The Whole History of Podcasting in Under 11 Minutes

So here’s the thing about podcasts. It seems like they are all new. Right?  You need a smart phone to listen to them…there’s a bunch of huge celebrities making podcasts now…people don’t read books any more…plus the whole idea of listening by yourself, with headphones on, while you’re jogging, or cleaning your house or something, all feels very…modern.

But in fact, podcasts represent a form of communication that’s as old as time itself. 

Do any of these titles ring a bell? Homer’s Odyssey, The Iliad, 1001 Nights, the Torah, the Quran, the Old Testament, The Epic of Gilgamesh, all the original Greek Tragedies, The Bible…Turtle Island, the list goes on. Every culture, every language, every religion…they all have their own version. 

And while we can think of them as religious texts, or ancient tales of adventure, or even, grandiose exaggerations of an event…what they all are, originally, is stories…and more specifically, they were oral stories. 

Over time, they have been written down, codified, modified and then adopted by different religions, cultures or an academic institutions.

These stories, these texts, were not written down for hundreds years, maybe even thousands, of years. Back in 587AD, they were told. Long before the Gutenberg Printing Press began to mass produce books, which was not until the early 1400s, they were shared at gatherings, around the campfires, in an amphitheater, in a court. 

Oral storytelling is the original way that humanity shared important information. It’s how we created heroes to worship, how we warned of danger, how we told our children about the adversity we faced. Since the beginning of time.  

So while podcasting feels new, and radio feels very old-timey…what’s clear is that any measure, listening to stories is absolutely hardwired into our very being. 

So if you want to get technical, the idea of sitting around listening to a story, rather than reading it or watching it, is, in fact, the oldest form of communication, and entertainment, and knowledge transfer.

Maybe that’s why podcasts, and audiobooks, appeal to so many people. Because in some way, they’re able to access our deepest cultural roots.  

A little broadcast lesson here: if we talk about mass media, that is, the ability to transmit voice (and later image) over the air, via broadcast signal, which is from one to many, one signal to many devices…radio was the original method of broadcast. 

Guglielmo Marconi, an Italian inventor, sent the first over the air radio transmission in 1897. 

Marconi’s invention caught steam, and by the 1920s, AM radio signals were being sent over long distances, which was the beginning of the Radio Era.

By the 1930-40s, radio started to become a place for both breaking news AND entertainment. My grandmother, who was born in 1908, used to tell stories of her family gathering around the radio at the same time each week to hear the latest edition of the family-friendly music-variety show of the day.

And what’s interesting is that the invention of television actually shares a similar timeline, it was also invented in the early 1900s, and by the 1940s and 50s, television shows were being broadcast widely, but it took longer for television to become popular, like it is now. Why is that? Well, tvs were expensive. And there wasn’t a giant amount of programming available…and it also wasn’t available everywhere. 

We get to the 1970s, and  television was king. By then, lots of people could afford them, and now, there was plenty of entertainment. Sitcoms, game shows, news hours. Dramas, soap operas…there was something for everyone, available on a weekly schedule, which was published in the TV Guide.  

As television geared up, radio switched gears; people listened differently to the radio than they watched television. Public radio flourished - they wanted news and information, call-in shows and popular music to play in their cars while they drive.

As satellite technology became affordable for broadcast networks began to launch entire platforms of content - so that was around the turn of the century. 10 and 20 different shows around themes - like Home Improvement, or Cooking, or History. 

And then new television companies like HBO, began to disrupt what television looked like. Instead of a weekly episodes, new series like The Sopranos and 6 Feet Under were told by the season. In a way, they stole this format from Soap Operas, a never ending story. Except that they did end… By the end of its run, The Sopranos was 6 seasons and 86 hours long. Now that’s a story.

In 1995, the NPR station called WBEZ in Chicago, allowed a young Ira Glass to experiment with a new kind of radio story: ones that were told through a narrator, and didn’t shy away from odd events or uncomfortable moments. This how became This American Life, which was syndicated to over 500 NPR stations across the US in 1996.  

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Then somewhere around the year 2005, RSS was created. RSS  stands for Real Simple Syndication. And the concept is that with a small string of code, these different shows, which used to be called radio, could each have a unique URL, or individual internet address. And each of these addresses would contain the information it needed to‘ deliver’ directly to all the people that requested it - so, it would be delivered from a server computer, to an individual computer. 

And while that sounds kind of boring, what this actually meant was the Internet could now, effectively, act as a broadcaster. And it could distribute, based on a set of criteria and demands, an audio file on demand, at any time, from one location to another. 

The thing you need to know about broadcasting, is that it’s expensive, it’s highly regulated, ie you need to have a broadcast license, which is a complicated and expensive thing to obtain… but now, this simple technology - a small piece of code - could effectively deliver, sort of like broadcasting, content.

Real Simple Syndication, or RSS, turned out to be a major disruptive technology, and it was how the podcast industry was built.

During the first ten years that RSS existed, which was basically 2005-2015, the world of podcasting slowly came to life. At first, it was very small and quite niche. 

The big radio players were first to use it. And here I mean NPR, the BBC, the CBC, the ABC in Australia…they began to repurpose their radio shows into podcast episodes. 

And then some savvy individuals realized they could do this too…after all,  the barrier to entry was just figuring out how to create your own show and distribute it. This was a radical departure from the traditional broadcast world. It didn’t require much beyond a computer and a microphone. So here, the world of podcasting began to grow, but slowly. 

In 2007, the first iPhone was released. It had a brand new thing in there: a podcast app, baked right into the homepage. But it took few years for these to catch on….they were also very expensive. But somewhere around 2010-2012, iPhones, and now other smart phones, moved from being a luxury device, to commonplace.

Then in 2014, another disruption came. It was also from WBEZ, the offices of This American Life. It was an audacious experiment. These producers decided to borrow an old radio concept, from the 1950s…it was basically a murder mystery story… “one story, told week by week.” 

And that show was Serial. From there, the modern version of True Crime was born, or perhaps it’s more accurate to say, re-born.

To date, more than 300 million people have downloaded Serial…And just for some reference, it took until around 2007 for the Super Bowl, the biggest television event of the year, to hit 100 million viewers. 

Despite the success of Serial, podcasts grew slowly at first, and then by 2018, the market exploded.

Comedy shows, game shows, celebrity interview shows, self-help shows, shows to help teach you how to launch a business, a giant array of true crime…there are now billions of podcasts, about everything and anything. 

So now that you know basically all there is to know about podcasting, let’s set that aside for a moment.

In this course, we’re going to focus on how to tell ONE particular kind of podcast, which is a short narrative podcast.