“Nobody has any attention span anymore. Least of all anyone under 40.” Until a few years ago, it seemed that virtually all media watchers, and media makers, agreed on this. Among the most powerful gatekeepers, anyway, the consensus seemed solid.
One of the most gratifying revelations to emerge from the podcast boom of the last few years is that the above article of faith was dead wrong. It’s an especially gratifying discovery if, like me, you love to produce long-form, in-depth, documentary audio.
Yes, the trend took off with Serial’s first season. Twelve episodes, “one story told week by week,” 100 million downloads in no time, etc., etc. Everyone knows that Serial’s success unleashed a new podcast stampede. More specifically, for my purposes here, it threw open the doors to the podcast series. Eight, ten, fourteen parts, a bunch of hours in total — the audio nonfiction (and sometimes fiction) equivalent of a good book, or of the bingeable Netflix series so many of us are burning through. Podcast listeners — who in fact skew younger than in most other media — seem to be saying: Yes, thank you. Take me on a journey. We’re going to take our time, dig into corners, get into the weeds? Sign me up.
So, we’ve got the many true crime series, each show or season tackling a single case (In the Dark, Dirty John, Empire on Blood, Atlanta Monster, Last Seen), while others dive into past political scandals (Slow Burn, Bag Man). In addition, podcasters are making series that explore personal journeys (First Day Back, How to Be a Girl) and historical and social themes (UnCivil, Caught, Scene on Radio’s Seeing White and MEN). There’s fiction and quasi-fiction (Homecoming, The Shadows), and limited series turning on a creative, imaginative device (Everything is Alive).
It turns out that people — well, lots of people, anyway — are hungry for substance. Our attention spans are quite intact, ready, and willing.
My prediction: More podcast series in 2019. (No kidding.) They’ll keep getting better, smarter, deeper, and more varied. Thank god and the inventors of the podcast. Bring ‘em on.
John Biewen is audio program director at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University and host/producer of Scene on Radio.
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Adam B. Ellick Video forensic reporting goes mainstream — and local
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Rick Berke The year of loyalty
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Eric Nuzum The year of the DIY podcast network
Angilee Shah The year news orgs say “yes” to real leaders
Shannon McGregor More bogus embedded tweets in our stories
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John Saroff The pivot to reader revenue’s unintended consequences
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Jake Shapiro Podcasting is media’s slow food movement
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Amy King We should listen to the kids (especially on Instagram)
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Thomas Hanitzsch The rise of tribal journalism
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Chase Davis We can acknowledge what we don’t know
Lauren Katz Community becomes a core newsroom value
Heather Bryant We are responsible for how we use our power
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Dave Burdick Seeing our blind spots
Callie Schweitzer The rise of the conveners
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Juleyka Lantigua Podcasting battles East Coast bias
Seema Yasmin We will create our own spaces
Stephanie Edgerly It’s time to understand the un-audience
Ernie Smith The year we step back from the platform
Jeremy Gilbert AI finally becomes helpful
Simon Galperin After capitalism’s fire, journalism’s secondary succession
Jared Newman AI-generated fakes launch a software arms race
Mat Yurow Content competition from the tech companies
Charo Henríquez Pivot to journalism
Bill Adair Another year fighting Trump’s falsehoods
A.J. Bauer The coming splintering of conservative media
Dan Shanoff Bet on sports gambling
Mike Isaac The old exit doors for digital media companies are closing
Celeste LeCompte Local news needs local conversation to survive
Steve Henn Smart speakers get smarter
Tamar Charney Seriously: What do you do for people?
Libby Bawcombe Haikus of the news
Matt Skibinski Quality and reliability are the new currencies for publishers
Jim Friedlich Meet Citizen Kane 2.0
Alexis Lloyd & Matt Boggie The year product leads media
Simon Rogers Data journalism becomes a global field
AX Mina The death of consensus, not the death of truth
Meredith Artley Huge demand for…anything but politics
Monique Judge Committing to the truth, calling out lies
Sarah Alvarez Simplify and redistribute
Carolina Guerrero Spanish-language audio blows up
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Matt Karolian Publishers come to terms with being Facebook’s enablers
Alexandra Svokos Good luck convincing us millennials to pay
Talia Stroud Engaging people across lines of difference
Don Day Timewalls and other reader revenue experiments
Mike Rispoli and Craig Aaron Government funds local news — and that’s a good thing
Nico Gendron Reaching Generation Z beyond the coasts
Kyra Darnton A shift to depth in video
Andrew Ramsammy The great re-pivot to audio
Catalina Albeanu Being responsible for what we don’t know
Rishad Patel A design system for responsible publishing
Jenée Desmond-Harris It finally sinks in that some people aren’t white
Andrew Donohue Voting rights becomes the new climate change
Jean Friedman Rudovsky Cross-newsroom collaborations strengthen communities
Eric Ulken The year you actually start to like your CMS
Patrick Butler Measuring impact will increase audience trust
Kawandeep Virdee Media wants to take care of you
Rebecca Searles From silos to Swiss Army knife teams
Ruth Palmer and Benjamin Toff From news fatigue to news avoidance
Glyn Mottershead and Martin Chorley When a tech company pulls the plug on your story
Annie Rudd A more intimate aesthetic of politics — on Insta
Elizabeth Dunbar Local reporters reflect on what’s not important
LaToya Drake Listen up: New stories, new storytellers
Jennifer Dargan You don’t build diversity through one-off training sessions
Mike Caulfield Ditch the media literacy cynicism and get to work
Francesco Zaffarano Towards a rethinking of journalism on social media
Nathalie Malinarich Video — yes, video
Salem Solomon Correcting our corrections
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen A long, slow slog, with no one coming to the rescue
Brian Moritz The subscription-pocalypse is about to hit
Elizabeth Bramson-Boudreau A more sincere definition of “community”
Axie Navas The traffic hunt, CMS battle, and magazine identity crises loom
Christa Scharfenberg and Vickie Baranetsky The year of the lawsuit
Heather Chaplin Agree we’re partisan — for the democratic system
Joel Konopo Influencers become the new liberated power in Africa
Steve Grove A reckoning for tech’s work with news
Zainab Khan Publishers whose products can stand up to social media giants will win
Cristi Hegranes A year to invest in the security of local journalists
Zuzanna Ziomecka News leadership gets an overdue upgrade
Manoush Zomorodi Tech will do for information overload what it did for mindfulness
Pia Frey You can’t solve a crisis without treating it as a crisis
Tushar Banerjee Interactive ads will be the new face of display advertising
Elisabeth Goodridge Yes, they signed up — but our job’s not over
Sarah Stonbely Mapping the local news ecosystem — with scale but detail
Alyssa Zeisler We expand what (and how and who) we serve
Marie Shanahan Newsrooms take the comments sections back from platforms
Rebecca Lee Sanchez We are all actors in the running rampant of political theater
Jonas Kaiser Catching up with “Neuland”
Mandy Jenkins Fight the urge to run away from social media
Linda Solomon Wood The year of the climate reporter
Sue Robinson Reporters go on the offensive
Logan Molyneux Seeing social media for what it is
Julie Posetti The year of the fight back
Alexandra Borchardt Newsrooms need to build trust with their journalists, not just the audience
Cherian George Fake news wins in Asia
Candis Callison Learn from Indigenous journalists on covering climate change
Errin Haines Say it with me: Racism
Rodney Gibbs A bright — and young — year for audio
Andrea Faye Hart Doing less harm, not just more good
Justin Kosslyn Text hits a tipping point
Bill Grueskin Toward a symphony model for local news
Hossein Derakhshan The news is dying, but journalism will not — and should not
Reyhan Harmanci Selling more stories to Hollywood
Zizi Papacharissi Old interface, say hello to the new interface
Craig Newmark The end of “loudspeakers for liars”
Kjerstin Thorson Time to get mad about information inequality (again)
Jack Riley Facebook refugees, from ad revenue to news habits
Taylor Lorenz Personal branding is more powerful than ever
Betsy O'Donovan and Melody Kramer The most beautiful sentence in 2019 is “No.”
Michael Grant More newsrooms experiment their way to success
Peter Cunliffe-Jones The focus of misinformation debates shifts south
Robert Hernandez Racists and sexists get replaced
Jesse Holcomb We’ll get better at making the case for local journalism
Ståle Grut A new dawn for 3D tech in journalism
Victor Pickard We will finally confront systemic market failure
Elite Truong What do we owe the next generation?
Geetika Rudra The year of actionable (local) journalism
Kevin D. Grant A year to embrace journalism as public service
Renan Borelli Developing loyalty means developing your talent
Knight Foundation A year of local collaboration
Efrat Nechushtai Journalism wants to be your friend, not your teacher
Renée Kaplan Our future could lie within our own organizations
Adam Thomas In Europe, foundations invest in news
Ben Smith The pendulum starts to swing back
Rachel Davis Mersey Local news goes minimalist
Sarah Marshall A return to destination journalism
Claire Wardle Forget deepfakes: Misinformation is showing up in our most personal online spaces
Almar Latour Reported facts, weaponized in service of action
Cindy Royal For journalism curriculum to change, its faculty needs disruption
Ariel Zirulnick Participation gets professional
Whitney Phillips Our information systems aren’t broken — they’re working as intended
Colleen Shalby Representation becomes more than a talking point
Elva Ramirez News — but make it cinematic
Josh Schwartz A pullback from platforms and a focus on product
Stefanie Murray Local news wakes up and starts collaborating
John Garrett You can’t raise prices forever
Nikki Usher Three ways national media will further undermine trust
Frank Chimero Leave the phone at home and put news on your wrist
Ben Werdmuller The platform tide is turning
P. Kim Bui The misfits become the bosses
Amy Schmitz Weiss Local news isn’t where you thought it was
Kristen Muller Local news fails — in a good way
Laura E. Davis More access, but not that kind
Masuma Ahuja Make foreign coverage less foreign
Gideon Lichfield Goodbye attention economy, we’ll miss you
Shalabh Upadhyay A culture clash on India’s growing Internet
Borja Bergareche Sainz de los Terreros Entering a more balanced era
Emma Carew Grovum The year of the loyal reader
Rachel Glickhouse Newsrooms will prioritize audience needs
Francesco Marconi The year of iterative journalism
Sue Cross Return of the water cooler
Mario García The rise of content “pilots”
Joanne McNeil Building a digital hospice
Nisha Chittal The homepage makes a comeback
Pablo Boczkowski Reimagining the media for post-institutional times