Podcast Journalism

Podcast Journalism

Runner-up, 2025 Tankard Book Award, Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication Podcasting’s stratospheric rise has inspired a new breed of audio reporting. Offering immersive storytelling for a binge-listening audience as well as reaching previously underserved communities, podcasts have become journalism’s most rapidly growing digital genre, buoying a beleaguered news industry. Yet many concerns have been raised about this new medium, such as the potential for disinformation, the influence of sponsors on content, the dominance of a few publishers and platforms, and at-times questionable adherence to journalistic principles. David O. Dowling critically examines how podcasting and its evolving conventions are transforming reporting—and even reshaping journalism’s core functions and identity. He considers podcast reporting’s most influential achievements as well as its most consequential ethical and journalistic shortcomings, emphasizing the reciprocal influences between podcasting and traditional and digital journalism. Podcasting, both as a medium and a business, has benefited from the blurring of boundaries separating news from entertainment, editorial from advertising, and neutrality from subjectivity. The same qualities and forces that have allowed podcasting to bypass the limitations of traditional categories, expand the space of social and political discourse, and provide openings for marginalized voices have also permitted corporations to extend their reach and far-right firebrands to increase their influence. Equally attentive to the medium’s strengths and flaws, this is a vital book for all readers interested in how podcasting has changed journalism.

The Oxford Handbook of Radio and Podcasting

Radio today remains the most accessible and widely available communication medium worldwide, despite technological shifts and a host of upstart challengers. Since its origins in the 1920s, radio has innovated a new world of sound culture - now expanded into the digital realm of podcasting that is enabling the medium to reach larger audiences than ever before. Yet radio remains one of the least studied of the major areas of communication arts, due largely to its broadcast-era ephemerality. With the advent of digital technology, radio's past has been unlocked and soundwork is exploding as a creative field, creating a lively and diverse sonic present while simultaneously making critical historical analysis possible at last. This volume offers newly commissioned chapters giving readers a wide-ranging view of current critical work in the fields of radio and podcasting, employing specific case studies to analyze sound media's engagement with the arts; with the factual world of news, talk, and documentary programming; as a primary means of forging community along with national, transnational, and alternative identities; and as a subject of academic and critical research. Its historical scope extends from radio's earliest days, through its mid-twentieth century decades as the powerful voice of nations and empires, onto its transformation into a secondary medium during the television era, and into the expanding digital present. Over the course of 37 chapters, it provides evidence of the sound media's flexibility and adaptation across diverse cultures by examining radio's past and present uses in regions including the United States, Canada, Britain, Australia, Poland, China, Korea, Kenya, Angola and Mozambique, South Asia, and the Caribbean. Contributors include historians and media scholars as well as sound artists and radio/podcast producers. Notably, companion links to digital "quotations" from works analyzed are included in many chapters along with chapter audiographies offering links to further listening. Throughout, The Oxford Handbook of Radio and Podcasting connects radio's broadcast past to its digital present, and traces themes of creativity, identity, community, nation, and transnationality across more than a century of audio media.

American Journalism Review