Radio Journal:International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media - Volume 23, Issue 1, 2025

This article analyses metajournalistic discourse between a ‘core actor’ and a novice reporter in The Trojan Horse Affair, a 2022 podcast from Serial Productions and the New York Times about a faked conspiracy to radicalize Muslim students at secondary schools in Birmingham, England in 2013. The podcast utilizes metanarrative self-reflexivity and transparency to challenge an erroneous news story propagated by the British mainstream press. The article argues that the intimacy, reciprocity and good-faith conflict (the ‘sonic friendship’) that develops between hosts Brian Reed and Hamza Syed are integral to the podcast’s value for industry-wide questions about journalistic authority, credibility and objectivity. Metajournalistic discourse and reporter–reporter intimacy in The Trojan Horse Affair serve to substantively challenge institutional boundaries that keep Muslim reporters from making news stories that serve their communities in western societies. The podcast models a renewed process for the construction of journalistic integrity in the twenty-first century.

The French podcast sector has seen strong growth since the early 2010s, but this has been primarily driven by the catch-up content offered by the major actors in the radio sector. This article analyses the emergence of independent studios producing podcasts independently of radio broadcast, known in France as ‘native’ podcasts. Drawing on eighteen interviews with the main actors in the sector, we show how they are adopting different strategies and editorial lines. The native podcasting business model has not yet stabilized and is still largely based on producing branded content for third parties and monetization of content through advertising.

The relationship between the sound industry and its audience is influenced by the widespread use of smartphones as the primary means of accessing the internet. This has led to a transformation in media logics, particularly among young people in Colombia, as they adapt to an evolving ecosystem that is redefining the creation, production and distribution of media. The objective of this research is to determine the significance of podcasts in the information consumption habits of listeners/users and to examine how this digital innovation is positioned in the content offer of radio and independent producers. The study employs a mixed methodological approach, including a case study that involves the administration of 190 surveys to young people, the review and listening of digital repositories of podcast platforms and the conducting of fifteen interviews with podcast producers. The main conclusion drawn is that podcasts are revitalizing audio content on-screen, connecting young people with information and the reality of their environment.

The history of municipal radio stations in the United States has yet to be written. Between 1921 and 1927, at least twelve municipalities obtained licences to broadcast over the air and there are traces of dozens of municipal radio projects across the United States in the 1920s. Apart from WNYC, New York’s municipal station from 1924 to 1996, most of them have been dismissed as failures and sunk into oblivion. Based on archival research, this article seeks to recover that part of the history of broadcasting and capture what citizens, elected officials and broadcasters meant when they talked about ‘municipal radios’ in the decades that saw the birth of the US broadcasting system. Those experiments point to a path not taken to combine radio and democracy. This article thus contributes to the history of public media by tracking the origins of public broadcasting in the United States besides educational radio.

We report on an experiment that used podcast audio-drama as a medium to generate impact from academic outputs in a creative, inclusive and collaborative way. Tobias and Syd was a serialized podcast audio-drama published in January 2023 based on ideas contained in the book Anthropology of Tobacco and personal narratives from the Wellcome Trust funded ‘Letter to the Breath’ project. The series aimed to generate conversations and discussions, rather than conclusions, about the role of tobacco in society today. It was a collaborative project involving contributions from diverse stakeholders. In addition to developing, producing and promoting the play, the educational value and dialogic space of the podcast was enhanced through four recorded webinar events based on key themes in the drama. Podcast audio-drama has the potential to open up new perspectives on contentious public health issues like tobacco use and abuse. We reflect on some of the processes involved and the challenges encountered in this case.

The podcast has emerged as a format for the promotion of tourism destinations. This study explores how, through branding, governmental tourism agencies convey the identity of the territory they represent and manage to create travel expectations among their stakeholders. We therefore employed a descriptive documentary method with a quantitative and qualitative approach and analysed titles produced by fourteen agencies. The results reveal that the most used genre for the construction of the narrative is the interview and the least used is fiction and that local expert sources predominate, with a notable participation of voices recognized by the audience and influencers. We conclude that the sampled destination podcasts meet the needs of future travellers by providing valuable information about the destination through legitimized voices and making the territory’s identity known in all its dimensions.