Radio Journal:International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media - Volume 19, Issue 2, 2021

There has been an increase in the use of immersive or spatialized audio formats for radio and podcast journalism. Immersion is used to put audiences at the heart of a story, enable richer experiences and encourage empathy with others, but it can disrupt the ‘grammar’ of broadcast formats and the codes that structure the relationship between audience, journalist and story. Immersive journalism research has not tackled the impact on audio-only storytelling, and the lack of research by and for audio journalists means programme-makers have until now lacked a conceptual framework and terminology to describe how space is constructed in immersive audio, the creative and editorial choices available and their effects. This article, based on analysis of immersive output and interviews with those who produce it, critically examines the differences between mono/stereo space and immersive audio space and argues they are not only a matter of aesthetics or comfort, but communicate differential authority over the story and merit further attention when journalists are trained in immersive audio.

This article is an examination of podcasts portraying marginalized and racialized Canadian lived experiences during the world wars. This research is a textual and auditory analysis of the historical narratives of Canadian minority experiences in the world wars evident in Historica Canada’s podcast episodes: ‘The No. 2 Construction Battalion and the Fight to Fight’ (16 June 2016), ‘A Proud Benchwarmer’ (29 March 2016) and ‘The Tomkins Brothers’ (16 December 2019). The impact of both sound and text is explored regarding the impact on podcasting’s potential to present alternative war history narratives. In addition to the expansion of the historical record examined in these podcast analyses, the potential for the survival of these histories is examined through an evaluation of the podcast repositories as archives and potential public access points.

This study analyses the public service broadcast terrain within a changing sector that is driven by digital media convergence using the case of the BBC Sounds. From the findings, we demonstrate that the BBC Sounds promotes the idea of a visible media, an inter-medial platform providing agency to some of its listeners as they choose what content they want to listen to, while questioning whether this new streaming service offers more control than choice. In this study we identify issues surrounding accessibility for all when exploring on-demand content, and what impact this has on the public. Finally, we highlight the blurring of podcasts and radio and whether all live radio shows become, or risk becoming, podcasts.

Starting from the analysis of the programmes and the production strategies of two of the biggest podcast platforms in Spanish (Cuonda and Podium Podcast), this research explores in depth how the rise of this format for distributing audio content is playing a key role in recovering and renewing the audio feature genre. This type of content, in disuse in speech-based radio broadcasting in recent decades, has ended up being strategic for new platforms, as it combines investigative journalism with aesthetic and narrative resources usually associated with radio drama, such as seriality, recreations and the design of sound atmospheres.

Review of: Community Radio in South Asia: Reclaiming the Airwaves, Kanchan K. Malik and Vinod Pavarala (eds) (2020)

New York: Routledge, 294 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-138-55853-3, h/bk, $65.42, e-book, $48.95