The Power of Podcasting

It’s strange to think that ‘less than a decade ago, most people had never heard of podcasting’, as Siobhan McHugh points out in The Power of Podcasting. In this part how-to guide, part history of the form, McHugh-a seasoned audio producer, teacher and scholar-offers a brisk, enthusiastic walkthrough of the ‘grammar and logic’ of audio storytelling. She charts the rise of the podcast, which ‘arrived quietly as a tech innovation in 2001 and as a term in 2004, then exploded as a pop-culture phenomenon in 2014’. She explores the reverberations of mega-hit true crime podcast Serial, which pushed podcasting into the mainstream (‘podcasting’s history falls into two categories: pre- and post-Serial’), and the subsequent S-Town, which elevated the form to literary heights. In The Power of Podcasting’s most compelling section, McHugh takes us behind the scenes of celebrated podcasts that she worked on at the* Age*: *Phoebe’s Fall *and The Last Voyage of the Pong Su. This granular examination, including specific script notes and edits, will be most compelling to those seeking a crash course in the medium, from journalism students to anyone thinking of picking up a mic. Kim Thomson is a freelance writer and editor.

Siobhn McHugh is a writer, documentary-maker, academic and podcast producer. She has won six gold awards at New York Festivals for co-produced podcasts and is the author of The Snowy, winner of the NSW Premier’s Literary Award.