4 Posts You Might Have Missed This Year
I'll be back soon with fresh content, but now now, here's a few standouts from 2025
Hi folks…Happy New Year to everyone, far and near.
While I’m busy cooking up some new content for this year, I wanted to share some gems from last year that you might have missed.
Hailing from Ireland, but has called Australia home for decades, Siobhán McHugh has helped to shape this industry, in both subtle and also very direct and applied ways. She’s both an academic and a producer, and teacher and a critic…a writer and a narrator. Dive in to find out how she has woven these threads together throughout her life.
Her Academic Life: How Siobhán McHugh Helped Build a Scholarly Home for Podcasting
Siobhán McHugh has spent decades immersed in the art of narrative audio—not just making it, but dissecting it, teaching it, and shaping how the rest of us understand it. McHugh has worked in audio for longer than most podcasters have been alive. Her career began in radio in Ireland, back in the early 1980s. McHugh was forced to emigrate to Australia after she lost her job at a radio station because she booked a guest who spoke openly about contraception (a story that’s captured in the award-winning 2018 BBC audio doc
There was something that really struck me about this series when I listened to it…it was so…familiar…but also very new at the same time. This was when I realized just how deep some influences run in this industry. And actually, maybe for the first time, I felt that this was cause for celebration, not a tear down of how someone was working to sound like someone else. It’s growth and achievement, in a new way.
Glassian Mode
It’s not just mimicry, that’s too basic. Partially, it’s a narrative mode, which blends a specific configuration of voice, packing, intimacy, humour and structure. But then it’s also the structure, the affect and the ethics involved.
Most people never spend more time than they absolutely need to on water, on a boat. Maybe it’s a ferry ride from one place to another, or back when you went to summer camp, you learned how to tack and jibe a sailboat (before getting knocked out by a concussion when a gust of wind smacked the mast into the back your head). Most adults run from the idea…except Ian Urbina. During his 17 years as an investigative reporter with the NYTimes, he spent about 10 of them on various ships, in the actual middle of nowhere. He’s here to talk about Season 2 of The Outlaw Ocean, a fascinating, multiplatform, multiyear project that demands that we look at the ocean as a human story, and not a climate story.
Ian Urbina's The Outlaw Ocean Season 2 – A Bingeworthy Review
For someone who has spent as much time on ships—ugly and dark fishing trawlers, shady ocean liners in the middle of the often lawless ocean—you might expect that Ian Urbina was born on the ocean, or to a family of seafarers…or at a minimum, raised in a coastal town, adjacent to the salt air and the tall tales of the longshoremen.
Perhaps we can write down 2025 as the year we turned the corner on change…in the audio industry anyway. So much can be said about this, and there are a million layers of nuance. But as the year was drawing to a close, I went to Resonate Podcast Festival, in Richmond Virginia, where I stumbled across an emotion that I wasn’t exactly expecting: Optimism. Here’s a spotlight on some of the folks who are helping to bring this emotion back into fashion.
Spotlight on Hub & Spoke Audio Collective
When Tamar Avishai beamed “optimism is back!” as we huddled in the basement with Mia Lobel in early November at Resonate, I felt like I had accidentally stepped on a trip wire.