Exploring the Frontiers of Media: Dr. David Dowling on the Evolution of Podcast Journalism and Its Impact on Modern Storytelling
Interview: Dr. David Dowling discusses his book, “Podcast Journalism”
David Dowling, Ph. D., is a professor at the University of Iowa’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication. His research in digital media and journalism centers on developments in publishing industries that drive markets and cultural production.
We (Kyle and Nick) have known Dowling for over a decade and have been consistently blown away by his research. One of the many reasons we remain impressed by him is that he strives to make his research accessible to people in and outside of higher education. So whether Dowling is writing about Moby Dick’s contemporary relevance (Chasing the White Whale: The Moby-Dick Marathon; or, What Melville Means Today) or the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (A Delicate Aggression: Savagery and Survival in the Iowa Writers' Workshop), his books are richly researched experiences that anyone can experience.
Knowing that his latest book, Podcast Journalism: The Promise and Perils of Audio Reporting, would be another homerun for this scholar, we wanted to interview him for The Electric Knowledge Foundation.
Electric Knowledge Foundation: Tell me your story. How did you get involved in academia? What drove you to join?
Dr. David Dowling: My lifelong obsession with all kinds of media landed me in this role. I was always interested in how media industries operated; even as a kid, my friends and I couldn’t just go to a rock concert to party but would typically go in order to dissect the production values of the event afterward. In some ways, we savored the capacity to see through the illusion and how it was constructed more so than the music itself.
I took that same approach to literature and narrative journalism, which I studied via the publishing apparatus and industrial mechanism behind the production of celebrities as a graduate students and beyond, into my first academic job. So my research on media, communication, and culture always was concerned with narrative journalism, and increasingly I’ve turned my attention to digital media forms, such as podcasting.
EKF: As of now, what are your favorite podcasts?
Dowling: You Didn’t See Nothin’ by the Invisible Institute is remarkable and arresting. I was on the panel that adjudicated its first award, an Ellie from the American Society of Magazine Editors, prior to it winning the Pulitzer Prize for Audio Journalism in 2024. This is advocacy nonprofit journalism par excellence, that brings a racially motivated assault in the south side of Chicago during the 1990s to life, exposing the bizarre concatenations of city politics and the municipal justice system of the windy city.
EKF: What was the inspiration for creating Podcast Journalism: The Promise and Perils of Audio Reporting?
Dowling: I had been publishing several research articles with Kim Fox (American University in Cairo) and Kyle Miller (Northwestern Missouri State University) and noticed that the burgeoning field of podcast studies was intersecting in interesting ways with the field of digital journalism studies. A true hybrid approach had yet to be attempted in a book-length project, which prompted the decision to try my hand.
EKF: While conducting research for the book, did you come across bits of information that surprised you?
Dowling: I was stunned that Michael Barbaro of NYT’s The Daily had made such a concerted effort to soften media coverage of the Caliphate debacle, which was arguably the publisher’s most spectacular failure in the 21st century. The breach of ethics occurred when the source for Caliphate–a young man living in Canada who claimed to have been a member of ISIS–turned out to be a fraud. The show’s hosts suspected trouble mid-way through but elected to continue despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
EKF: Broadly speaking, podcasts increased in popularity from 2008 through the 2010s. This coincided with the ZIRP era. This was the period between 2008 and 2022, during which interest rates were near zero. This cheap money allowed investors to financially float myriad media businesses. How do you think the Federal Reserve ending cheap money has impacted news podcasts?
Dowling: I’m sure it factored in, but I can say the bigger development from 2010-2024 has been with platformization, especially through the monopolistic tactics of Apple and Spotify to seize control over the market.
The market has actually grown more lucrative over those years, but these two platforms have absorbed the majority of the revenue.
EKF: In Podcast Journalism you write, “one of the strengths of the podcast medium, especially for traditionally marginalized groups, lies in the fact that it is untethered from social media.” This seems counter-intuitive, considering that all of the top podcasts have clips that go viral on YouTube, TikTok, and other social media platforms. So, do you believe it is possible to have a popular podcast that is disconnected from social media?
Dowling: Kim Fox, Kyle Miller, and I received a peer review of a draft manuscript of our article on Black podcasting that opened our minds. In the study, we had been critical certain podcasts for not “using social media” to their advantage, until the reviewer raised the point that one of the advantages of podcasting is that it isn’t social media–and essentially does not depend on it for its livelihood–thus casting listener communities as liberated from the screen-based and heavily gamified designed features.
Podcasting has always been transmediated and listeners of course turn to discussion on social media to ruminate on topics. True crime fans constitute some of the most active online communities on the internet today. Our reviewer alerted us to the fact that podcasting does not need social media to survive, nor do producers solely rely on it to expand its reach.
EKF: When people interested in launching their own podcast read Podcast Journalism, what are some key insights you hope they pull from the text?
Dowling: People should gain a rich understanding of the industry and the reality of platform domination, that nonetheless have not prevented such producers as The Invisible Institute and Latino USA to thrive. A healthy dose of inspiration can come from the imaginative approaches to usering in intellectual culture represented in increasingly sophisticated, culturally relevant content such as Floodlines and The Last Archive.
EKF: What are some podcasts that you believe are the best examples of podcast journalism? Why?
Dowling: The Daily by the New York Times is of course the standard bearer for daily news that probes beneath the headlines. It demonstrated that deep dives could be possible on a daily cycle, which its host Micheal Barbaro could deliver mainly through access to the stable of reporters at the Times who could speak to the nuances of the news stories they had prepared. The show remains the “new front page” of the Times given its massive audience that exceeds that of its print and screen-based digital publications.
The Daily continues to be the standard bearer for excellence in daily news podcast production, especially in pieces such as “Voices of the Unvaccinated,” released during the pandemic. The series of carefully reported profiles rendered each subject’s story in a what that highlighted how race, social class, and access to health care mitigated their decisions. The continuum of voices—and their socioeconomic circumstances—deeply humanized the stories of the unvaccinated thus complicating the public debate at the time.
For podcasts operating on a slower news cycle, The 1619 Project’s audio series hosted by Nikole Hannah-Jones was lauded by critic Nick Quah as “a formal reimagining of what an audio essay can be.” Humanity plays a major role here as journalistic features clearly begin to move into the territory of literary nonfiction by allowing narrativity to take over along with subjectivity, emotion, and self-reflexivity.
Other exemplary work can be found in the oeuvre of Brain Reed, who has emerged as a master of the craft with S-Town, and The Trojan Horse Affair, which is arguably the greatest work of his career. The true crime podcast genre’s standouts include Natalie Baran, who’s In the Dark investigates the investigators, and thus performs a true public service to communities plagued by unsolved crimes known as cold cases, in which police failed to make any arrests. Overall, there is an embarrassment of riches in podcast journalism, work that serves the public interest, commands massive audiences, and is capable of ascending to the status of literature with its crafted narratives.
EKF: How can local papers pivot towards podcasts and helping them to erase some of the news deserts that exist within our country? For example, while the cost of creating pods is relatively low, the learning curve may be steep, particularly for journalists who are already overworked.
Dowling: Local news is moving into this space rapidly. Of course, the playing field is uneven and favors large production companies and platforms. But the more savvy local radio stations have discovered podcasting as a way of staying relevant and generating revenue. Audio reporting’s pivot to podcasting is indicative of how longform documentary storytelling can offer a boon amid drains on revenue caused by the systemic imbalance of platformization. Audio industry challenges reflect what is happening to media on a broader scale. Rather than a volatile ad industry being the cause, the problem is rooted in the deep structural imbalance in digital publishing.
As WBUR Boston CEO Margaret Low explained, “The old economics of our business can no longer sustain us,” given the ever-expanding percentage of ad revenue soaked in by platforms. “In the digital age,” Low noted, “almost all that money now goes to the big platforms—like Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Spotify. This is bad news for the business and has created big gaps that can’t easily be filled.”
But one way of filling those gaps for broadcasters is to reallocate resources toward podcast production. Colorado Public Radio CEO Stuart Vanderwilt adopted precisely this strategy. “We are shifting our focus to news-based podcast products…at the intersection of news and longform storytelling,” he said.
His rationale for this decision lay in the organization’s original strength in news reporting along with its rich archive of stories that could be repurposed as documentary longform podcasts, in some cases capable of serialization. Vanderwilt explained that “we have a lot of the base material in original news that we’ve produced, which can then be used in a podcast or on-demand type project.” The commercial advantages of this pivot to digital narrative podcasting in 2024 resonates with Sports Illustrated’s Going Deep department in 2012.
Also seeking to gain readership through longform storytelling, the legacy sports magazine similarly mined its archive of stories dating back to the 1950s to repurpose as multimedia “Snow Fallen” features. This tactic for economic survival aimed at developing on-demand, unbundled immersive storytelling continues to be a keynote sounded in news industries from print legacy news media’s shift to digital in 2012 to broadcast radio’s attempt to avert hemorrhaging revenue to platforms a dozen years later in 2024.
EKF: What are some examples of successful journalism podcasts that changed how journalists approached this work?
Dowling: The stock answer is Sarah Koenig’s Serial and Ira Glass’s This American Life, which indeed deserve credit for transforming the medium from unimaginative production practices—a few folks chatting into a mic—to carefully orchestrated sound design and self-referential reportage willing to expose its vulnerabilities. But another series of podcasts predating Serial emerged from Black Twitter in the 2010s.
This network, led by Elon James White’s TWIB!, traces back to 2008. One can trace a lineage from these shows to the influx of marginalized voices into the audio space, that now flourishes in productions such as Ear Hustle, an wildly popular and critically acclaimed podcast on daily prison life. The show is produced by inmates themselves and stands out for its extraordinary humanity, wit, narrativity, and masterful sound design.
EKF: Finally, what else are you working on that people can look forward to?
Dowling: I’m currently working on a book on brand journalism across media that treats journalistic narrative produced by not only commercial companies, but advocates, nonprofits, and government agencies. These groups increasingly produce their own media rather than generating press releases with the hope of gaining news coverage otherwise known as earned publicity.
Brand journalism is a curious hybrid between PR and advertising that is visible in the content studios attached not only to legacy news publishers, but also born digital outlets and startups. As with podcasting, it represents a new and rapidly expanding frontier for narrative journalism, which can be ethically used to edify audiences or deceptively as a means of manipulation.
Remember, you can check out Dr. Dowling’s latest book here.