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.

If you had anything to do with podcasts a decade or more ago, at their frothy peak of hype in the US, you might have had an encounter like the one I’m about to describe. My encounter happened in 2017, following the successful second season of Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History, a show I freelance edited at the time.

Memories of the meeting are a bit hazy, like the foggy day in San Francisco when it occurred. The gentleman worked with venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, and he had reached out about making a podcast series on the history of data. 

He’d just flown in that morning from meetings in some faraway place. He wanted to know how many people, at a minimum, it took to make a show about big ideas. He wanted to know what it cost. Warning him I didn’t really know the big picture, I gave him my best estimate.

“That seems like a lot,” he said.

I asked him more about the format of the show he envisioned. As I recall, he said that he (or maybe one of his bosses?) had a lot of ideas and observations, so he thought he could record them, and that would be the basis of the show. No script, just off the cuff brilliance.

Our meeting wasn’t going well. I tried for a beat to explain the challenges of making what basically sounded like a series of voice memos into a successful podcast. But he wasn’t interested. 

He confessed that he had already approached some production companies for estimates and was shocked at the quotes they gave him. It seemed like a scam, he complained — and was disappointed I didn’t share his view that more zeroes should come off the price tag.

Most of us who came from the nonprofit public-radio world were never versed in what you might call the business arts. It’s only after years of observation that I figured out one should redirect or deflect questions about numbers until more trust has developed, and the potential client understands the realities of the profession they’d like to make use of. This process takes patience and skill.  

A few savvy producers understood that early on and are now rich. The rest of us could have used some help. Industry rate guides are great, and I refer to them often. But I’m talking about psychological help: when it comes to matters of money, you want to be propped up by something impressive; by a potent chunk of external validation just casually displayed. 

You want Fortune Magazine, May 1938.

This bad boy, like all the Henry Luce-published Fortunes of its heyday, was printed on luscious paper stock and packed with original artwork and photography. Much of the May 1938 issue is dedicated to the US radio industry. The articles emphasize the modern coolness of radio production and the jargon of the studio. Mainly they emphasize the bottom line, that making radio is expensive, but also profitable.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of this kind of industry publicity. The monthly Fortune got its start at the onset of the Great Depression, in 1930, at the cost of a dollar an issue — the equivalent of $19 today. And it was certainly worth the price, if you were one of the few who could afford it. 

The issue I ordered (for a reasonable fished-from-grandpa’s-garage eBay price) weighs in at 970 grams on the kitchen scale — almost a kilo. It’s fortunate — so to speak — that the publication’s thickness makes it hard to roll up and whack a person, because it could do some damage.

And so, the editors want you to know, would your bill for a network hit in 1938.

Ten thousand dollars in 1938, factoring for inflation, is equal to approximately $234,000 today. And that’s not counting the fee paid directly to the network for time on its schedule. The networks could demand that much because radio worked: it enthralled the nation by delivering mass entertainment to people’s homes for free, bringing them dramas and jokes and music and news.

But there were only 24 hours in the day, and fewer hours still when most people listened. The big networks, NBC and CBS, sat atop those hours collecting higher and higher tolls every year. Sponsors did not just buy ad spots back then — they had to shoulder the entire cost of the program that bore their name.

The most expensive show that Fortune lists is the Chase & Sanborn Hour, hosted by comedian Edgar Bergen and — winking to the audio medium — a ventriloquist dummy in a top hat named Charlie McCarthy. The show’s total weekly cost including network fees was $35,900: in today’s money, its food-industry sponsor was shelling out $840,755 per week for brand awareness.

Keep in mind that network radio at this time was entirely live, so each show was basically one-and-done. If performances were recorded, that was only for posterity and the sponsor’s library. There was no syndication, though sponsors could and did sell radio-related merch.

The Fortune article starts with a tongue-in-cheek emblematic scenario that’s incredible once you understand the numbers involved. A toothbrush manufacturer wants to sponsor primetime network entertainment as a way to make a dent in the market. The hapless toothbrush guy is talked by his advertising agency into approving ever more costly radio bills starting with $2000 weekly (almost $47,000 today) for the show’s star talent; and $1000 for two scriptwriters. Then there are supporting comic actors, a sound-effects team, and musicians: an 18-piece orchestra plus conductor. Toothbrush guy also needs to pay for a program director and an announcer to set up the show and shill the sponsor’s brand. In the end, with the network fees, he’s paying close to $13,000 ($304K+) a week for a show he doesn’t really like — but he says nothing and signs all the checks, earning the moniker “Fairy Godfather.”

Talk about good times! Fortune estimated that US broadcasting was worth in aggregate about $140 million in 1938 money — with a net profit yearly of $28 million across the networks and 700+ commercial stations. That’s the equivalent of more than half a billion dollars today, which wasn’t bad for a new industry that emerged during a long-running depression.

For more concrete answers to the question of money for radio production back in the day, I recommend Erik Barnouw’s Handbook of Radio Writing. Barnouw, whom I wrote about here, had been a radio program director for various ad agencies but came to hate the work. He quit and started teaching at Columbia, then went on to write some foundational histories of American broadcasting. He also became head of the Radio Writers Guild for a time.

Barnouw’s Handbook, published in 1939 when he was fresh out of the radio business, starts off with the practical stuff right away: how much can a writer make in this industry?

He warns his readers that contract gigs are only for proven, experienced writers who know how to churn out good scripts week after week. And the pay range is huge.

When I first encountered Barnouw’s charts, I had a sinking feeling. I could easily imagine a first-time client being shocked by the top end of the figure he cites for serialized scripts. And I mean shocked by the number as printed in 1939, not adjusted for inflation.

Of course, there are big differences between reported, nonfiction podcasts and original radio dramas. But at their cores, both media require a real fluency in writing for the ear and telling complex stories on deadline.

The prospect today that a top-notch ghostwriter could earn $1250 per episode? OK, at least it’s four digits — maybe try get that figure higher. But in 1939, that figure was the equivalent of twenty-nine thousand frickin dollars.

Here’s another way of putting all this: the cost expectations for audio production are much lower now than they were during the Great Depression. If anyone reading this today is getting $29K per episode as off-mic production talent, please click the button below — I want to meet you.

What Fortune did so well, behind all its talk of numbers and money, was sell dreams to people in positions to pay for them. In May 1938, that dream was to partake in the glamor and power of radio.

Commercial network radio would go on to dominate mass media in the US for another ten years after this issue came out. By the late 1940s, the network bosses had developed television, regulators got in line, and the talent (those that could) left radio behind. Much of the US dial became the province of DJs, right-wing talk and nonprofit public media.

But it’s still important to remember that people once paid big money for talent in radio, and not just to make more money. People paid because they wanted access to a mystical power only audio had to offer.

Fortune commissioned Mexican-American artist Miguel Covarrubias to bring that part of the story home without words. His work Radio Talent, spread across two pages, is the real reason why I sought out this issue. The reporting on radio and money was just a bonus. 

Covarrubias captures how strange it is that all these voices — the actors, the announcers, the singers, the comedians, the playwrights, the President — crowd out of the sky and into our ears. I’m impressed that a business magazine commissioned such a freaky image.

It was an old friend from high school, Anthony McSpadden — now broadcast director at Austin’s classical station KMFA — who posted an image of Radio Talent on my Facebook feed a while back. 

“I have a print hanging in my studio at home,” he wrote. “Absolutely love it.”

I should find out what it costs to get my copy framed. And not wince at the quote.