“Podcast” meant nothing and everything at On Air Fest
Brooklyn: Rachel Martin didn’t quite believe that anybody had figured out the economics of audio.
“If anyone claims they know how to do it, they’re lying,” she said. “A couple of people are making money, but they’re not here.”
It was the opening session of On Air Fest, a two-day audio festival spread across a couple of trendy hotels in Williamsburg, and Martin, host of the NPR show Wild Card, was on stage with Brian Reed, the host of Question Everything. Both shows had won Ambies, a podcasting industry award, the night before, and Reed and Martin talked about how both shows had originated out of frustration with the limits of journalism. “What value is there in chasing the same story as everyone else?” Reed asked at one point. “You’re baiting me,” Martin replied.
This turned out to be one of the central themes of the festival. The last time I attended an audio event of this sort was the Third Coast festival (RIP) back in 2018; at the time, there was so much money flowing into audio that people weren’t sure what to do with all of it. The panels there focused on craft, with titles like “How to make your listener levitate.” Most of the people at Third Coast were also journalists, or at least journalist-adjacent, and spent most of their time painstakingly craftng beautiful narratives and sonic experiments that were, in the end, grounded in the norms of public radio and shows like This American Life, Radiolab, and Serial.
Eight years later, things are very different. Most of the programming consisted of live episode tapings rather than discussions of craft, and I heard the term “creator” just as often as “journalist” at On Air Fest; some of those “creators” were longtime journalists like Don Lemon, who’s now doing his own thing after leaving CNN in 2023; others explicitly said they were not journalists, even if they borrowed some tools of the journalism trade The journalists, meanwhile, are also borrowing from the creator toolkit, particularly when trying to build an audience, but don’t want to let it affect their reporting approach. Martin, for example, said she would never change her interview style to be more conducive to shortform video — she leaves that to the editors at NPR, which her podcast is part of.
The question of money came up throughout the conference, including in a panel on narrative climate podcasts. Those have been disappearing as funding for both climate journalism and narrative podcasts dries up, and the panelists, all of whom were independent journalists, pointed out that many of the questions around podcast funding come down to how the podcast would reach the biggest audience possible — an unhelpful, practically impossible question for someone producing a podcast about local climate issues. “I spend so much time on [grant] applications,” said Roxanne Scott, who hosted a season of the Queens Memory podcast dedicated to water issues in the borough. “The most common question I get is, ‘How are you going to scale this?'”
In her introduction to the climate panel, emcee Avery Trufelman, host of the podcast Articles of Interest, gave a name to the type of audio that has come to dominate podcast feeds: “chat-casts.” This was the second big theme of the festival: audio, at least the kind of audio that brings in money, is now centered around celebrity-driven “chat-casts” and video. The most famous examples of the genre are shows like The Joe Rogan Experience or Call Her Daddy (neither of which, as Martin observed, were present at On Air Fest), though a “Hyper-Local, Slightly Opinionated Study of Podcast Listening” that polled people around New York and festival attendees found that even though nobody — including audio producers — had a particularly good definition of a podcast, they still mostly said they listened to podcasts rather than watch them.
The panels that addressed that transformation tended to be packed; one panel, called “experiments in the art of video podcasting,” which promised to teach attendees “techniques to help you dream up a video version of your show that you can be excited about,” was so popular that I couldn’t even get inside. At another, on building audiences that stick, Gillian Pensavalle, co-host of the True Crime Obsessed podcast, talked about how podcasts can serve as outlets for people with obsessions their friends and families are tired of hearing about. If a podcast builds out places for its audience to gather — Discord servers, forums, in-person events — those people often end up finding friends “in a safe space where nobody [is] going to make fun of them,” she said. That sense of community makes audiences loyal, which is especially helpful for podcasts that are trying out subscription tiers — something that’s increasingly common as the podcast ad market remains unreliable.
AI, too, came up again and again, mostly through people voicing their uncertainty about how AI might affect them. “Even with AI, the hope of hope is that we are still the creative engine,” said Audie Cornish at a panel with her former All Things Considered co-host Ari Shapiro. Both left NPR in recent years, driven by a desire to stretch their creative wings; Cornish now hosts two shows at CNN. “Whatever the state of the industry is today,” said Shapiro, “it’ll be different tomorrow.”
And, as Cornish pointed out, “social media is turning into TV, but TV is turning into radio.” Netflix, for example, has responded to the rise of short-form video by tweaking the writing of its shows so that they can be listened to in the background while viewers scroll on TikTok or do their chores. But background listening has been a part of the audio experience since the earliest days of radio, and audio producers can capitalize on this moment of divided attention, even if, as Cornish said, “monetizing attention isn’t why most of us got into this business.”
But still. Audio always appealed to me for its ability to approximate the sublime, and there was still plenty of room for sonic experimentation at On Air Fest. Audio Flux held a listening session, where a roomful of people held their breath as they listened to a series of 3-minute fluxworks together. Hrishikesh Hirway, of the podcast Song Exploder, played and discussed music with Peter Silberman of The Antlers. Zak Rosen and Sharon Mashihi facilitated a “ritual for your creative destiny” that, reportedly, involved the two — who hadn’t met in person until the evening before — taking off their pants onstage and pulling underwear over their heads. And the producer TK Dutes, host of The Secret Life of TK Dutes, invited audience members to a live production meeting of her podcast, an independent project that came as a response to her burnout and doesn’t have a set production schedule. Every producer in that production meeting was a person of color, which is something I had never experienced in my time working across four different shows.
“If we can’t be free in our country and we can’t be free in our bodies,” Dutes said, “then maybe we can at least be free in our projects.”