Podcasting

The word 'podcast' did not exist before 2004. It was coined, almost as a joke, by BBC journalist Ben Hammersley in a newspaper column musing on what to call the new audio files people were pushing to iPods. The name stuck because the medium stuck — and the medium stuck because a former MTV video jockey named Adam Curry and a software developer named Dave Winer had, the year before, figured out how to attach audio files to RSS feeds so they would download themselves.

That hack — automatic delivery, no gatekeeper — is the whole revolution. Radio had always been a one-to-many broadcast: a tower, a license, a schedule, and a program director deciding who got to speak. Podcasting inverted every one of those terms. There is no tower. There is no license. There is no schedule but the listener's own. And the program director is whoever has something to say and the patience to record it.

The first wave was hobbyists and tech obsessives — the same crowd that had been blogging. They recorded in closets, edited in GarageBand, and published to a few hundred listeners who had figured out how to sync an MP3 player. Then came Serial in 2014, and the medium crossed the chasm overnight. A single investigative journalism series became the fastest podcast ever to reach five million downloads, and suddenly every network, every celebrity, and every brand wanted a microphone.

What survived the gold rush was the original promise: that anyone, anywhere, with a hundred dollars of gear and a story to tell, could build an audience that radio could never have given them. The empty nester with a lifetime of expertise, the hobbyist with an obsession nobody else shares, the town historian, the domino tournament champion — all of them now have a frequency. The feed does the rest.

To start a podcast is to claim one of those frequencies. It is among the most approachable of the maker disciplines — the barrier is a microphone, a laptop, and the willingness to speak into the void until the void starts talking back.