Podcasting in Public: Toward a National Podcasters Project

Recent investments into podcast programming and infrastructure by Apple and Spotify have accelerated the ascent of the format as a predominant mode of popular communication in U.S. public culture. For some practitioners and historians of the format, the late incursion of these transnational and publicly traded corporations into the podcasting industry is an ill omen, portending homogeneity and platformization in a space of cultural production heretofore celebrated for creative wildness and broad accessibility. While the money may be good for some, such critics worry, many more podcasts and podcasters will be sidelined outside these platforms’ “walled gardens,” with still others silenced by their racially-coded algorithms.

In this talk, I locate two moments of historical contingency that function today to block alternative visions for the future of podcasting in the United States. The first is the original capture in the U.S. of the “public broadcasting” mantle by private philanthropic interests in the interwar period. By anchoring public broadcasting to philanthropic funding sources, the numerous committed and well-intentioned architects of non-commercial public radio foreclosed further exploration of how a public-funded form of broadcasting might look and sound. That the most lauded podcast series in the recent “golden age of podcasting” is distributed by National Public Radio stations, I argue, helps to explain how otherwise progressive and anti-capitalist podcasters have defaulted to a patronage model rather than work to build public funding alternatives. I close with a proposal for a National Podcasters Project on the model of the New Deal era National Writers Project.