Old Fashioned News

It’s no secret, podcasting has changed. I’ve been listening to podcasts since 2010, and fell in love with This American Life, The Daily, and Serial — along with all their copy cats and alterations. On The Media, Moonface, Dolly Parton’s America, Radiolab, White Lies, In the Dark, Search Engine; and so, so many more. Those big three spawned a garden of narrative audio storytelling I’ve loved. They are the reason I wanted to get into audio. But like so many other people in this industry, I ended up working less and less in narrative-driven podcasts, or journalism information work. My work got pulled into the vortex of video celeb chat casts — hoping to be discovered on YouTube while we tried to throw as many marketing stones of chat cast clips to stir waves of viral. Like so many companies and shows doing this, the hope has been that a viral social clip would elevate the brand and bring the shows immense popularity; bring in more money and viewers.

I still love a good interview on audio (or video) — Longform used to be one of my favorite podcasts ever. I love what Pablo Torre is doing with his new version of new media (a 21st-century rebirth of new journalism?¹), which includes just a hang on mics — a 2025 feature of mainstream podcasts.

I like listening to Mixed Signals every week — I like Hard Fork. But the universe of podcasts has been soaked with the hyper engine of capitalism — leaning into video ad advertising, celebrity-led talk shows. As journalist Ben Smith has said, everything is becoming TV.

Alex Sujong Laughlin’s recent article on podcasting captures the podcast transformation, and our likely future of celebrity video podcasts with minimal production. Like me, Sujong Laughlin likes a celebrity podcast — they are good company on a walk or in the kitchen but, “it has never shocked me out of hazy malaise and made me feel more curious about the world, less alone, or in awe. I have never listened to one and been surprised in the ways that I was upon encountering This American Life, or Serial, or The Daily. “

She believes the creative ambition for podcasts has disappeared (along with the funding and incentives for such creative ambition). Podcasting lost its way because it became popular and monetized puffing out an economic pod bubble, and then after that bubble popped, a new version of podcasting (celeb chatcasting) came around and made more money. But like a lot of things that make lots of money — like a lot of things on TV — it lacks substance. It lacks that shock, ignition of curiosity, education, subliminally, or feeling of togetherness. As Sujong Laughlin writes:

It turned out that companies could make way more money if they went straight to the profitable projects—the ones that favored big names and “always on” publishing schedules, and which required (and allowed for) less editing, less format experimentation, and less contemplation. This is why the word “podcast” increasingly means “dudes talking at each other for five hours on camera.” Those hours are then cut down to one minute-ish clips to share on social media in the increasingly futile hope that one will go viral. Step 3, as always, is: ??? Step 4, the most important one, remains: Profit. The result of this enshittification is a fundamentally different medium, and one that produces work very different than the kind I got into this business to make. The consensus picks among people in the industry for the best and most influential podcasts of all time are the sort of work that the industry mostly does not produce anymore—higher-touch narrative projects that are more novel than shitpost, and more art than commerce. 

The industry consolidation that followed the bursting of the podcast bubble continues to destroy the legacies of companies that defined this medium; Pineapple and Wondery are the latest to bite the dust post-acquisition. Wondery just dropped $100 million on Travis and Jason Kelce’s New Heights last year, and I guess it’s gone so well they want to go all in on “personality-driven shows.” It is best not to think about how many other podcasts could have been made, and how many producers and editors might have found employment, with some small portion of that money. 

Hundreds of people lost their jobs in those shakeouts, but the owners who sold those companies are sitting high on the millions they made from the sales; Pineapple Street sold in 2019 for $18 million and Wondery sold in 2021 for a reported $300 million. It has only just come to my attention that Gimlet co-founder Matt Lieber is spending his post-Spotify days as a whimsical ice cream proprietor in Park Slope, where he sells ice cream shaped like sushi.  

Read more here: The Future Of Podcasting Is Here, And It Sucks (Defector)

It’s sad business thinking about the pivot of podcasting — the interstellar journey it took from episodic, narrative and art ambition, to a restocking of celebrities chatting on screen.

As Sujong Laughlin points out in her article, we need both. You need a blog and a deeply researched book. You need PBS and Bravo. But it gets discouraging when everything gets mega crunched and forced to be the same. Podcasting has started to feel like chain restaurants — everyone is chasing some hope they’ll hit the jackpot if they chat with a someone famous on video. As Deborah Copperud writes in Good Tape about teaching students about podcasts in 2025:

I also don’t want my students to try and copy the big hit podcasts because, to me, celebrity-led podcasts tend to sound like they’re produced by committee, with jokes watered down to please a wide audience, social awkwardness covered up with confident chuckles, and stammering passion cut short by “that’s all the time we have” segues. And how boring would our soundscape be, how tediously homogenous, if every podcast host sounded like a Hollywood or public radio personality? It would be the aural equivalent to suburbs with strip malls all housing the same fast casual chain restaurants. 

To find the other voices — the nonconformists — Copperud encourages her students to seek out indie podcasts: podcasts without big names and big money; podcasts for building a community, sharing knowledge, building momentum for a cause. Small staff (if any), simple, straightforward — perhaps doing it for zero money. Podcasts like Prairie Track & Field about running in North Dakota. Podcasts like Rumble Strip about rural life in Vermont. Podcasts like Tech Won’t Save Us about pushing against tech boosterism.

To find such podcasts use the search engine Listen Notes. Podcasts can still be many things. The next big innovation in podcasting won’t come from chasing trends; it will come from someone with the creative ambition to try something new, to experiment, who will have time and money to make something great. Everything else might become background TV.

1. Pablo is like making a chimera of everything: chat cast, investigative journalism, a newsletter, video, audio, print all bumbling along in the vast and busy sound waves burbling in the ocean of media ↩︎