Blog Post #4: The Podcast
After listening to "Money Tree," what was your impression of the storytelling? How is podcast storytelling different from the radio plays we've discussed earlier this semester?
I will admit, as soon as I saw Criminal on this week’s module, I knew I would enjoy the assignment. Phoebe Judge is one of my favorite podcast hosts, and the production quality of Criminal has had me listening since very soon after it was first started. Most of the podcasts I follow are through Radiotopia, the radio production collective that Criminal is produced under. In a way, all of the Radiotopia podcasts have a similar production aesthetic – ambient background music, a host’s voice that is both soothing yet captivating, and interviews that feel like you’re part of the conversation.
Criminal, and especially this episode, utilizes interviewing as a primary storytelling medium. While some podcasts – and news reporting, and dare I say also the general format of the Radio Play – lean on the narrator to tell the story, Criminal leans into the interviewee’s perspective and explanations to provide a sense of story. While we know the interviewer is asking questions, we as the listener don’t always need to hear them in preface to the answer. Answers can speak for themselves, and guide the story just as well, if not better.
Radiotopia from PRX is a podcast production collective based in Oakland, California.
While a Radio Play, or at least the Welles pieces we listened to, tends to focus on the narrator presenting the story setup to the audience, I think it may be applicable to say that the podcast – in this interview format – approaches the dialogue without the assumption of the listener needing a brief before the story begins. While I don’t believe the radio play assumes the audience is unintelligent, I do think that the radio play was limited by its format of generally being a live broadcast. The podcast, being highly edited, stylized, and curated, has the ability to afford its listener the benefit of the doubt - you can’t go back and re-listen to a live broadcast if you miss a detail or misunderstand a statement, whereas in podcasts it is almost commonplace to rewind or skip ahead.
