Bloomsbury Podcast Studies – serie

Podcasting in a Platform Age explores the transition underway in podcasting by considering how the influx of legacy and new media interest in the medium is injecting professional and corporate logics into what had been largely an amateur media form. Many of the most high-profile podcasts today, however, are produced by highly-skilled media professionals, some of whom are employees of media corporations. Legacy radio and new media platform giants like Google, Apple, Amazon, and Spotify are also making big (and expensive) moves in the medium by acquiring content producers and hosting platforms. This book focuses on three major aspects of this transformation: formalization, professionalization, and monetization. Through a close read of online and press discourse, analysis of podcasts themselves, participant observations at podcast trade shows and conventions, and interviews with industry professionals and individual podcasters, John Sullivan outlines how the efforts of industry players to transform podcasting into a profitable medium are beginning to challenge the very definition of podcasting itself.

Podcasting in a Platform Age explores the transition underway in podcasting by considering how the influx of legacy and new media interest in the medium is injecting professional and corporate logics into what had been largely an amateur media form. Many of the most high-profile podcasts today, however, are produced by highly-skilled media professionals, some of whom are employees of media corporations. Legacy radio and new media platform giants like Google, Apple, Amazon, and Spotify are also making big (and expensive) moves in the medium by acquiring content producers and hosting platforms. This book focuses on three major aspects of this transformation: formalization, professionalization, and monetization. Through a close read of online and press discourse, analysis of podcasts themselves, participant observations at podcast trade shows and conventions, and interviews with industry professionals and individual podcasters, John Sullivan outlines how the efforts of industry players to transform podcasting into a profitable medium are beginning to challenge the very definition of podcasting itself.

The growth of scholarly podcasting engenders radical possibilities for how we conceive of knowledge creation and peer review. By investigating the historical development of the norms of scholarly communication, the unique affordances of sound-based scholarship and the transformative potential of new modes of creating and reviewing expert knowledge, Podcast or Perish is the call to action academia needs, by asking how podcasting might change the very ways we think about scholarly work.

The growth of scholarly podcasting engenders radical possibilities for how we conceive of knowledge creation and peer review. By investigating the historical development of the norms of scholarly communication, the unique affordances of sound-based scholarship and the transformative potential of new modes of creating and reviewing expert knowledge, Podcast or Perish is the call to action academia needs, by asking how podcasting might change the very ways we think about scholarly work.

Horror Podcasting argues that podcasting, as an aural medium, is about the mind. Horror is an inward-style of storytelling, and yet the reception of the podcast can be an embodied form of listening. This intersection creates conditions for a subject/listener collapse (which results in immersion) as well as a potential listener/creator collapse (listeners move into the roles of creators). The texts (2006- ) discussed in this book generally originate in independent podcasting or public service broadcasting, and their modes of narrative vary between ‘stripped-back storytelling’ and the ‘Theater for the Mind’. Titles like the post-Serial dramas (Limetown, The Black Tapes, Tanis, A Scottish Podcast, Video Palace, The Lovecraft Investigations) leverage the ‘found footage’ mode, collapsing frames through audio media’s lack of a quotation mark and its time-based qualities, while Welcome to Night Vale plays on generic hybridity and horror’s fixation on technology-based fears, including the fear of surveillance.The last part of the book uses cultures of production and Practice as Research frames to investigate processes of monetization and platformization and the impact of community in horror podcast dramas. The tensions between experiment and professionalization are explored through a series of interviews with fourteen creators involved in the 11th Hour Audio Drama Challenge as well as the author’s own podcast drama series. The praxis of horror podcast drama is ultimately informed by the book’s themes: technology-based fears including surveillance, generic hybridity, and the collapse between listener/creator engendered by the podcast form.

Horror Podcasting argues that podcasting, as an aural medium, is about the mind. Horror is an inward-style of storytelling, and yet the reception of the podcast can be an embodied form of listening. This intersection creates conditions for a subject/listener collapse (which results in immersion) as well as a potential listener/creator collapse (listeners move into the roles of creators). The texts (2006- ) discussed in this book generally originate in independent podcasting or public service broadcasting, and their modes of narrative vary between ‘stripped-back storytelling’ and the ‘Theater for the Mind’. Titles like the post-Serial dramas (Limetown, The Black Tapes, Tanis, A Scottish Podcast, Video Palace, The Lovecraft Investigations) leverage the ‘found footage’ mode, collapsing frames through audio media’s lack of a quotation mark and its time-based qualities, while Welcome to Night Vale plays on generic hybridity and horror’s fixation on technology-based fears, including the fear of surveillance.The last part of the book uses cultures of production and Practice as Research frames to investigate processes of monetization and platformization and the impact of community in horror podcast dramas. The tensions between experiment and professionalization are explored through a series of interviews with fourteen creators involved in the 11th Hour Audio Drama Challenge as well as the author’s own podcast drama series. The praxis of horror podcast drama is ultimately informed by the book’s themes: technology-based fears including surveillance, generic hybridity, and the collapse between listener/creator engendered by the podcast form.

The first book-length treatment of This American Life, Empathy Machines contextualizes the influential show within the history of radio, looking back to radio’s golden era and the para-social connections that it encouraged, as well as the formation of NPR in the 1960s and the “Great Society Liberalism” that guided its programming and approach to the audience. Empathy Machines identifies This American Life as a central cultural institution in the evolution of empathy as a “liberal feeling” central to podcast storytelling and the neoliberal era in which it developed. This American Life revitalized the public radio traditions of investigative journalism and sonically inventive audio production. An early adopter of podcasting as a time-shifted delivery mechanism for its broadcast content, the program also ushered in appointment listening, a key innovation and disruption in the emerging chaotic attention economy of the 21st century. Empathy Machines centers This American Life as a model for prioritizing empathy as an affective and ideologicalstrategy for feeling liberal as liberal democracy’s precarious balance of opposites began to fracture into hypercapitalism, atavistic ethnonationalism, and new identity politics.