I’ve had two posts in my head now for so long that the passage of time has changed their meaning quite significantly. The first one was a post about podcasts. It was inspired by Serial, the series that launched a thousand podcasts and that showed that serious investigative journalism and public concentration spans are perhaps not quite as dead as we might have feared. Thinking back, I know that I was planning the post in my head at least as long ago as the start of the second season – so a full year.
My original idea was to think a little about what the style of the show offered to academic writing, and then to think about potential of the format. The second half at least feels as though it has become irrelevant – over the course of the year podcasts have become almost ubiquitous. My mum got me to install the right apps on my dad’s phone, academic podcasts seem to be proliferating quite fast, and it feels as though everyone & their dog hosts a show now. The original thinking that inspired the post included musing on the possibility of launching my own podcast: I think I’ve missed the boat there but more positively (I think), the volume of things I listen to is growing at a rate that threatens to exceed my weekly capacity to listen to them all.

As for what the content of Serial can tell us as academics, I think there are a few lessons. Firstly, its success shows that there is an audience for serious work, presented in a suitable format. The Partially Examined Life (a philosophy podcast) mentioned a while ago that they had some really staggering number of downloads per episode – hundreds of thousands I think it was. In terms of approach, the two seasons of Serial were quite different – the first one had the hook of suspense, turning listeners into detectives, revealing the power of a narrative arc to keep people paying attention. The second one (which seems from my network of friends etc to have been less well received) developed less of a storyline, but looked at the same set of events from multiple perspectives and levels, each one revealing new insights. Both approaches suggest ways of making academic work more engaging and communicative, I think. 

Daisy Ridley and Elijah Wood both mentioned on a podcast that shall remain nameless that the hosts of your regular shows come to feel like friends over time. This certainly holds true for me – indeed, more than that: last summer we got someone to house sit for us who I knew as the occasional host of a podcast I listen to. The podcasts I listen to include a lot of radio shows made available as a download, as well as a few academic seminar series which are recorded and put online, in addition to shows created directly to be podcasts. Probably more of them are politics/journalism rather than academics, but all the same it’s easy to see how the format could be well suited to scholarship – simple discussion formats – whether a couple of presenters and a weekly guest, or a more consistent circle of regulars with a coordinating figure – represent really effective ways of expressing individual views and drawing out new insights. With the traditional journal model of research dissemination creaking pretty heavily under the weight of expectations of the industry, and more and more expected from academics in terms of public engagement and access, blogs and podcasts seem like quite interesting ways of adding to the network of scholarly debate and opening it up to a wider audience and range of participants.*

* As I understand it, in economics blogs and the comments that they provoke is already recognised as a site where some of the most interesting ideas are being explored, even by some of the most significant figures in the field.