Introduction to Podcasting

Welcome to the world of podcasting! By using this text, you will develop the skills to communicate to public and professional audiences using podcasts. The scope of this work discusses collaboration, writing, and production. Throughout the book, we’ll provide examples from students in wildlife and natural resources in particular; let these ideas guide your own productions and stir your creativity. While we do spend some time looking at the history and context of podcasting here in the first chapter, know that much of the book is guidance on the details: writing a good script, audio mixing, and post-production. We’ve also added some tools we used in our podcasting class, such as ideas for sample assignments and our grading rubrics.

Much like the weekly modules in the course we created, each chapter in this text sets out goals to accomplish; we refer to these as learning outcomes. After completing a learning outcome, you should have something concrete to show for your work. Another way to think of learning outcomes is that they are SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound). Podcasting, like writing, is iterative. You may finish a draft, edit the audio, then completely re-arrange sections of the work. This is expected and desirable to produce a great podcast.

A Brief History of Podcasting

As of 2022, Apple Podcasts has over 2 million active podcasts, with about 50 million episodes. Though podcast creation accelerated after the appearance of the first iPod device in 2001 and the creation of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) in 2004, the roots of this medium are in radio. Gunsmoke, a TV classic, began as an episodic radio show in 1952. The characters of Superman, Sherlock Holmes, and Phillip Marlowe entertained audiences over the airwaves starting in the 1930s. “Podcast,” in fact, is a portmanteau of “iPod” and “broadcast.”^[1]

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In 2005, Apple integrated search and list features into iTunes v.4.9; this was a game changer for the podcast medium. In a June 28 press release, Steve Jobs said, “Apple is taking Podcasting mainstream by building it right into iTunes…[p]odcasting is the next generation of radio, and users can now subscribe to over 3,000 free Podcasts and have each new episode automatically delivered over the Internet to their computer and iPod.” iTunes also had features for subscribing. Jobs went on to make a keynote at the WWDC 2005 (Worldwide Developers Conference) with a podcast demonstration. That same year, New Oxford American Dictionary chose podcasting as “word of the year” (Chan-Olmsted and Wang, 2022).

Unexpectedly, podcasting dipped in listeners from 2005 – 2014. Bottomley (2015) suggests this may have been due to the too-close linkage of podcasting to Apple; iPods faded even as iPhones blossomed. What changed to bring back the medium from near extinction? In a word, Serial (O’Connell, 2015, April 13). The creators, Sarah Koenig and Julie Snyder, hit all the right notes. They told a compelling story about a convicted murderer, took advantage of the new iTunes upgrades in September 2014, and acquired multiple sponsors. Of their success, Koenig said, “[It’s] about the basics: love and death and justice and truth. All these big, big things.” This was quite a game changer from mere digital audio files to gripping cliff hangers.

As of 2022, podcast distribution has expanded far beyond the now-discontinued iPod and iTunes. Sirius XM and Spotify have emerged as key networks since 2010. News media corporations, such as NPR and The NY Times, also are top distributors of podcasts. Edison Research’s The Infinite Dial provides interesting statistics on podcast users and listeners as of 2020:

• Percent of Americans age 12+ who self-describe as “familiar” with podcasting: 75% (212,000,000)
• Percent of Americans age 12+ who self-describe as “monthly listeners” to podcasts: 37% (104,000,000)
• Number of Americans who self-describe as listening to at least one podcast per month: 100,000,000

Most-Listened Podcasts, 2021-2022 (Edison Podcast Metrics)

(Note: Some podcasts may have explicit materials and are not suited to all audiences)

1. The Joe Rogan Experience  
2. Crime Junkie  
3. The Daily  
4. This American Life  
5. My Favorite Murder  
6. Stuff You Should Know  
7. The Ben Shapiro Show
8. Call Her Daddy
9. Morbid: A True Crime Podcast
10. Office Ladies

Why Podcasts? And Why Keep Listening?

Chan-Olmsted’s and Wang’s (2022) work listed entertainment, information, and audio platform superiority as key motivations for listeners of podcasts.  Tobin and Guadagno (2022) noted similar characteristics; they identified dispositional predictors of podcast listening and its association with psychological outcomes. They observed that people listen to podcasts for informational needs, social engagement, and relatedness to the hosts and narrators. Rime, Pike, and Collins (2022) provided a useful analysis of listeners by “theme” and related “key concepts”:

People thus listen to podcasts for many reasons. But what keeps the audience coming back for more? The answer goes back, in many ways, to Serial. The podcast told an intimate story: the trial of Adnan Syed, convicted for the murder of student Hae Min Lee at Woodlawn High School, Baltimore, in 1999. Ira Glass, known for This American Life, featured the podcast on his television show. Serial also had high-production value and original music by Nicholas Thorburn, a Canadian indie rock artist. Critics loved the podcast, and sponsors funded a second season. Other successful podcasts have used a similar formula; Welcome to Night Vale, a fictionalized story of small-town weirdness in a news-show wrapper, debuted in 2012 and also received promotion from Ira Glass.

What This Book Covers

Although the introduction and first chapter address the context of podcasting and how to use it as assessment in higher ed, the bulk of this book focuses on student-created podcasts. The the grant that provided support of this podcast is rooted in principles of active learning. As Vanhorn et al. (2019) state, “Learning is not a spectator sport.” We didn’t have students read about podcasts and regurgitate answers on a podcasting quiz. They made podcasts, with scaffolding from the TA and instructor of record; they engaged in evaluation through peer reviews; and they delved into their specific interests as young wildlife professions to create original work (Chickering and Gamson, 1987).

In these chapters, we’ve outlined and described the steps student producers need to create content specific to wildlife and natural resources. However, we also believe that our “lessons learned” can be applicable to students across many disciplines. We provide instructional support on creating rubrics and offering ideas on the role of instructors in courses steeped in active learning. We ourselves love podcasts and hope that you and your students will discover the many valuable learning experiences, such as writing, editing, and working on a team, that come with the process.

Preview

Head to Chapter One if you’d like to learn about building a podcasting course and creating ways to assess student podcasts. Continue to Chapter Two if you want to dive right into how students can create rich podcasts.