One of my very favorite places on the Internet is The Sound of Young America, a one-man radio show/podcast by twentysomething Jesse Thorn. Its business-card description is “a public radio show about things that are awesome,” and it mostly meets that bill; imagine Fresh Air aimed at a younger audience and focusing almost exclusively on smart, interesting, creative people — musicians, comedians, writers, actors, and the like. Some of his recent guests include Jeffrey Tambor (most recently brilliant as George Bluth on Arrested Development), The Daily Show’s Larry Wilmore and Rob Corddry, comic-book theorist Scott McCloud, Calexico singer/songwriter Joey Burns, and book-cover designer Chip Kidd. That guest list won’t appeal to everybody, but in my case it’s a pretty good gazetteer of my brain’s pleasure centers.

While I’m a fan, I’m also interested in Jesse as a model for a new kind of media-producing lifestyle. Not so long ago, if you wanted to host an interview program on public radio and reach people beyond your local station’s 5,000-watt transmission tower, your best hope was changing your name to “Terry Gross” and hoping no one listening at home noticed. The path to an audience went through a traditional media organization. And while those organizations could provide resources and security — plus, one hopes, a degree of quality control — they also served as a chokepoint limiting talent. How many people out there could host a Fresh Air-quality show for NPR? I don’t know the answer, but I know it’s greater than one.

The Internet, of course, wrecks that old model, for good and for ill. And The Sound of Young America strikes me as one of the success stories of that transition — one that has lessons for folks interested in harder news.

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As promised yesterday, here’s Part 1 of my interview with Jesse Thorn, the host of public radio’s The Sound of Young America. (Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say “The Sound of Young America podcast,” given what Jesse says below about his interactions with both the public radio mainstream and his devoted core audience online.) Here we talk about the show’s philosophy, how his audiences guide his choices, and how he supports himself. Among the topics we cover:

— How having a show on dozens of public radio stations can still only generate about $10,000 a year;
— How showing your mistakes can build listener loyalty;
— How a truly dedicated audience can turn into a business model; and
— How an NPR voice can get you a beautiful wife.

You can listen to it by pressing play in the audio player below, or by downloading the MP3 directly here.

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There’s also a full transcript below. Keep reading »

Here’s Part 2 of my interview with Jesse Thorn, the host of public radio’s The Sound of Young America. (Here’s my intro post and Part 1.)

In this part of our conversation, we talk about the state of the radio business — both commercial and public — and its unwillingness to imagine a truly new model for how it could succeed. It’s a problem he sees in many creative professions whose business models are being wrecked by the Internet:

…everyone [in the music industry seems] to be working so hard to try and make it the ’70s again. And all their new ideas were driven towards: How can we get it back to the ’70s? Rather than: What’s the best thing that we can do given reality? They’re trying to figure out, as [Jesse's friend Merlin Mann] put it, how to get Led Zeppelin to back that limousine full of money from Led Zeppelin III up to their door again.

A lot of the media world is like that right now. It’s people trying to — to the extent that people are being creative, it’s them being creative in an attempt to find creative ways to get back to where they were before, when they were sitting pretty.

I should mention that a healthy part of this conversation centers around Adam Carolla, the radio host who has transformed himself into the world’s most popular podcaster. Carolla is best known to many as a Howard Stern type — a producer of brash, scatological comedy aimed at the most reptilian, walnut-sized part of the 14-year-old male brain. And it’s true that much of his work is less than sophisticated. Actually, a lot less than sophisticated. But I agree with Jesse that Carolla is also a smart, talented guy (as is Stern) who breaks the mold of traditional commercial radio in interesting ways. What I’m saying is don’t let your (justified!) disdain for much of what Carolla’s done color your opinions about what he has to say.

You can listen to it by pressing play in the audio player below, or by downloading the MP3 directly here.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

There’s also a full transcript below. Also, for our more delicate readers: There’s a little swearing in the audio. Keep reading »

Here’s the third and final part of my interview with Jesse Thorn, host of public radio’s The Sound of Young America. (Here’s my intro post, Part 1, and Part 2.)

In this excerpt we talk about MaxFunCon, his upcoming weekend convention of fans of his radio show and a mix of former guests and other interesting folks. It sold out in a matter of days.

I think this is actually a big potential area for some media operations; while the Internet has reduced people’s willingness to pay for content, it’s terrific at forging a connection with between the producers and consumers of that content. And, in person, people are a lot more willing to pay for some iteration of that experience.

Think of the music business: Selling the actual music to listeners is much more problematic than it used to be, but many musicians are doing just fine by refocusing their energies more on touring, house parties, personalization, and other ideas that play off the audience’s connection.

Jesse also talks a bit about an interview John Hodgman gave to Wired last year (I wrote about it at the time) that played off that issue of small and passionate audiences vs. big and unengaged ones. I wish I could tattoo what Jesse says about that backwards on the foreheads of news execs, so they’d see it every morning in the mirror.

You can listen to the interview by pressing play in the audio player below, or by downloading the MP3 directly here.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

There’s also a full transcript below. Also, there’s a little bonus coverage at the end. Oh, and a little swearing. Keep reading »