Radio Broadcasting, Podcasting, and “Superbug Media”
“We thought we were doing this little experiment, and it became this huge thing.” —
Sarah Koenig, host and co-producer of the Serial podcast
The Serial podcast is a true crime drama that calls into question the efforts of Adnan
Syed’s defense attorney as well as several elements of the case against him. Syed was convicted
of murdering his former girlfriend Hae Min Lee in January 1999. The podcast analyzes, among
other things, the use of a questionable timeline and questionable witnesses by prosecutors as
well as the failure of Syed’s defense attorney to use a witness who could have provided him
with an alibi. As of 2018, Syed expects to get a new trial, but listeners are split on whether Syed
is guilty. Among other issues, the podcast questions whether Syed’s alibi would hold up in
court. The story was released in serial fashion (that is, one piece at a time), in the autumn of
2014. Listeners were enthralled. This podcast more than any other helped establish the
platform, and advertisers learned that podcasting could be a viable mass medium. The ability
to engage with murder mystery stories is not new. Serial dramas have appeared since the early
days of mass book publishing, but basing a podcast around a real-life murder adds an element
of voyeurism that makes some question the podcast’s social impact. The reporting was
journalistically sound, but what happens when online audiences dissect real tragedies? Such
podcasts are potentially dehumanizing for the story’s subjects even as they show the platform’s
potential. The social and cultural reach of podcasts now rivals that of radio. It is a broad reach
indeed. This chapter discusses the history of radio broadcasting including its potential as a tool
of propaganda, the relationship between radio and the music industry, the social reach of
broadcasting, as well as the rise of podcasting. Finally, persevering podcasts have something
to teach us about how to make successful digital products and brands.
Radio’s Reach
Radio is more than the music or “talk” you are stuck listening to because your auxiliary
cable shorted out. It is a means of transferring great numbers of messages, most of which are
created and disseminated by professionals, to large audiences. Radio does more than entertain
and inform mass audiences. It enables other industries (such as shipping and delivery services)
to work efficiently. The technology serves police and other first responders, as well as various
military functions. This is not to mention the cultural aspect. Pop music on the radio was for
almost a century the soundtrack of American life. Across the world, people make a tradition of
gathering around their radios to experience the World Cup, particularly in areas without reliable
satellite television or broadband internet service. Historically, radio was the most reliable
medium to experience global events. Listen to this update from the 1986 World Cup in Mexico
and imagine what it might have been like to experience the game from half a world away. The
power of radio broadcasting is to connect people instantly across vast spaces. As a broadcast
medium, it helped shape modern society and culture. Radio brought huge audiences together
to listen to the same programs at the same time and made it possible to sell airtime, which
would not exist without the medium. In other words, radio created what is now an $18 billion
advertising industry out of thin air.
Radio Propaganda
Radio created a market where there had been none, but there is a downside to the reach
of broadcasting. Radio’s mass appeal and quick adoption in the developed world made it
possible to influence the public opinion of whole populations at once. One of the most
disturbing uses of radio was to spread Nazi propaganda before and during World War II. With
the technology, the Nazis could reach across national boundaries and try to gain sympathy in
German-speaking communities across Europe. The Nazis also made it illegal to listen to
broadcasts from other countries, particularly Great Britain. Broadcast technology has the power
to influence and mobilize masses of people, but it is important to reiterate the limited effects
paradigm (covered in Chapter 3). Several cultural and social forces have to be at play for
messages in the mass media to help mobilize people to commit genocide. While radio can be
used as a propaganda machine, people still have to believe the propaganda. Mass media
broadcasting is a tool. It can be used for good or ill, and the conditions and proclivities of the
audience affect the level of influence the broadcast media can exert.
Broadcast Technology
Radio waves can transmit sound and speech. Radio communications have helped direct
ships and armies and win world wars. Broadcast radio intended for mass audiences created a
need for information that was not present before. With radio, news can be instantaneous. People
heard about developments in World War II as they were happening, which was not possible
only decades earlier during World War I. Some thought this would bring an end to war because
people would be too close to the pain and devastation of large-scale conflict to have the stomach
for it. This proved to be an insufficient deterrent.
World-altering promises are made with the introduction of almost every new mass
medium. Similar things were promised with the dawn of television and the spread of home
internet access. James W. Carey calls the notion that communication technologies will bring
about peace and understanding the “rhetoric of the electrical sublime.” New communication
technologies do not lead to social utopias. They are both beneficial and disruptive. The
technology of radio followed the development of the telegraph. The world was already
connected. Telegrams communicated complex messages in series of dots and dashes, but by
working wirelessly, radio seemed more like magic. In recent generations, the spread of wi-fi
internet access and wireless electrical charging give some sense of what it felt like to experience
wireless radio for the first time. With the development of small, cheap batteries, the transistor
radio brought rock-and-roll wherever the audience wanted to go. Radio made the instantaneous
transmission of mass messages portable. In the early days, though, radio receivers were
prohibitively expensive and large. They were pieces of furniture that, for the most part, only
wealthy early adopters could afford. David Sarnoff, who led the Radio Corporation of America
(RCA) and later NBC, was one of the first to envision commercial broadcasting. He was
instrumental in the development of commercial radio receiver production. It was necessary to
generate demand first. In the early days of radio, broadcasters tried all sorts of things to make
use of this new medium. Plays, opera performances and live music performances were
broadcast.
As radio receivers became household items and radio broadcasts became more reliable,
radio broadcasters (the large ones in particular) demanded better industry regulation. In the
United States, regulation favored commercial outfits over public broadcasting. In other
countries like the United Kingdom and France, regulations gave the government more control
and responsibility for reaching audiences. To this day, public broadcasting is still more popular
and influential in Western Europe than in the United States. Listen to this BBC Radio
documentary about the Beatles to get a taste of British public radio. In the U.S., Regulation of
the airwaves by the Federal Radio Commission (FRC) and later the Federal Communications
Commission (FCC) helped settle who would broadcast on which channels, but the most
powerful broadcast towers in the world are of little use if people do not tune in. According to
Vinylmint (also linked above in reference to David Sarnoff), the marriage of recorded music
and radio came after radio had become a popular medium for delivering live music and the
Great Depression had killed the value of many record companies. Three developments helped
to establish the ratio as a popular, immediate, in-home mass medium: the development and
promotion of affordable radio receivers, the popularization of radio through broadcasting live
music and radio dramas, and the marriage of the recording and radio broadcast industries.
Broadcasting’s Influence on Recorded Music
In the early 20th century, sheet music was more popular than recorded music. When sheet
music was shared widely, certain songs gained popular status. This is what defined pop music
from the 17th through the 19th centuries. The radio was invented around the turn of the 20th
century with contributions by Guglielmo Marconi and Nikola Tesla, among others. Then, in
the 1940s and 1950s, pop music as we know it was born. Much of pop music in America was
first performed by black artists and was then appropriated by white artists. Blues, jazz and rock-
and-roll music all originated in black American culture. There is a long history in pop music of
artists from a dominant social group taking someone else’s cultural expression and profiting
from it. Different types of music have qualified as pop music throughout the 20th century. Jazz,
rock-and-roll, psychedelic rock, R & B, disco, glam rock, metal, grunge, rap, electronic dance
music and other forms too numerous to categorize have all qualified as “pop” and have often
competed with one another for dominance. Changing technologies drove changing tastes. The
addition of the electric guitar, synthesizer and computerized sampling are just a few key
developments of the 20th century. Radio broadcasting brought technological advancements in
sound into homes, and the recording industry relied on radio to promote sales so that people
could own the music that was most meaningful to them. The disruption that altered the
recording industry is covered in Chapter 6. Podcasting did not disrupt radio broadcasting. In
fact, podcasting in some ways revives radio traditions, such as the successful radio personality,
the forprofit news and talk show, and shows with a deep appreciation for niche music. In the
late 2010s, the most profitable content on broadcast radio is conservative talk radio. It is
bombastic and often mean-spirited, but it is popular among a relatively powerful sector of
society: older, white men. Podcasting opens up avenues for all manner of expression. The
audience for a podcast selected at random may be small, but in the aggregate, there are millions
of listeners, and this platform for audio communication is growing with young audiences just
reaching the age where they have some disposable income.
Podcasting
The term is derived from blending “iPod” and “broadcasting,” although Apple no longer
manufactures the iPod and most podcasts are not broadcast over the airwaves. Because
alternative terms such as “mobile audio blogging” do not exactly roll off the tongue,
“podcasting” remains in popular use. Podcasting can be traced to the popularity of blogging in
the early 2000s. Bloggers wrote about niche topics, and some of them developed sizable
followings. Podcasting is in some ways a natural extension of this form of direct
communication with organically cultivated groups. It caught on with wider audiences in 2004
as broadband internet penetration increased rapidly and as more and more people owned iPods
or iPhones capable of storing and playing back several episodes at a time. Expectations for
podcasting as an industry rose and fell for about a decade until 2014. This article in Wired notes
two important occurrences that year. First, the Serial podcast demonstrated podcasting’s ability
to reach beyond niche audiences to become a truly national media phenomenon. Second, Apple
created a separate iPhone app dedicated to downloading and listening to podcasts, which help
boost the prominence of the entire field. Many of the top podcasts are National Public Radio
shows rebroadcast or repackaged in podcast form, but several successful shows originated as
podcasts. This list of some of the top podcast episodes of all time draws from a wide variety of
topics, including health, money, mindfulness and communication. Like magazines, cable
television and niche news sites of the past, podcasts often develop in niche environments. Only
a tiny percentage reach mass popularity. Here is one of 2018’s top podcasts about the state of
the War on Terrorism. You can find it online as part of a visual presentation, on iTunes or via
other podcast apps. The methods of accessing podcasts vary widely. Even novice smartphone
users can find podcasts through popular apps. Podcasts rise to popularity by word of mouth or
by reaching enough critical mass that they are referenced in other media platforms. We often
learn about live music based on which bands are popular locally and regionally. Instead of
being organized geographically, podcasting is often organized by topic.
Comedians, talk show hosts, academics and other experts, scientists, engineers,
philosophers, writers, musicians and many others have podcasts serving various functions.
Their podcasts may or may not be promoting other products, services or digital media
properties. They may be fiction or non-fiction. What links the vast majority of podcasts is they
begin as passion projects. They are cheap to produce and free to download, and they grow niche
audiences before, sometimes, making it big. Podcast advertising will soon be a $500 million
industry. Observations on what helps a podcast thrive can teach us the keys to success that we
expect will translate to a variety of emerging digital media platforms.
“Superbug” Media
Podcasting as a medium seems to have stumbled on a sort of “superbug” model of mass
media production and audience building. Think about bacteria and our unending desire to kill
them with anti-bacterial soaps, wipes and hand sanitizers. Only the strongest, antibiotic-
resistant bacteria survive attempts at eradication. Successful podcasts function similarly. Those
that survive the media free-forall often build mass audiences rather than tapping into them on
legacy media platforms. Superbug media products are the opposite of viral media. A virus
develops and spreads via a host, and if it does not spread to another host relatively quickly, it
dies. Either the host system kills it, it kills the host, or it leaves the host and dies. Generally
speaking, viruses do not work in symbiosis with their hosts. We can vaccinate ourselves against
viruses, and this happens with viral media messages too. If we view a new video on social
media with some of the elements of viral videos we have seen before, we may ignore it. We
inoculate ourselves against things that waste our time. Novelty is part of the joy of viral content.
Thus, copycat content has a difficult time spreading. This makes audience-building on digital
platforms difficult. You cannot reliably produce viral content. Exponentially more media
products are created than go viral, no matter how hard the creator tries. The “superbug” process
is different. Bacteria can often survive without a host. They can lie dormant for years with very
little to sustain them and then return to devastate populations. In the human body, there are
about as many bacteria cells as there are human cells. Some bacteria are not only beneficial but
also necessary. Bacteria can be localized, while viruses tend to attack an entire system. The
media equivalent of successful superbug bacteria is a podcast that grows inside a niche
population, sometimes rising and falling in popularity before reaching a mass audience who
then looks into the back catalog to see what the podcast is all about. What follows is a summary
of the nascent theory of “superbug media.” For now, it is a list of characteristics that will be
explicated to conclude this chapter. This is not a media studies theory arrived at through
extensive peer review. These concepts are meant to describe phenomena that appear to be
happening all around us. Over time, the author hopes to publish more about this topic and begin
to test these concepts as a cohesive theory built on empirical facts. That said, here is the working
definition: Superbug media products are those that survive and thrive in highly competitive
environments with limited initial access to traditional media resources. They are persistent,
adaptive, independent, niche and symbiotic.
An easy way to remember this material is that it takes PAINS to build an audience on a
digital platform. Cultural production is at the heart of much of what we do in the mass media,
but institutional demands are never far behind for those who want to create successful products
or for those who may not want to make their own “superbug” media outlets but who are looking
for good places to work. The final lesson of this chapter is this: Regardless of whether you plan
to start your own media product or create a “superbug” of your own, when looking for work in
the mass communication field, you owe it to yourself to look for companies that are capable of
producing products and brands that can survive in this environment. At your internships and
your first jobs, ask yourself if the company seems like it could produce a “superbug” if it had
to. If the answer is “no,” you may need to look somewhere else for an enterprise that can create
a media product with that rare mix of cultural meaning, social impact and financial success.
