Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: Welcome to the Community Podcast Initiative where we explore diverse and inclusive ways of audio storytelling.
Our goal is to connect community members through sound while providing an alternative for those underserved or misrepresented in traditional media.
The CPI is based out of Mount Royal University on Treaty 7 territory.
I'm your 2026 host Emma Miller, and in this episode we're taking a listen back to a visit podcast researcher and Professor Mia Lindgren's keynote lecture in April of 2025.
This episode dives into how journalistic standards sometimes are and aren't represented in podcasting, how parasocial relationships can impact storytelling and the pros and cons regarding the growing practice of video podcast.
[00:00:57] Speaker B: My talk today draws quite a lot from a recent publication of a special issue of an open access journal called Media and Communication that I guest edited. So this has only just come out. The issue Balancing Intimacy and Trust, Opportunities and Risks in Audio Journalism brings together a great collection of international research examining this complex relationship between intimacy and trust in audio journalism and and especially looking at podcasting as it evolves as a medium. So I'll draw quite a lot from that in my talk today. So we have a lot to learn, I think, from looking at how scholars and industries are doing podcasting internationally. And I find it really interesting that despite podcasting being a boundary less medium, unlike the forbearer radio which was constricted by the physicalities of radio waves, country specific podcast charts show us that we like to listen to homemade content, which is why it's so important to go outside of that and to do this kind of international collaboration. There's of course some exceptions, especially in the English speaking world where US juggernauts like Joe Rogan or Mel Robbins still dominate. The top podcast in Australia is Mel Robbins, which I find again, really kind of interesting.
So the special issue makes several important contributions to our understanding of podcast journalism. Kate Lacey, who is a prominent UK scholar, examines examination of proper distance and listening out introduces a framework that combines cosmopolitan ethics with feminist ethics of care. Kim Fox, David o' Dowling and Kyle J. Miller's analysis of sports podcasting reveals how intimate formats enable political discourse and social justice advocacy. Furthermore, the collection reveals how intimate audio journalism operates from within different political and cultural frameworks, including fascinating research on podcasting in Serbia I'd not come across that before, and several studies of podcasting in China. We're learning a lot about Chinese podcasting and I think this is an area for us to really engage with. There's an estimate 150 million podcast listeners in China. Even that just alone is reason for us to engage with that. And it's attracting significant numbers of listeners, especially amongst young people in China. Podcasting has become firmly embedded in journalism, driving consumption and revenue for online publishers. This is really something that needs to be examined in much more detail. We're only starting to see early work in this field, so it's creating new opportunities but also a lot of challenges for audio journalism.
Its intimate format creates unique possibilities for deep storytelling, authentic connection and addressing underrepresented voices that we know examples of. At the same time, it introduces risks related to journalistic integrity, emotional manipulation and the potential for parasocial relationships to compromise critical evaluation. So both sides really. So I'm hoping that today's talk will make a small contribution to this work. Like any decent podcast, let's start with a story that illustrates both the power and the ethical complexities of intimate audio journalism. In 2017, I was living in Melbourne. I'd been binging on this new podcast series produced by the team behind the 2014 super hit serial. I'm sure you've all heard Serial, often described as the starting point of mainstreaming podcasting. I was on the train going to work, listening to S Town when the host made a shocking revelation.
I was so upset by this news that I heard on the podcast that I called out, oh, no. On the train.
And people turn around.
I remember exactly where I stood. I know exactly what I was looking at in Melbourne going through when this happened.
So I do have to apologise because there are spoilers. So if you're intending to hear it, I'm going to destroy it for you.
But it is really worth listening to, Esther. And it's getting a bit of a revival at the moment. There's a lot of the younger generation of listeners and I'm glad to hear that because I'm seeing now, when I talk to some of our undergraduate students, they've never heard of Serial, So it's really been moving through so quickly now. 2017 is a long time ago. As mentioned, S Town was released in 2017 by the creators of this American Life and serial.
Just within one month, it was downloaded 40 million times. The podcast begins with the host, Brian Reed, investigating an alleged murder in a small Alabama town. One of the residents, local residents, John B. McLemore, who describes his hometown as Shittown S Town. So what starts as a potential true crime investigation transforms into a profound and intimate exploration of Macklemore's life following his unexpected suicide. S Town represents a watershed moment in audio storytelling, not just for its extraordinary popularity, but for how it blurred the boundaries between journalism and literature and personal narrative. Reid called it an oral novel and the Peabody Awards recognised it as the quote, the first true audio non fiction biography constructed in the style and format of a seven chapter novel. What made S Town compelling was the intense intimate relationship it established between the listener, the host and Macklemore. Through Reid's narration, we hear Macklemore's distinctive Southern drawl describing everything from his intricate maize garden to his theories on climate change. We follow Reid as he processes the death, speaking in a valuable way about his own emotional response. We become privy to deeply personal details about McLemore's repressed sexuality and mental health struggles. As Siobhan McHugh explained in her analysis of S Town as digital literary journalism, Reid employs complex narrative techniques throughout the podcast, including dramatic tension, scene setting and symbolism. So it is really like literary journalism. The maze in McLemore's garden becomes a powerful metaphor for the meandering story in itself.
However, S Town also sparked important critical conversations about the ethics of intimate audio journalism.
Daniel Schroeder, writing for Slate, argued that the podcast treatment of McLemore's queer experience was hobbled by straight biases and represented a form of voyeurism especially. Further ethical concerns arose when Reid played audio recordings from one of Macklemore's church sessions, which is what it was described at intimate moments when McLemore would have one of the characters re pierce his nipples and and go over his tattoos. Schroeder describes this as broadcasting a very raw scene from McNamal's private romantic life on air, noting that listening to it felt grossly voyeuristic. Similarly, Gay Alcorn, who was the Australian editor of the Guardian, criticised S Town, saying the podcast is morally indefensible. She said, John B. McLemore's agonies are laid out for our entertainment with scant reflection by the podcast reporter as to the ethics of what he's doing. Journalism requires a purpose beyond telling a good story.
So I think at the moment, remembering that this is 2017 when it was absolutely a new form of telling stories, I think we're getting quite used to this in depth storytelling now, so it's a useful time to come back and to reflect on this. This tension between intimacy as a journalistic tool and intimacy as a potential exploitation of lies at the heart of many debates about podcast journalism today. And I think S Town is a really important example for us to think about the potential of intimate audio storytelling and the ethical minefield such intimacy can present. It's a complex interplay between intimacy, trust and ethical responsibility of audio journalism. Before I go any further, I just wanted to give you a very quick and dirty overview of podcast history because I thought we needed a little bit of context at this point. So podcasting as we know it today is about two decades old.
Using Richard Berry's reflective piece, Part of the Establishment, Informed by He's Got Three Steps, I've just expanded that to kind of four distinctive faces in podcast history. So the first face, which is 2004 to approximately 2014, was what we might call the podcasting's pioneering era. In these early years, podcasting was predominantly the domain of amateurs, hobbyists and educational institutions.
It required limited equipment. It was all done very simply and often low audio quality. As Barry notes, these early years of podcasting bear a striking resemblance of the early years of broadcasting in the 1910s, before radio was colonized by media corporations.
So we're kind of seeing this mimicking the early mainstream podcast production period, which is 2014 to 2017, was dominated by public radio veterans, comedians and independent hobbyists with technical skills.
The second phase was podcasting's breakthrough period, marked by the, of course, huge success by serial in 2014.
The middle transition period, 17 to 20, witnessed a dramatic professionalization of podcast production as venture capital, advertising dollars and established media companies entered the space. And with that, we also saw an increase in production standards and media corporations dedicating podcast studios in emerging major markets. And the recent transformation, which I guess you can think of as 2020 and into the present, has seen podcast production become more accessible and more complex at the same time. This present phase might be considered as podcasting's maturation era, characterised by platforms, visualization and an integration into broader media ecosystems. During this period, podcasting has evolved from a primary mobile, audio only asynchronous medium to a multi platform, increasingly visual and more interactive experience.
The producer landscape has diversified dramatically with podcasting becoming a standard communication channel across many sectors, journalism and entertainment to education, healthcare, government and corporate communication. This evolution reflects what legal scholar Tim Wu describes as the cycle, the typical progression of information technologies from somebody's hobby to somebody's industry, from open to closed systems. So we're just seeing what we might have thought of as this unique medium is now just doing what different mediums have done before.
I won't dwell too much on statistics, but I'll just give you a bit of a flavour. As of 2024, there are over 5 million podcasts worldwide with more than 70 million episodes. Episodes. In Australia, where I'm based, we have a particularly strong podcast adoption. We're the biggest consumers of podcasts in the world, surpassing the US recently now reaching 6 million weekly listeners. And there's 25 million of us. Almost half of Australians aged 18 to 34 have listened to a podcast in the last month.
That's huge. The average weekly listening time in Australia is 7.3 hours. In Canada, monthly podcast listening has grown from 26% of adults to 39 in the past year. So it's really a medium that is punching pretty high and really worth examination in scholarship. So I want to come back now to explore intimacy a little bit more and kind of delve into that.
So these numbers reflect not just growth, but transformation.
A medium that has evolved from a niche audio format to a mainstream multisensory experience that's reshaping how stories are told and consumed. The topic of intimacy as that's been frequently named as one of the draw cards in attracting both high numbers of consumption and extended listening, also known as audience engagement. In 2016, I wrote the paper Personal Narrative Journalism and Podcasting, which was written shortly after Serial.
So it's kind of again, interesting to go back and see what seems so unique. It's much more mainstream now. I argue that podcasting draws from radio's capacity to privilege the unique and emotional qualities of the human voice. Sharing personal experiences is driving personal storytelling. So again, this very personal experience of listening. I described how the medium creates a personalised listening space through headphones that further accommodates the bond between voices in the story and the listener. This observation builds on a long tradition of recognizing radio's intimate qualities. Andrew Crissel, in his important 1994 text Understanding Radio, I remember looking at that when I was doing my PhD, described radio as the most intimate of mediums. Susan Douglas argued that far from being blind, radio invokes rich imagery in listeners minds.
Podcasting as an evolution of radio intensifies these intimate qualities.
The medium has been described as creating supercharged intimacy.
We become completely comfortable with people wearing headphones everywhere they go, which means that we have very close listening behaviors. Earbuds. Think about this. The earbuds are inside your body.
We're actually including audio of someone else inside our body. No wonder we think of it as intimate.
In my research, I've identified several key dimensions of intimacy in podcasting. That discussion distinguish it from other media forms. First, there's that physical intimacy of the listening experience itself. As Ellen Uret notes in her book Podcasting as an intimate medium, podcasting intimacy fits within a tradition of scholarship that describes media interaction in terms of their intimate haptics. Sound waves physically moves part of the ear, creating a literal physical connection between content and listener. That's just mind boggling, right? Second, there's the temporal intimacy of the asynchronous, on demand nature of podcast consumption. Unlike live radio, podcasts meet listeners on their terms, during commuting, while exercising, during household chores, or in moments of relaxation.
Third, there's a narrative intimacy created through storytelling techniques. Many podcasts, particularly narrative ones, employ what Spinelli and Dan call the authenticity of engagement, inviting audiences into intimate conversational experiences rather than broadcasting to the masses, which is what radio was doing. Fourth, there's the emotional intimacy fostered by the human voice itself. Voices convey warmth, empathy, and personality in ways that text cannot. It provides an antidote to loneliness. These dimensions of intimacy create powerful affordances for podcasters, particularly in journalism. The intimacy of the medium also facilitates transparency about the journalistic process.
Many nonfiction investigative podcasts use journalists as sources and characters to allow audiences into how journalism actually works. This builds trust through what Padormo sitting in this room and Rodriguez Rulo calls perform transparency. Furthermore, podcast intimacy enables emotional authenticity that can be difficult to achieve in more traditional media formats. Finally, podcasting intimacy creates space for underrepresented voices and perspectives.
Raul Rodriguez Ortiz and Manuel Fernandez Sanders analysis of Ibero American podcasts reveal how narrative strategies, including personal life stories and sound archives, enhance emotional resonance and help address underrepresented voices. So that brings us to the risks and ethical challenges that are flagged. There's a risk of emotional manipulation. In focus groups with Czech podcast listeners, participants express concerns that when music is too depressing or dramatic, or when pauses are included, listeners can feel emotionally drained and manipulated or pushed to feel something. This raises questions about journalistic ethics and the boundaries between emotional engagement and emotional manipulation. There's a risk of blurring facts and fiction. As Elvira Garcia de Torres and colleagues warn, emotional truth in podcast journalism can blur boundaries between fiction and reality, raising ethical challenges regarding objectivity. They interviewed journalists producing daily news podcasts and documentaries, and their work revealed the complex negotiations required to maintain professional standards while fostering audience connections. And then, of course, what we've just talked about with S Town, there's a risk of exploitation through intimate access to vulnerable subjects.
McLemore died without explicitly consenting to the podcast being about him rather than the murder he first contacted the producers about.
Was it ethical for Reid to reveal personal details about McLemore's sexuality that he had shared off the record. And there's a risk of uncritical trust through parasocial relationship and of course, the way that we feel really connected.
When listeners feel that they know the hosts on a personal level, they may be less likely to critically evaluate the information being presented. This is particularly concerning in an area of declining media trust and increased polarisation.
What's clear is that intimacy in podcasting is neither inherently good or bad. It's a powerful affordance that can be used for diverse purposes, from building empathy and understanding to reinforcing partisan divides.
So let's delve a little bit more into the questions about trust and the fascinating relationship between intimacy and trust in podcasting. People have developed long standing relationship with podcast hosts. These are called parasocial relationships where listeners feel that they know the host personally despite never having met them. I actually remember feeling a sense of loss when I'd finished listening to S Town. I'd spend so much time with these voices and the music and as the final episode finished I just thought, oh, they're not going to be in my life anymore. That's an example of this parasocial relationship. They'd been deeply embedded in my head and my heart. The concept of parasocial interaction was first described by Horton and wall back in 56, but in the context of podcasting, the understanding has evolved significantly.
As MacDougall argued in 2011, podcasts may be part of an evolution in parasocial phenomena and a fundamentally new form of mediated interpersonal communication. And I do think that the work that Gabriela and her colleague did on the New York Times Caliphate Podcast is really interesting, showing that how the host Callum Maci engaged in performative transparency, revealing the journalistic process, including things that the kind of milk that she had in her coffee, etc. Creating this sense of connection, sharing behind the scenes decisions, disclosing personal reflections and reactions to developments in the story as they explain quote by discussing her methods, motives and feelings, Kalimachi creates a sense of intimacy with the listener that can build trust while also giving the journalist greater authority. And this kind of work represents a significant shift in journalistic practice, one that aligns with broader cultural trends towards storytelling authenticity and personal connection. Several other factors distinguish podcast mediated parasocial relationship from those in other media. The direct to ear nature of podcast consumption creating this hyper intimacy. Coming back to the Czech research focus groups that I mentioned, one of the participants explained, quote, I feel that the unique feature of the podcast is its form itself. The host speaks softly in your ear. It's basically a privileged discussion, which I can have privately with a friend somewhere in the corner of a coffee shop. The extended duration of podcast episodes and serialized content allows for deeper relationships developing over time. And of course, there's lots of work that's been done on Netflix and other streaming services. We don't just spend a documentary amount of time. We spend hours and hours and hours with both hosts and interviewees. We do the binge listening. And of course, this subscription model creates ongoing engagement where podcast listeners actively choose to continue a relationship with a host over time. These parasocial relationships have significant implications for trust in audio journalism, as Whittle observed in a 2023 study of the gratification of daily news podcast listening. Podcasts help build communities and make listeners feel and affiliation to them. But there's also a tension between intimacy and professional standards in journalism. As I've mentioned. This tension is evident in what researchers have identified in a shift in journalistic roles. Harnichen Vos in 2017 argued that journalists are becoming marketeers, service providers, friends networks, networkers, mood managers, inspirers, and coaches. This represents a significant departure from the emotional, detached association with professional journalism in the 1970s and the 1980s. So let's think about what's happening now. The Rise of Video Podcasts Perhaps the most significant transformation in podcasting over the past 18 months to two years has been the shift from audio only to, increasingly visual formats. It represents both an evolution and, some might argue, a fundamental reconfiguration of what makes podcasting distinctive. The statistics are striking. YouTube reported 1 billion monthly podcast users in March 2025, making it the dominant podcast platform globally. Who accesses podcasts on YouTube in this room? Anyone? It's a generational thing, right? YouTube is now the most used platform globally, surpassing Spotify and Apple Podcast Australia. We still have Spotify as number one. We do a lot of commuting, so video is not quite as easy. 43% of monthly podcast listeners report watching video podcasts. 43%. Almost half video podcasts on YouTube receive 28% more engagement than audio only podcast content. Now this data is from the platforms themselves. It is really interesting, something that we need to start looking at, particularly people who do podcast studies where we mostly have been looking at the audio, we've been analyzing the audio. So what is driving this shift towards visual formats? Well, there's three main reasons for it. Enhanced discoverability.
It is very hard to share audio on social media. Even those early audiograms that you might have seen where you've got A still a tile and you've got embedded audio, people just aren't sharing it. If you've got a bit of video, off it goes. The YouTube algorithms and search capabilities make podcast content more discoverable than on audio only platforms.
YouTube makes it easier for new audiences to discover podcasts organically, especially compared to audio only. Searchability has long been an issue for podcasting. I have spent hours of my life looking for podcasts that someone has told me about not being able to find them. You know how people share podcasts? You hold up your smartphone and say, oh, it's this one, it's this tile. So there's a huge reason why people are shifting to YouTube. Second, stronger audience connection. And again, this is an area that I think requires a lot more research.
So the research suggests that the visualization of podcasts may actually intensify rather than diminish the parasocial relationship that is so central to the medium's appeal. As I said, 67% of podcast viewers cite feeling more connected to the hosts as a primary reason for watching rather than listening. This is according to a 2023 Nielsen survey. This trend is particularly pronounced amongst younger demographics. 71% of Gen Z podcast consumers prefer video formats, compared to 43 of millennials and 29 of Gen X. And it's really interesting, especially considering my previous arguments that the intimacy and human voice are the draw card of podcast listening. One of Australia's most popular podcasts, the Imperfects, reported 34% higher engagement rates for video content compared to audio only. The social media integration and shareability. As I said, short video clips can be shared more easily in Australia. Specifically, TikTok has become a significant driver of podcast discoverability.
But the visualization trend is not without its skeptics. The shift to video also introduces new production challenges and costs. Video podcast production costs on average 2 1/2 times higher than audio only production. I just want to mention Spotify, and if any of you are engaging with audio only podcasts on Spotify, you will have seen now that you've got video embedded. Spotify's introduction of video podcasts provides a case study in the transition from audio only to video or a combination of the two. And I think this is a very interesting point. So Spotify has created a seamless experience for switching between video and audio formats. When users press switch to audio, the app loads an audio specific file to reduce data transfer. So what we're hearing from audience research is that people might be watching at home press switch to audio as they walk out the door. So it's a switching between the different mixed media mixed platform.
I use the Whisper Sync on Kindle a lot because I like to both read and listen to audiobooks. So again, it's a similar kind of thing. You might do one part of consumption in one setting, whereas if I'm in a different environment in a car, for example, I want to listen. I think really considering the Podcasting's intimate format creates both opportunities and challenges for journalistic practice. The opportunities, as mentioned, includes enhanced storytelling capabilities, deeper audience connection, and the ability to address social justice issues more effectively.
However, studies also identify significant risks, including the potential for parasocial relationship to compromise journalistic integrity, the challenge of maintaining professional standards whilst fostering audience connections, and the possibility of reinforcing echo chambers rather than bridging societal divides.
The boundaries between media formats are increasingly blurred and this is an example of that. Visualization of podcasting represents both opportunities and challenges. The video format offers enhanced audience connection according to this early data that we've seen better discovery through algorithms and increased social sharing. They also introduce higher production costs and potential creative constraints.
This transformation raises important questions about the future of podcasting as a medium. Will the shift to video fundamentally alter what makes podcasting distinctive, or will it simply add a new dimension to an evolving medium?
Research by Italian scholar Tiziano Bonini suggests that podcasting should be understood as a hybrid cultural form that remediates not only radio, but a whole range of earlier media technologies in different aspects.
This hybrid understanding might help us make sense of podcasting's ongoing evolution without getting caught in unproductive debates about what real podcasting is or is not or should be.
[00:31:53] Speaker A: That was Mia Lindgren, Visiting speaker and Adjunct professor at RMIT University and University of Tasmania in Australia.
The CPI focuses on audio storytelling as a way to better include underrepresented voices.
Our podcast is produced on the homeland to the Niitsitapi, the Blackfoot Confederacy, the Ithka Story, Nakoda Nation, and the Sutina Nation. This land is also home to the Metis Nation of Alberta Districts 5 and 6.
We would also like to recognize the land that Lindgren's work was done on the unceded lands of the Paloa in Tasmania.
As media creators, we strive to uplift the voices of Indigenous peoples while strengthening our commitment to diverse and inclusive audio storytelling.
You can learn more about the cpi@thepodcaststudio ca or on social media communitypod yyc Once again, I'm Emma Miller and thanks for listening to the Community Podcast Initiative. See you next time.
