Nieman Foundation at Harvard
Not too long ago, the word “radio” meant something very particular: The turn of a knob to music stations cycling through the latest hits, or a Howard Stern/Rush Limbaugh-type spouting off, or an NPR member station, staidly delivering the news interspersed with occasional oddities like the musings of a horse born to be wind but trapped in his stable.1 Podcasts, meanwhile, were a subset of radio. Shows like This American Life, Radiolab, and 99% Invisible made their homes at public radio stations — WBEZ, WNYC, and KALW, respectively — but also distributed their episodes on iTunes, back when it was called that, so that anyone who had a smartphone but not a radio could listen in.
Many true crime-oriented media companies either sprang up in the wake of Serial or, for those that already existed, looked in the mirror one day and found they were in fact the geese laying the proverbial golden eggs (and here, I suppose, is where I disclaim that I managed to snag a sliver of down when I helped produce a true crime podcast in 2021). But traditional media companies, and particularly public radio stations, wanted in on the action too. It made sense: Public radio stations had the audio talent, the reporting chops, and a deep knowledge of the local oddballs and mysteries that make for a particularly juicy true crime story. So podcasts like Bear Brook, from New Hampshire Public Radio, and Bundyville, from Oregon Public Broadcasting, were born.
“True crime as a genre is very opportunistic when it comes to new media forms,” said Jean Murley, a professor of liberal arts at the Savannah College of Arts and design, true crime scholar, and author of The Rise of True Crime: 20th-Century Murder and American Popular Culture. Murley talks about true crime as if it’s a living being. If it is, then audio is its ideal dance partner; audio producers like to say there’s an intimacy to audio that can’t be found in text or video, which makes it well-suited to a genre that Murley notes deals largely in big emotions and heady questions of good and evil.
But leaders at some public radio stations think there’s actually an opportunity here.
“We’ve seen that audiences respond to true crime,” said Sage Van Wing, executive director of talk and podcasts at Oregon Public Broadcasting. “As a genre it’s popular because you have all the elements of storytelling that people love. There’s a whodunnit with cliffhangers and a strong narrative thread and a hero whose story you can follow.”
Public radio stations, Van Wing told me, can’t really pursue the other type of podcast that’s particularly popular these days — celebrity-driven talk shows like The Joe Rogan Experience or Call Her Daddy, which tend to come with much higher price tags than public media can afford. “The only other thing that we can potentially chase is the true crime model,” she said.
True crime as a genre has a mixed reputation, beginning with its stereotypical demographic: Last year Pew reported that women are twice as likely to listen to true crime as men, even though overall podcast listenership skews slightly more male overall. Rebecca Lavoie, who oversees podcasts at New Hampshire Public Radio, thinks this is part of the reason the genre gets so much hate; she says there’s a sexist underpinning to some of the criticism.
“I think the number one reason [women are drawn to true crime] is that we are overrepresented as victims within the genre and we want to know about what happens to us,” Murley said. “It’s a genre that acknowledges the harm that’s done to women by violent men. There’s not really [another] popular genre that does that in quite the same way. It’s kind of a society-wide acknowledgement about the end result of unchecked misogynistic violence.”
True crime has had an identity crisis for as long as it’s existed, particularly due to (rightly founded) fears of exploitation and the genre’s proclivity to focus on white victims of crimes when the majority of murder victims are young Black men; journalist and newscaster Gwen Ifill coined the term “missing white woman syndrome” for exactly this reason. The explosion of true crime podcasts has only made the problems of the genre more apparent. “It’s not a good place to try to understand American homicide,” Murley said. “It’s a good place to get a very thin slice of the reality of American murder, but it’s a fantastical slice. It gives you a very rarefied picture of what murder is and who murder victims are.”
Maybe, as Emma Berquist wrote for Gawker (RIP) a few years ago, true crime is rotting our brains. But Walker of the podcast Stolen thinks the popularity of the genre also presents an opportunity to tell stories that otherwise might not be greenlit, and to cut through the rot with quality work. The genre, she said in a 2019 interview, allowed her to report gripping stories about a topic — the deaths of indigenous people in Canada — that people otherwise wouldn’t care to listen to. But deeply reported podcasts like Stolen are more the exception than the norm, and the genre has been inundated with talk shows that treat crimes as entertainment (multiple sources called out My Favorite Murder, which bills itself as a “true crime comedy podcast,” in particular). So the stigma persists, as does the desire to hold the genre at arm’s length.
Van Wing’s team, meanwhile, tries to think of ways to apply what she calls the “true crime structure” — cliffhangers, narrative threads, protagonists to follow through each episode — to projects that might not necessarily be “true crime stories.” The podcast Hush, for example, is more about the failures of the criminal justice system than the crime that the first season’s main character was accused of committing (he was eventually exonerated after 25 years in prison). It’s a similar line of thought to what NHPR’s Lavoie was thinking when Bear Brook took shape ahead of its launch in 2018.
“Bear Brook never started out, from the journalist’s perspective, as being a true crime story,” Lavoie told me. “It was initially a science story about new technology to identify bodies, and it was going to be a series of seven-minute features. But when I heard [host Jason Moon] talk about the stories, I was like, ‘You’re talking about a true crime podcast.’”
Bear Brook’s popularity speaks to something Van Wing at OPB has seen before herself with shows like Bundyville and Hush: there’s no such thing as a regional podcast audience. “If you can break big in podcasts,” Van Wing said, “It means that people from all over are listening to you.”
But, she continued, that doesn’t mean the mission behind the reporting changes. “We are specifically trying to tell stories about the Pacific Northwest, and we’re most interested in audiences in the Pacific Northwest,” Van Wing said. “If we happen to do a podcast that hits big, and there are audiences listening to it from outside the Pacific Northwest, that’s great. It’s an added benefit for us, but it’s not necessarily what we’re going for.”
For all the ways podcasts have changed, one thing has remained largely the same: the way they’re distributed. Podcasts were built on RSS — also known as the classic, algorithm-free way to keep up with your favorite websites’ stories as they publish — and every new podcast launch is, behind the scenes, essentially the launch of a new RSS feed.2 If you open your podcast app and subscribe to a new show, you’re subscribing to that podcast’s feed; during the height of the podcast boom, new feeds would drop onto the iTunes charts like rain.
In some ways, that’s still happening. “Right now a lot of true crime podcasts are sort of just the content sludge machines you see all over YouTube,” said Nick Quah, culture critic at Vulture and former writer of the Hot Pod newsletter (which we used to syndicate here at Nieman Lab). Quah said those “content-sludge” types of podcasts, which often repackage work already done by journalists, dominate charts in part thanks to sheer quantity. “We know it’s a very popular genre,” he continued.“But you can make McDonald’s, or you can make a gourmet burger, and the public radio lane is more like a gourmet burger.”
To extend the metaphor a smidgen further, a gourmet podcast-burger might also benefit from being in limited supply. Van Wing, Lavoie, and Ben Brock Johnson, the executive producer of podcasts at WBUR, all think “true crime structure” shows are important to their podcast strategies, but Johnson and Van Wing have both decided that the best way forward for their podcasts is to reduce the number of feeds that listeners are sent to. At OPB, for example, the Hush feed will be the home for investigative stories that are better suited for a seasonal model, while smaller serialized stories will go into the station’s weekly podcast. At WBUR, the feed for the hit podcast Beyond All Repair, which was previously the feed for the show Violation, could be the home for another investigative show down the line.
The reason for this is twofold: First, using existing feeds capitalizes on the audiences those shows built, so each new series will automatically land on the phones of thousands or even millions of listeners instead of having to build an audience from scratch each time. Second, it’s easier to sell sponsorship deals around pre-existing, reliably popular feeds than to try and make new deals every time a new show gets greenlit.
Lavoie is more bullish about creating new feeds; she thinks they help with discoverability, and her plan is to both lean into existing feeds the way Johnson and Van Wing are while also pulling individual series out into their own feeds so they can be highlighted on places like, for example, the new narrative series chart on Apple Podcasts.
Still, Johnson said, dynamic insertion — which WBUR also uses — won’t solve everything. Instead, he thinks that podcasts, which have historically mostly been funded by sponsorship deals and kept separate from the membership drives and grant funding that make up the bread and butter of classic public media revenue, need to start leaning into those sources of funding too. “Public radio invented crowdfunding, and we need to be doing that not just on the air [but] in our podcasts as well,” he said.
His team did exactly that for Beyond All Repair. Listeners to the show were asked to pledge a one-time donation of $25 to support WBUR producing more shows like it, and in exchange they were promised ad-free episodes and early access. Johnson says more than 3,000 people pledged a donation, raising over $80,000, and the station is planning a push to convert podcast listeners into sustaining members. They’d have a large pool to draw from; overall, the Violation/Beyond All Repair feed has had more than 7 million downloads, 4 million of which came from Beyond All Repair episodes alone.
If they can pull it off, Lavoie said, public radio has both an enormous talent pool and an audience that is constantly hungry for more shows to scratch the true crime itch. And their competition in the narrative audio space may be dwindling.
“I think it’s sort of clear now that the ad-supported model, even during the podcasting heyday, could never truly support these kinds of [deeply reported] projects,” Quah said. “Good journalism alone, I think we’re beginning to discover, has never been truly enough to support a media organization that can exist at scale. But the function of a public radio station is to be a little larger than that. The ethos shouldn’t just be ‘How can we grow the company?’ but also ‘How do we serve our communities through a work of quality?'”
Lavoie, Van Wing, and Johnson all think that is public radio’s secret weapon. “More and more public radio stations are saying they tried podcasts and they’re not paying for themselves, so they’re the first thing they cut when they have to cut people,” Lavoie said. “There’s membership potential, there’s grant potential, and there’s revenue potential. We’re not expecting the podcasts to pay for themselves [with ad sales alone], and they’re not seen as a failing enterprise within our institution if they don’t.”
There’s also another factor on the side of public radio: At the end of the day, people always want a good story. That’s why, on October 30, 1938, thousands of people (how many, exactly, is up for debate) tuned in to listen to Orson Welles’ adaptation of the War of the Worlds and why, all these years later, the story of that night remains legendary in radio history3 The knob keeps turning, but it lands, again and again, on the good story — even if the skies are clogged with more noise than signal these days.
“I think partly this is an industry story, right?” Van Wing said. “We’re all having this moment of understanding what podcasts can do, especially for public media. We’re still interested in investigative deep dive audio storytelling. And we can see that audiences like true crime stuff. So if we’re going to spend a lot of time doing in-depth investigations and turning it into a podcast, we’re probably all looking at that and making the choice of ‘let’s make it as a true crime story,’ or ‘let’s at least try to investigate it or tell it in that structure.’ I think you can fit any kind of story into that structure. We’re just talking about a great narrative. It’s taught us all to be stronger storytellers.”
