It was spring 2023, and Julie Shapiro was disillusioned with podcasts. Cofounder and longtime artistic director of the Third Coast International Audio Festival, Shapiro wasn’t just upset; she felt it in her core. The creative world she’d inhabited and championed for the better part of her life had become unrecognizable over the past decade of explosive growth followed by gutting contraction. 

“It was as if the values and interests and passion that had brought us all into audio and sustained us as audio people were receding throughout the podcast landscape,” Shapiro said. “‘Imagination has left the building’ was a phrase that stuck with me in that period.” 

She was referring, of course, to the notion that the longing for capital robbed podcasting of much of what made it special in the first place. Falling victim to this kind of King Midas syndrome, podcasting hit new highs in terms of cultural penetration and listenership, but one could argue it was at the expense of its artistic soul.

Rather than walk away, Shapiro chose to forge something new. It was evident that the future required change. Relying on the apparatus responsible for this ebb state wasn’t an option. So she embraced community as an act of rebellion against the retrenchment running through the medium. 

While bonding with recently laid-off producer John DeLore, the pair hit on an idea that they couldn’t let go of: an open-submission, short-form storytelling, and experimental sound incubator. When they founded Audio Flux, they had to commission works from a small cadre of established podcasters. But in the two and a half years since, over 310 works have been submitted by audio makers from 22 countries. It’s an extraordinary endeavor, working to decentralize and widen the talent pool in narrative audio storytelling by returning to its roots, making it accessible yet authentically offbeat. 

Ironically, while Shapiro and DeLore were getting Audio Flux off the ground, the artificial intelligence firm Inception Point AI was creating Quiet. Please, a network of more than 4,000 generative audio podcasts releasing approximately 3,000 episodes per week. This had largely taken place surreptitiously until a story in The Hollywood Reporter from September of this year highlighted the company’s efforts. A veritable firestorm spread across social media, and within days, a movement cropped up championing the “lazy luddite” mentality infamously scorned by Jeanine Wright, Inception Point’s chief executive officer (formerly Wondery’s chief operating officer).

“The industry may be hollowing out, but audio culture, writ large, is ever-expanding and deepening,” Shapiro said. “The surge of energy and participation and support we’ve seen for Audio Flux is just one sign of this.”

She’s right. Shapiro and DeLore are hardly alone in their desire to move forward by fostering community. This year has seen the launch of two audio magazines: Written In Air and Signal Hill. Creating space for collections of artistic, one-off creations means new coalitions of curious and open narrative storytellers and astutely engaged audiences are emerging, catalyzing an independent renaissance of sorts. 

Written In Air comes from Dennis Funk, a one-time senior producer with Third Coast, who felt a misalignment between the medium’s trajectory and the stories he wanted to tell. The publication, which plans to release quarterly, shares its name with Funk’s production studio and website, where he often curates pitches for various BBC Radio programs. That pitch process has left Funk with a surfeit of engaging stories, ideas, and contacts, and he’s created a perfect home for the best of them. It’s a singular endeavor with a distinct bent.

Written In Air is entirely subscription-based and digital, but also offers listeners the option to purchase its editions in a fully analog format on cassette tape, along with a printed companion. And though Funk worries that consumers undervalue audio as an art form, often declining to support it financially, he’s got ideas that still align with his ideals. “It would be amazing if you were able to go to your local library and borrow the magazine and tapes for free,” Funk said. “I would rather have this work in a library than a podcast app any day.” 

Signal Hill’s editors-in-chief, Jackson Roach and Liza Yeager, are audio makers who met at Third Coast and who similarly seek to carve out space for the kind of expansive storytelling they feel is no longer at home in the commercial podcast industry. “We wanted to be working in collaboration with other people,” Roach said. “We wanted to make a space where people could publish a one-off documentary that was really in their own voice but still had an editorial team and a community of makers to support it, so that every person who wanted to make something interesting and specific to them didn’t have to just up and start their own podcast.”

Launched in February of this year, the twice-annual podcast magazine prioritizes human connection. Yeager is adamant that community is more than just a watchword at Signal Hill; it’s a reason for being. Every stakeholder in a particular issue, whether storyteller, producer, or editor, has a hand in one another’s work. “We do this not just because it’s nice to get together and makes the process less scary, but also because building community is actually crucial for making the work good,” Yeager said. “Having many brains on stories will make them better than if it were just us two, let alone just any one person making it on their own.”

A nascent movement is taking shape. Podcasters, eager to shed the “content” moniker, are embracing the medium’s kaleidoscopic artistic potential. Through acts of radical collaboration, these outfits — along with others such as Audio Spice, Small Audio Art, and The Ecco — hope to rebuild from the rubble left by countless cycles of investment and liquidation. There’s still a ways to go, but ultimately, Funk believes that there has never been a more critical time for passionate creators to come together.

“It feels like the audio community at large needs to sort of collectively get behind a handful of ideas that we want for the future, [which isn’t] going to exist unless we invest,” Funk said. “And that means going beyond the minimum right now. That means giving the money you can to support or being vocal about work you care about in the communities you are in. The world is too fucked up right now to feel cringe about caring.”

It’s a resonant message in this community of creators, many of whom found each other through Third Coast. But it’s meaningful, too, for those working in genres other than narrative audio documentary; as Lauren Shippen, a writer best known for her work in fiction podcasts, said, “Everyone who’s making audio fiction these days is in it for the love of it, which has created a really lovely community.”

Shapiro concurred. “Audio brings people together in a certain, special way,” she said. “And for a lot of people in podcasting who feel abandoned or undervalued by the increasingly commercial and celebrity-fueled industry, finding fellow producers who share a value system and certain passion for what we do feels crucial — like a lifeline.”

Find Audio Flux at audioflux.org and look for a companion podcast coming this fall from the Hub & Spoke collective. Written In Air is available on Bandcamp and Substack. Signal Hill is available wherever you get your podcasts.