By Brian Pearlman
Journalism as an industry is facing a turbulent period of growth and change. As local newsrooms in smaller markets shut their doors and news organizations grapple with the best ways to fund their work, there’s a push to engage audiences in new ways — the infamous “pivot to video” or “pivot to audio.”
It’s in this sense that some have suggested podcasts hold the key to journalism’s future.
Podcasts are downloadable, episodic segments of audio content that are made for on-demand listening at the user’s convenience. The audience for podcasts is young — the Reuters Institute’s 2019 Digital News Report found that half of those surveyed who were under the age of 35 had listened to a podcast within the past month. Users are most likely to listen on smartphones, where they can download podcasts for free from apps like the Google Play store or Apple Podcasts app.
But while much has been made of success stories like New York Times’ “The Daily,” a 20-to-30-minute program that features original audio reporting from the national newspaper and claims a listenership of millions, the fact remains that podcasts have a long way to go before they truly inform a broad swath of the U.S. population.
While over half of Americans over the age of twelve have listened to at least one podcasts, the core pool of listeners is relatively small and niche. And the ad revenue generated pales in comparison to FM radio, movies and television shows.
Surprisingly, people also aren’t listening to podcasts in significant numbers on ubiquitous smart speakers like the Google Home and Amazon Alexa. According to a report from the Reuters Institute, while a tenth of the U.S. population now uses such devices, only one-fifth actually listens to them for news.
And in Nieman Labs’ 2019 “Predictions for Journalism” series,
Latoya Drake of Google News Lab and Juleyka Lantigua-Williams of production company Lantigua Williams & Co. both warned that many podcasts are still marked by a white, East Coast bias that entrenches them away from the diverse American populace — and a broader listenership.
Despite these hurdles, the intimacy and portability of podcasts can be powerful for news organizations who want to grab the attention of listeners.
“I think we’re entering a new age where we’re going to see a wider variety of content,” podcasting industry analyst Dave Zohrob told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Antony Funnell in March. We’re going to see more people listening, and really binging on that content like they do a new Netflix show.”
It’s intimate experiences like these, with audiences who are passionate about the shows they listen to and the companies that produce them, that have the potential to plant headphones on peoples’ ears and leave them there for 45 minutes or more.
The trick is to craft meaningful, compelling listening experiences, which is tough for smaller news organizations. Many of the top podcasts are produced by major companies like Gimlet, iHeartRadio and Wondery, the latter of which has found great success in turning newspaper series like the L.A. Times’ reporting on the Golden State Killer and New York Magazine’s reporting on convicted animal wrangler Joe Exotic into successful shows.
While podcasts may not be the panacea for the future of journalism, their continued growth shows that people do crave great stories — and great stories are what good news organizations have in spades.