When Julia Barton was the executive editor at Pushkin Industries, she frequently found herself explaining podcasting best practices to audio newcomers. While the authors and academics she was editing were skilled at what they did on the page, she had to teach them a lot about how to translate their work for the ear. She drew upon what she had learned from her own editors as a reporter and producer, but there was always a nagging feeling. She could never quite pin down how she knew what she knew. 

“I felt that lack of depth because I was drawing on my own experience,” Barton said. “And this sort of folk wisdom that would come from my own editors, and that’s all great, but I was like, no, there must be more to this.” 

There is. Podcasting has its roots in radio, which began over a century ago. The history of broadcasting informs the way we write, edit, and structure stories and series. It has shaped the instincts that guide our choices about tape, sound design, and tone. But the medium’s past is rarely acknowledged, appreciated, or interrogated by those of us working with it in the present. We would do better work if we remembered that we aren’t in a vacuum; we are part of a conversation that spans more than 100 years.  

Barton’s growing desire to understand her own field led her to a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University, where she dove deep into broadcasting history. She’s been sharing what she learned through a weekly newsletter called Continuous Wave. She also wrote a series of articles for Transom called “Audio Ancestors,” where she profiled the radio pioneers who created the interview show and the audio documentary — formats that form the basis of today’s podcasts.

“It’s very flattering to think that you invented everything yourself,” she said. “And I myself have been mortified reading some of these books from the 1930s and ’40s, and being like, ‘Oh, I thought I came up with that. And here you are, dead person, you had it a long time ago, and I didn’t even know.’”

Back in those days, everything was new and entirely live. Through trial and error, American broadcasters began to figure out what worked on the air. Then radio fell into the background with the advent of TV, and much of that knowledge lay dormant until NPR was founded in 1970. Public media institutionalized format, style, and tone, and trained the people who would go on to create the first podcasts 20 years ago. Everything we do today stems from this legacy. 

It makes sense that those of us actively engaged in this work don’t know all the details. We aren’t required to be historians of our own field, and to some extent, everyone has to figure out for themselves how to make things. But the more we know, the more consciously we can choose to uphold or discard the standard ways of making. We can pay homage to the work we admire and shake off traditions that no longer serve us.

Part of learning this history comes from reading, and part of it comes from listening. While audio does not have as formal a canon as film or literature, it certainly has an informal one. When we acknowledge that, we can interrogate the ways it reproduces itself, the values it upholds, and the voices it silences. To do so, we must listen broadly, deeply, and critically — not just to the works of contemporaries and competitors, but also to unusual stories from the early days of NPR, dramas from the Golden Age of radio, and personal narratives produced with limited resources. We can hear how style developed and format evolved, and how later works reference earlier ones. 

In her course Radio/Audio Masterworks, Sarah Montague teaches students at The New School to listen in this manner. They learn to tease apart the elements of a piece of audio, and to understand the complex cultural underpinnings that brought it into being. 

“There is a reason why ‘War of the Worlds’ is an extraordinary piece of work. There is a completely different reason why ‘The Idea of North’ is an extraordinary piece of work. There is a really different reason why ‘Finn and the Bell’ is an extraordinary piece of work. All of those things are to some extent different, but you look at them all together [and] there’s a throughline,” Montague said. If we pay attention, we can hear that throughline, and we can hear its echoes in our own work, whether we intend them to be there or not. 

Outside of the United States, the throughlines are different. Radio and podcasting have evolved on alternate timelines, in diverse political environments, and in varied economic circumstances around the world. While there is a gap between the Golden Age of radio and the birth of NPR, institutions in other countries have more continuity: The Australian Broadcasting Corporation is over 90 years old, and the BBC celebrated its 100th birthday in 2022. And while the U.S. fatefully opted to fund broadcasting through advertising, other countries adopted different funding models. All of these factors influence the values and aesthetics of the work that is produced.

“People are in their silos,” said Siobhan McHugh, a narrative podcast maker, critic, and academic in Australia, who founded RadioDoc Review. “So in America, you’ll certainly know about Orson Welles and the ‘War of the Worlds,’ and you’ll know about some of the big talk show people, and there’s a lot of respect for public radio. But public radio is only a baby in America compared to the rest of us.” 

Becoming aware of other histories and listening to the work that emerges from them is another reminder that our conventions are not set in stone. 

“Context is everything,” McHugh said. “Those of us who are not American get really annoyed by things like Time Magazine, which trumpets the 100 best podcasts of all time. It’s not just arrogance, it’s kind of short-sightedness. It’s that kind of self-centered American thing that the rest of us kind of roll our eyes at.” 

But it goes even further than this. Having an understanding of the industry’s past not only affects the kind of storytelling we reproduce but also how we think about the conditions that enable it. 

“To put it really succinctly, it might affect the way you do your work. I’m not talking about what you make, but the kind of choices you make in terms of what companies to work [for], how you work, if you are a part of a union or not, what’s in your contract, what you agree to,” said Chenjerai Kumanyika, a media scholar and journalist whose work includes “Uncivil,” “Scene on Radio,” and “Empire City.”

Kumanyika, who holds a PhD in mass communication and critical media studies, is on the faculty of NYU’s Audio Reportage program. As an educator, part of what he wants new reporters and producers to understand is that their work is inseparable from the economic and social contexts in which they live. In the United States, this includes an ad-based funding model that has, throughout broadcasting’s history, been marked by instability. 

“As journalists and media-makers coming into their careers, they are also entering into a power struggle,” Kumanyika said. He added that not knowing our media history “impoverishes our understanding of what’s happening to us, and our ability to fight back and transform it.” 

The past holds information that can help us approach the present more effectively and think creatively about the future. If we understand why we do what we do, we will do it better; if we know how institutions came to be, we can reimagine them. Our predecessors inform, inspire, and provoke us in our work, whether we are aware of it or not. If nothing else, we should remember that everything we create is a contribution to a conversation that has been going on for more than 100 years.