no idea how much radio and television actually developed in tandem. Back in 1926, David Sarnoff, the hard-driving head of Radio Corporation of America, talked about nascent “photo-radio” technology in an interview with (future broadcasting queen) Mary Margaret McBride (Saturday Evening Post, 97). Just a few months later, Sarnoff would establish the first US radio network, NBC.
In 1939, Sarnoff kicked off NBC’s first TV broadcasts at the World’s Fair in Queens, NY. But the network’s TV programming lasted only two hours a day, and almost no one owned a set to receive it. Despite the corporate R&D love, television had a lot going against it: the production studios required extremely bright, hot lights that made performance a misery. Early TV consoles were bulky and expensive, yet there wasn’t much to watch on them.
Still, more and more markets began to get TV stations, until World War II hit and the medium came to a standstill. After the war, the FCC received such a flood of license applications that it paused the spread of TV until it could sort out this new part of the spectrum. In the meantime, radio networks were turning huge profits, so they decided to plough that back into TV production while also claiming a tax write-off. “Nobody realized that the radio networks were indeed financing their own burial,” as LeRoy Bannerman put it in Talking Radio (6).
Dead duck walking
Back in 1948, Norman Corwin — then arguably the most famous US writer for radio — was still sanguine and sarcastic about television as an artform.
“On the day that the owners and operators of television announce they are investing a reasonable percentage of their budget in cultural and artistic exploration, I will gladly exchange my present state of aloofness for the status of a man who can be had,” he wrote in Theatre Arts (33). Corwin predicted television wouldn’t be much of a thing, except for live event coverage, for another ten years. His projection was way off.
Back when radio was twee?
By 1950, the storm clouds were already on the horizon. “Radio was never more than a transitional stage, a step towards television,” director and playwright John Houseman wrote in Harper's Magazine. Then he prophesied:
“It is likely to continue fulfilling a useful, though minor, function as a carrier of music and a disseminator of cultural items not appreciably enhanced by the addition of sight. In the major fields of entertainment, including news and drama, radio is almost certainly a dead duck.”
Big Radio produced some great programs in its final years: NBC’s The Big Show, hosted by Tallulah Bankhead; the weird duo Bob and Ray on CBS. Future media historian Erik Barnouw got to produce a series of public health dramas and songs aimed at the treatment and prevention of venereal disease.
But it was clear by 1953 that all the action and money was migrating out of radio as Americans rushed to buy sets to watch all the new shows, and advertisers followed suit. RCA was winning: it both owned TV tech patents and NBC. CBS’s radio stars found they could endure the make-up and lights for all the extra cash, and they were joined on the fame-train by newcomers like Lucille Ball.
Let me clear: network radio was, by this point, starting to get stagnant, not to mention full of incessant, intrusive ads. It also used the cover of audio to get away with gross things. Leaders in the NAACP had long campaigned against the popular minstrel comedy Amos n Andy, performed for decades by two white men. That show didn’t last two years on television, even with a Black cast. Much of radio’s stock-in-trade vaudeville humor didn’t hold up as well on camera (though sexism certainly thrived).
Nor did radio die in the 1950s — it just changed. Freed from the network structure and its emphasis on live programs, “the medium turned to more local and more specialized audiences. And one of the fastest growing and most loyal audiences was teenagers,” as Susan J. Douglas writes (Listening In, 17). Radio, especially on new stereo FM frequencies, became the beating heart of popular American music.
A requiem
As a widespread force for the spoken word and ideas, however, radio has suffered an immense decline from its height during World War II. And I would argue it’s barely started to recover, and that all of today’s audio programs combined — all of public media, talk-radio and spoken-word podcasting and audiobooks — still wield just a fraction of the cultural power radio once had in this country. Unlike early radio, podcasts are also now up against 75 years of consumption habits shaped by television. It was only a matter of time before the Tube started to suck us back in.
Were he in Chicago at Podcast Movement, listening to us twist our dials over video strategies, Arch Oboler would have had a good laugh. The sci-fi and horror king of radio drama is one voice in the audio vault who really got it, and early on. In an epilogue to a 1945 collection of his scripts, Oboler started talking about radio in the past tense, back when TV was still only a grumble of indigestion.
“Blind” broadcasting that was only heard was an artform… The listener gave of himself as he listened; in his mind he built up pictures evoked by the sounds of words and effects, and orchestral accompaniment. But with television, the visual factor will become the predominant one; the listener will see only what he sees…. once again, the listener will become primarily a passive spectator.
This then is a requiem, read prematurely, of course, with the deceased [who is] even at this moment jingling for Super-bread and rhyming for Super-cigarettes, and cajoling with comedian and orchestra and chorus for Super-soap. But the moving electronic rays are writing the scroll, so chant a hymn in honor of the dead. Yes, a requiem to broadcasting as we knew it, that went its blind way, that made its service to the public secondary to its balance sheet — yet had within it the stimulus for active listening, the creative participation of all with the participation of one.
Radio did this to itself, Oboler warns us. It did not value the imaginative bonds it forged with listeners — nor the craft, invented over decades by its writers and producers and engineers, of speaking to and entertaining people who cannot see you. Once the usefulness of that craft had (allegedly) expired, the big networks tossed it, and its audience, in the trash. The bitterness of radio’s first generation of creatives comes from the lack of effort to keep both forms strong and alive.
That’s the lesson we need to take from the past. Because, as the creepy voice at the top of Oboler’s program Lights Out whispers, “It…is…later…than…you…think.”
What are your thoughts on the vid-pod convergence? Have you made it work? Leave a
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