Words are Waves

I have questions

“Thoughts are things,” the influential American minister and motivational speaker Norman Vincent Peale declared in the recorded version of his best-selling 1952 book “The Power of Positive Thinking.” 

I don’t know if thoughts are things. But it does sometimes seem that certain decisions in the past act like things, a boulder dropped in the stream of history that alters its course. Perhaps because I grew up in Dallas, an amnesiac kind of town, I am fascinated by origin stories and unintended consequences. 

This newsletter will feature many boulders littering the stream of my chosen profession, radio and podcast production. On a recent Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, I checked out every book I could find on the history of broadcasting in the US and started to find answers to questions that had bugged me for a long time, such as:

I did find answers to these questions in the library stacks, but also a lot of surprises, some of which I’ll be writing about in upcoming posts. For example, did you know…

• The two major radio networks in the US tried to ban recorded material from their air for almost a quarter of a century. So no recorded speeches, no recorded music, no field tape, no interview tape — which led to bizarre consequences.

• Radio’s earliest producers published excellent guides on how to talk to, and write for, audiences they could not see. I’ll explore their advice, some of which still holds up pretty well.

• The business model of broadcasting has always been unstable in the US, and that’s pretty much the model for all digital media now. What’s crazy is that even before broadcasting existed, people already warned against giving away music, journalism and theatrical productions for free.

And yes, I am writing a (for now) free newsletter

For a podcaster, reading about radio’s past is like finding a whole new group of colleagues you never realized you had. I’ve come to make a living helping writers reach new audiences through audio — first as a features editor for various public radio shows, and then as editor of Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History, Michael Lewis’s Against the Rules, and Jill Lepore’s The Last Archive, among many other podcasts and original audiobooks at Pushkin Industries. I’ve also written and hosted a few podcasts of my own. Every time, it’s felt like we were inventing something new, and of course we were. But now I’m much more aware of how much we’ve also been re-inventing something old.

I now think that old-as-newness is the hidden reason why Americans have flocked to audio (which they may be “watching” on YouTube — more on that in future posts). By one estimate, in the second half of 2024, Americans spent an average of 20 percent of their days listening to audio. A significant chunk of that listening is to “news/talk.” 

As happened with radio a century ago, podcasts have acquired culture and political influence that can feel weird and alarming. The most recent presidential election may have hinged on the power of comedy podcasts like Joe Rogan’s out of Austin, or Theo Von’s from between two plastic ferns in Tennessee. A right-wing radio and podcasting conspiracy bro is now deputy director of the FBI. Bloomberg cites anonymous sources from Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign who say she wanted podcasters to come to her for interviews — which, if true, a shows complete ignorance about how This Thing Works. Meanwhile, Rogan’s people told TMZ, POTUS “was so in the zone that he didn't even take a bathroom break, before or after!” 

Not surprisingly, for decades Donald Trump attended the church run by Norman Vincent Peale, the father of positive thinking. Peale had a popular radio show on NBC radio for decades. NBC TV made Trump famous. Our president is thoroughly a creature of broadcasting, hatched from and still swimming its ancient waters like a shark. 

🦈 Anyway, the title of this newsletter refers to the most consistent form of radio communication, the “continuous wave” that Morse code operators still use to send and receive signals. It’s the Battlestar Galactica technology of radio — and l like CW as a mascot, now that I know more about broadcasting’s history. As one expert at the Library of Congress put it to me, podcasting just “speed-ran” through all the patterns established by broadcasting decades earlier in our own, largely forgotten history. I like to think we’re in a better position than ever to understand our own past, because we’ve inadvertently just repeated much of it.

I’m not an academic, but I appreciate all the scholars who’ve led me to so much treasure: the “how-to” guides for radio producers, the arguments of regulators, the many vain and chaotic inventors, women overlooked and voices repressed. I’ll also be featuring the work of media scholars in the hopes that more practitioners will read their books — but I also hope that scholars will correct me if I get something wrong. This is intimidating!

Anyway, I’m excited to share some of the stories I’ve found, as well as the many questions I still have. I am in my Nerd Villain Era and would love for you to join me.

Wait, I have Frequently Asked Questions

You may proceed.

Why not just make all this into a podcast? 

I could do that — and would love to some day. But trust me when I say that podcasts are very time-consuming. And for reasons I’ll keep returning to, it really is important to write about audio, not just talk about it and play examples. Audio is very influential, yes — but it’s still invisible. Ideas have a way of getting mangled, forgotten, or left behind when the source is invisible. 

But there are great podcasts on audio history, just for starters:

Also, I helped write this condensed history of WNYC that the hosts of On the Media performed in 2024: WNYC and Friends Centennial Celebration at SummerStage in Central Park.

I am a journalist already oversubscribed to all my friend’s newsletters, and mainly concerned with books and writing and Takes. Why should I care about “podcasts” and “broadcasting”?

If you are a journalist, you already work in broadcasting. You may still talk in terms of word or page counts and column inches, but you’re on the Internet now, and the Internet is a broadcasting medium — one-to-many, where most of the work is given away for free, despite the often enormous costs to create it. Not only that, there was a time when newspapers owned one fourth of all radio licenses in the US, so you were possibly always working for a broadcaster, just one with a paper annex. So come on, subscribe!

Are you going to talk about Old Time Radio? Old radio shows are cool!

I agree, many of them are cool. Some are also atrocious and embarrassing, so if you’re looking for a place that doesn’t acknowledge radio’s problems with racial minstrelsy or workplace exclusion, this is not the place for you. That said, many people who wrote for and about radio in the 1930s and 40s do a much better job nailing the dilemmas and failings of the profession better than anyone today. Just a few examples:

Excuse me, but weren’t we doing FAQs here?

Oops.

l am a recently laid off podcast producer just here for the gossip, and also some good rage about impossible audio jobs, accompanied by miserable salaries.

I am sorry you’ve been laid off. A big part of why I’m starting this bloggy newsletter is to help us all make sense of why and how American broadcasting’s business model combined instability and profit, then spread that model to all of American media. Here’s an initial stab I made on this topic for Nieman Lab. I don’t have a lot of gossip, and even if I did, I’m an editor and really believe in old-fashioned principles like right of reply. But if I ever start a paid version of this newsletter, it will get saltier behind the paywall, I guarantee it!

AI voice clones? Notebook LLM? You going there? 

Sigh, yeah probably. But let my dude Jesse Dukes hold you for a while on those topics.

Facts. I’m only here for your takes on Herbert Hoover’s tenure as Secretary of Commerce in the 1920s and his impact on the nascent radio industry.

I got you, too. “Stay tuned” (get it?) for so much more on him.

Seriously, though, are you just going to be writing about radio all the time? Sorry, but 😴.

That is more of a comment than a question; however, no. This is a newsletter about all kinds of electronic media — including the great-granddaddy of them all: the telegraph. Sign up now to get my next post, which is about the most maddening dude you may ever meet (and yes, I know the competition is currently fierce): Samuel F.B. Morse.

1   Roganesque potty-break dramas and speculation on adult diapers aside, I’m indebted to Northwestern professor Neil Verma, author of the recent book Narrative Podcasting in an Age of Obsession, for his insights into how place and radio are intertwined — and how podcasts have often failed to get that fundamental fact, to their detriment. More on Verma in a future post. Subscribe!