Lying dormant for decades after being one of radio’s star attractions during the twentieth century, audio drama seems to be making a comeback in Spain thanks to the emergence and consolidation of podcasting. This phenomenon is being promoted equally by the new digital platforms and by traditional broadcasters. This research aims to explain how the podcast is helping to revive drama and to what extent the new productions will allow radio stations to preserve their identity or if the latter will be forced to reinvent themselves due to the peculiarities of this new format. The results confirm both hypotheses. The fact is, there has been significant growth in production during three well-defined periods. Moreover, at the same time, fiction is changing in terms of its characteristics, content and production techniques, as the rich heritage accumulated over the last century has been lost with the passing of time.
Review of: Jazz Radio America , Aaron J. Johnson (2024) Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 406 pp., ISBN 978-0-25208-830-8, p/bk, USD 29.95
There has certainly been a revival of interest in what is known variously as spatial, immersive or three-dimensional sound in radio and podcasting in recent years. It has been used in news, documentaries, investigative series and audio dramas. But this article turns instead to its relative lack of use. Focusing on factual programmes and based on research with programme-makers from several countries over five years, I analyse the reasons they give for not using spatial sound as often as they want and identify significant underlying cultural patterns that constitute wider cultural problems in the radio and podcast sector. These threaten to undermine the growth and development of narrative audio more generally.
As the Australian community radio sector approaches its 50th birthday, many stations are reflecting on their own colourful pasts. Regional community radio stations are under-represented in historical literature, with most Australian community radio histories focusing on metropolitan stations. This research explores how community radio histories can find new life through practice-based research. Drawing on historical research conducted for and alongside a regional Australian community radio station, this article critically reflects on both the importance of preserving and sharing community radio histories and the potential of radio production as an approach to reciprocal research in this space. The findings suggest that radio production has a key role to play not only in increasing the accessibility of research findings in the platform age but also as a way of shaping and guiding inquiry itself. This is vital for both preserving historical research and ensuring that these stories remain accessible to their communities.
Review of: Podcast Studies: Practice into Theory , Lori Beckstead and Dario Llinares (eds) (2025) Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 383 pp., ISBN 978-1-77112-643-4, h/bk, GBP 79 ISBN 978-1-77112-676-2, p/bk, GBP 35
This article looks at the use of radio in three Irish films set in the past and centring on women confined to oppressive environments. It examines the narrative role that the radio plays in terms of diegetic sound but also as an object in itself and as a tool that links these female characters uneasily to the outside world. In each of these films, the radio inspires a desire for connection and escape as well as communicating the inner feelings of the female characters concerned.
The increasing accessibility of mobile technology has transformed how migrants document and share their experiences, shaping narratives of identity, belonging and displacement. This article examines mobile storytelling as a participatory research method for exploring migration experiences and transnational identity formation, focusing on Ukrainian migrants in the United Kingdom. As thousands of Ukrainians resettle in the aftermath of the 2022 Russian invasion, their stories offer critical insights into the emotional, social and cultural dimensions of migration. Based on the pilot study ‘Once Upon a Time in Ukraine: Mobile Storytelling with Ukrainian Migrants’, conducted in Dorset in May 2023, this research engaged ten Ukrainian female migrants in a mobile storytelling workshop. Participants used their mobile phones to record personal narratives, reflecting on their journeys, adaptation and evolving identities. The study highlights how mobile storytelling enables migrants to assert agency over their own stories, fostering self-expression and emotional processing while also contributing to collective memory and public discourse. Findings suggest that mobile storytelling facilitates a hybrid sense of identity, allowing migrants to navigate between past and present, homeland and host country. By leveraging accessible technology, migrants can actively shape their representations, challenging dominant migration narratives and creating a space for their voices in academic and media discourse. This article argues that mobile storytelling is a valuable methodological approach for migration studies, providing a deeper understanding of transnational identity construction and the role of digital media in contemporary migration experiences.
This study analyses the older adults’ participation in the production of programmes broadcast on RadiUS, the radio station of the University of Seville, and its contribution to their active ageing. To identify the interests that people over 65 pursue as prosumers through multiplatform radio and podcasting and to define the challenges and benefits of this practice for them, a mixed methodology was employed: a content analysis of the programmes making up the sample, a questionnaire delivered to each one of the 40 people who participate in these programmes and a focus group conducted among participants. Findings confirm that older adults’ participation in the production of multiplatform radio programmes and podcast episodes makes a key contribution to their active ageing; they organize themselves by sharing roles and tasks without hierarchies and tend to adopt a proactive attitude to improve their technical radio skills as well as the content quality of their programmes.
Thailand’s community radio sector encompasses a diverse array of stations, both religious and secular. This suggests the capacity to drive social transformation. However, while operational structures within these stations reflect a broad range of roles that potentially influence their formats and content delivery, programmes primarily emphasize entertainment, the dissemination of national and local information and news largely from official sources, as well as religious propagation. Political programming is largely absent. These limitations arise from a lack of diversity among station operators, the intentional avoidance of political issues, the absence of supportive affiliations, ambiguous licensing criteria and constraints in technical resources and transmission coverage. Rather than fulfilling its promise as radio ‘by the people, for the people’, current structures and roles suggest that community radio – especially people’s radio – is increasingly being sidelined, resulting in a less diverse and pluralistic media landscape and leaving rural areas and minorities without a voice.
We report on an experiment that used podcast audio-drama as a medium to generate impact from academic outputs in a creative, inclusive and collaborative way. Tobias and Syd was a serialized podcast audio-drama published in January 2023 based on ideas contained in the book Anthropology of Tobacco and personal narratives from the Wellcome Trust funded ‘Letter to the Breath’ project. The series aimed to generate conversations and discussions, rather than conclusions, about the role of tobacco in society today. It was a collaborative project involving contributions from diverse stakeholders. In addition to developing, producing and promoting the play, the educational value and dialogic space of the podcast was enhanced through four recorded webinar events based on key themes in the drama. Podcast audio-drama has the potential to open up new perspectives on contentious public health issues like tobacco use and abuse. We reflect on some of the processes involved and the challenges encountered in this case.
The French podcast sector has seen strong growth since the early 2010s, but this has been primarily driven by the catch-up content offered by the major actors in the radio sector. This article analyses the emergence of independent studios producing podcasts independently of radio broadcast, known in France as ‘native’ podcasts. Drawing on eighteen interviews with the main actors in the sector, we show how they are adopting different strategies and editorial lines. The native podcasting business model has not yet stabilized and is still largely based on producing branded content for third parties and monetization of content through advertising.
This article explores the role of the radio listener clubs in the Rohingya refugee response in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. The article demonstrates the unique potential of radio in reducing the challenges relevant to the lives of crisis-affected adolescents since the influx in 2017. Adolescents are the most vulnerable community in Cox’s Bazar. Drawing from findings derived from qualitative fieldwork in situ, the article demonstrates how the listener clubs serve as an inclusive environment where the affected youth can access life-saving information, express their needs, provide feedback for improvement of humanitarian response and act as change agents in the refugee context.
The history of municipal radio stations in the United States has yet to be written. Between 1921 and 1927, at least twelve municipalities obtained licences to broadcast over the air and there are traces of dozens of municipal radio projects across the United States in the 1920s. Apart from WNYC, New York’s municipal station from 1924 to 1996, most of them have been dismissed as failures and sunk into oblivion. Based on archival research, this article seeks to recover that part of the history of broadcasting and capture what citizens, elected officials and broadcasters meant when they talked about ‘municipal radios’ in the decades that saw the birth of the US broadcasting system. Those experiments point to a path not taken to combine radio and democracy. This article thus contributes to the history of public media by tracking the origins of public broadcasting in the United States besides educational radio.
The podcast has emerged as a format for the promotion of tourism destinations. This study explores how, through branding, governmental tourism agencies convey the identity of the territory they represent and manage to create travel expectations among their stakeholders. We therefore employed a descriptive documentary method with a quantitative and qualitative approach and analysed titles produced by fourteen agencies. The results reveal that the most used genre for the construction of the narrative is the interview and the least used is fiction and that local expert sources predominate, with a notable participation of voices recognized by the audience and influencers. We conclude that the sampled destination podcasts meet the needs of future travellers by providing valuable information about the destination through legitimized voices and making the territory’s identity known in all its dimensions.
This article analyses metajournalistic discourse between a ‘core actor’ and a novice reporter in The Trojan Horse Affair , a 2022 podcast from Serial Productions and the New York Times about a faked conspiracy to radicalize Muslim students at secondary schools in Birmingham, England in 2013. The podcast utilizes metanarrative self-reflexivity and transparency to challenge an erroneous news story propagated by the British mainstream press. The article argues that the intimacy, reciprocity and good-faith conflict (the ‘sonic friendship’) that develops between hosts Brian Reed and Hamza Syed are integral to the podcast’s value for industry-wide questions about journalistic authority, credibility and objectivity. Metajournalistic discourse and reporter–reporter intimacy in The Trojan Horse Affair serve to substantively challenge institutional boundaries that keep Muslim reporters from making news stories that serve their communities in western societies. The podcast models a renewed process for the construction of journalistic integrity in the twenty-first century.
Review of: Scripting Empire: Broadcasting, the BBC, and the Black Atlantic , James Procter (2024) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 192 + xii pp., ISBN 978-0-19889-417-9, h/bk, $100
The relationship between the sound industry and its audience is influenced by the widespread use of smartphones as the primary means of accessing the internet. This has led to a transformation in media logics, particularly among young people in Colombia, as they adapt to an evolving ecosystem that is redefining the creation, production and distribution of media. The objective of this research is to determine the significance of podcasts in the information consumption habits of listeners/users and to examine how this digital innovation is positioned in the content offer of radio and independent producers. The study employs a mixed methodological approach, including a case study that involves the administration of 190 surveys to young people, the review and listening of digital repositories of podcast platforms and the conducting of fifteen interviews with podcast producers. The main conclusion drawn is that podcasts are revitalizing audio content on-screen, connecting young people with information and the reality of their environment.
This article borrows the ‘circuit of culture’ concept to investigate podcasting in Brazil, one of the most dynamic audio markets in the world. Focusing on production sphere, semi-structured interviews were conducted with managers of independent podcasts producers – Rádio Novelo and Central 3 – and Brazilian major broadcasting network, Sistema Globo de Rádio, with a portfolio of around one hundred and eighty podcasts. Data gathered indicate we are entering a new platformization era, which can be described by growing consolidation and sustainability issues, both to independent companies and legacy media.
Review of: Bootlegging the Airwaves: Alternatives Histories of Radio and Television Distribution, Eleanor Patterson (2024) Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 192 pp., ISBN 978-0-25208-769-1, p/bk, $28.00
The aim of this systematic literature review (SLR) is to understand what research has been conducted on the use of binaural sound (i.e. a type of 3D sound) in audio and radio journalism in the last decade (January 2013 to December 2023). For this purpose, the PRISMA method was used and data were collected from WoS and Scopus. A corpus of six journal articles was obtained and the results demonstrate a need for greater literacy among journalists about binaural technology and its uses. In the cases in which it is applied, the most common editorial sections are those on society, culture, education and travel/tourism and the goal is to put the listener in the centre of the story and make them more immersed in the narrative. However, this SLR also shows that there is little research in this field and it is essential to create a specific grammar when binaural sound is applied to radio and audio journalism.
