Enchantment Is The Age-Old Goal Of Audio, says Julia Barton

Bingeworthy connects with Julia Barton, half-way through her Nieman Fellowship, to follow up on what the last 100 years of radio history means to podcast producers today; it turns out, quite a lot

When Julia Barton announced on social media that she was going to be a Nieman Fellow, the prestigious journalism fellowship at Harvard, I made a mental note to introduce myself to her and then see if she was open to conversation mid-year to see how things were going.

Over the years I’ve come into contact with Julia’s work in different ways. Prior to being a Nieman Fellow, she was the Founding Executive Editor at Pushkin Industries, where she played many roles, including the long-time editor of Revisionist History with Malcolm Gladwell and the editor of Jill Lepore’s The Last Archive. Last year she edited an innovative audiobook compilation called The Best Audio Storytelling: 2022, released through Puskin last year.

But Barton’s career actually began in 1995 when she worked as a board-op at a public radio station. From there she was a reporter for WHYY, a features editor at APM and then in 2012, once the term “podcasting” had been invented, she worked as an editor for the podcast series Life of the Law, and later produced work with Radiolab, Radiotopia’s Showcase, and many others. Read: she’s been at this for a while, has worked with a long list of fascinating folks, and had a front-row seat to watch this industry grow up from its radio roots, through the boom, to now, where on some days it feels like an open abyss (filled with both hope and despair).

What most recently caught my attention about Barton’s work was on the Nieman Storyboard, when it remounted Julia Barton’s Audio Danger column, which she began in 2012, and then updated for 2023 with new material.

I went back to read the Audio Danger archive, I was struck by her ability to connect ideas and concepts in a non-lateral fashion. These ideas were more than 10 years ago, yet they still seemed fresh and topical.

This made me curious to see where she would take her thinking forward, now inside an academic setting, a place with legroom to stretch.

To get things rolling, I suggested she send me a few things she had been reading, or that had piqued her interest  

That’s when she forwarded me a link to her HOLLIS record (Harvard On-Line Library Information System), which is basically a giant wishlist for every book, journal article, or archival material piece that she might consider accessing in the Harvard library system (which is also to say, basically anything that might available on planet Earth is at the end of your search command).

Her HOLLIS record was many pages long. I scrolled and scrolled with curiosity, like taking an inch of an old phone book and fanning it with my thumb.

The record listed a bunch of archival material she was interested in: letters written by Norman Corwin in the 1910s, academic accounts of the origin of radio dramas from the 1920s, the actual scripts from these radio plays and archival recordings of audio recordings from the 1950s. There was also a category for books about media ownership and authorship, such as: Sound Streams : A Cultural History of Radio-Internet Convergence, by Andrew Bottomly from 2020. 

Julia and I spent more than an hour talking, gabbing really, about all kinds of nerdy audio things. But taken as a whole, our conversation wrapped around three different themes:

1. How “Credentialism” in Audio Storytelling is different, and what that means to the industry today.

   1. How the lack of formal training in the audio storytelling industry shows up in the workplace

   2. How this contrasts with the traditional "learn by doing" approach that she experienced.

2. Impact of Radio History on Contemporary Audio Storytelling…Including the First Extinction Event

   1. What historical trends and technological shifts in radio have influenced contemporary audio storytelling today?

   2. We discussed the transition from live radio broadcasts to pre-recorded content and what the first “extinction event” means to the lineage of craft in audio production today.

3. Why she looks for “Enchantment” in audio…and what that is

   1. What does “enchantment” mean? And why is it important?

   2. It turns out she can pull threads for this term from the last 100 years, right up until today.

1. Let’s talk about Credentialism In Audio

Like many people of her age and vintage, she did not go to school for podcasting; it didn’t exist then the way it does now. Also interesting to note is that many people of her age and vintage are also running, or founding, or managing, the existing podcast empires, with all of the various credentials that they have (or do not have). It’s interesting to pause and consider how this whole thing was built with different credentials.

[Julia Barton] “I learned radio through osmosis…I didn't go to J-school for it, so I just had to learn it in this folkloric kind of way, which is, I think, the way that most people in broadcast learn, at least in the United States.”

This was the best description I had heard…folkloric…to describe how this industry built itself. It also goes a long way to describe the boot-strapped nature of this industry, and how it built itself while there was no institution there to audit and decree qualifications for audio, specifically (outside of some journalism schools that do have a “radio” focus, which was the most common starting point for many, with the next stop being at a public radio enterprise).

The upside to “folkloric learning” is that it’s unique and germane. And it creates a sort of renegade cohort of folks who have bootstrapped and made it up as they went along. It has, for better or worse, become the bedrock of this industry.

[Julia Barton]: “But there are real downsides to it…like, how do you teach [narrative audio]? Do you expect everyone to get a $30,000 a year job? And trust me, there are still people taking $30,000 a year jobs at public radio stations in the United States. And then you expect them to somehow subsidize your station, with no pay, in order to learn the business? 

Most people in the United States can't afford or want to do that, an apprenticeship, [so it becomes a] pipeline problem, and also a diversity problem.  

It's something that's bugged me for a long time. They're coming to places like Pushkin from lots of different realms from film production, from music…but, you can't assume any level of specific training.

One of the things that I was passionate about at Pushkin was having these sessions we'd call “Teach-Ins,” where an editor would lead an exercise in something really basic and important that we just can't assume everyone knows how to do: like writing pronouncers for names. [So if] you get a script and there's an unfamiliar name in it, you need a pronouncing guide; there is a way that we do it in broadcast.

That's the problem with folkloric. It’s fun and games and cool; but in the end, it has real consequences.”

Has the Folkloric Method led to a crisis of Credentialism? I mean, what does the perfect CV look like, when you go to apply for a new job? How do you explain, or quantify your expertise, using an industry-accepted system? Does it actually explain your skillset, out there on the job market?

Many people like Barton learned, on the job, by doing. These days you can apply to a Master’s Program and get your experience and credentials through an academic institution. But this is not how the first cadre of podcast professionals got to where they are today.

[Julia Barton]: “You learn doing. You learn by making mistakes, embarrassing yourself or others. And then you learn that that embarrassment did not kill you. It made you stop short and realize your shortcomings, but it didn't kill you. And then you don't do it again, if you're smart.”

This sort of folkloric system of catch-as-catch-can with audio isn't acceptable in other media. It's not acceptable in newspapers. It's not acceptable in television for sure. I haven't heard anybody just getting a job in TV because they know how to use an iPhone camera.” 

2. The 100-Year History Of Radio Has A Lot More To Do With Today Than You Think

This part of the conversation was fascinating…I’ve done some reading about this, but Julia has taken the plunge on a long, deep dive here while at the Nieman Center.

It’s important to start at the beginning:

[Julia Barton]: The impetus for [the beginning of] radio was a way to transmit Morse code without physical wires. We had telegraphs, we had telephones, but guess who you couldn't reach with a telegraph or a telephone? A ship at sea.

More and more people were traveling by boat across the oceans….and not everybody made it to the other side.

Boats were routinely lost at sea because nobody could reach them...or they couldn’t signal for help. But with Morse code, which is the practical beginnings of radio, everything changed. This is the first instance of radio being used to actually save lives.

It’s contentious if the current wave of True Crime helps or hinders all of us, culturally, or legally, even. It is, for certain, solving cold cases and helping the wheels of justice to churn a bit differently, which has been helpful, in some cases (thinking of Curtis Flowers for one).

But let’s consider for a moment that in its original usage, radio was about finding people and helping to bring them back to safety.

This could be a cute coincidence or a meaningless throw-away historical tidbit. Or, it could be seen as one of the fundamental building blocks of this industry, and a guiding principle for what role it can play in society moving forward.

[Julia Barton]: Morse code [was saving lives with] point-to-point communication. And then the adaptation of broadcasting…it was an experimental thing [at first], and then it became huge, and then it became something that amateurs could do and they could start to impersonate ship captains and like send out their own Morse codes, to confuse the ships at sea….pranking the US Navy ships.

That transition point resonates with someone who's living through the transition between analog and digital, and now digital to AI… and who the hell knows [which way that will go].

Radio solved an old problem with a new fix. But also, another new technology, buried under this innovation, was radio tuning; the idea that there were multiple radio signals that were able to work at the same time, but on different frequencies.

[Julia Barton]: Sir Oliver Lodge, in the 1890s, was presenting his research to his esteemed college colleagues in the Royal Academy in London, where he said:

“[Did you know that] You could actually imprint these signals with voices and music, you could read a newspaper or present a symphony orchestra?”

People [back in the 1890s] were like: First of all, that’s crazy. Second of all, who would do such a thing? You would be giving it all away for free….

And I'm like, wait a minute, it is 2024 and we’re having this same problem that these guys in 1898 foresaw? My mind is constantly blown. It's just amazing, the same inadvertent secondary problems keep coming up over and over again.

If I were 30 years younger I'd do my whole dissertation on this one dude. But instead I'm plucking these moments that seem to be relevant [to explain] the professional conundrum that we're in now.

And then there’s the first extinction event (in the US predominantly) that happened: Radio in the late 1940s.

To understand why, it’s important to understand something fundamental about radio; radio used to be only live. This squared with corporate reasons, technical reasons and also financial reasons. It’s also why radio had entire symphonies in the studio to play live music, why there were folley artists there to recreate sound effects to bring the audio dramas to life and why they had “radio stars” who were the voices of the different audio dramas—it all lived for a brief moment on-air, and that was it. It was much like how television leveraged appointment viewing in the decades to come; if you missed it, you missed it. People built their lives around television schedules.

Back in the 1940-50s, radio did not have taped segments, pre-recorded interviews, carefully scripted narration tracks bedded down with archival music or interview footage to bring a story to life. All of the things that make narrative audio what it is today would not have been considered “radio” in the early days.

This has also created a distinct disconnect between old radio and “new radio,” meaning, podcasts. In many ways, they are completely antithetical to each other.

In the 1940s, the golden age of radio dramas…the radio was where all entertainment lived—televisions were invented but they were expensive and not mainstream yet….in the 1950s, video did kill the radio star.

But when we say kill, we actually mean vanished without a trace.

[Julia Barton]: We have these sorts of headlines right now is ‘media in an extinction event.’ Well, radio in the late 40s and early 50s [actually] underwent an extinction event. That is why we don't have this lineage of craft in the United States. We don't even know how to listen to their work—that's how extinct it is.

[Early radio] sounds corny to us; it sounds stilted…it sounds strange. And it's because it was killed. It takes a lot to kill a powerful medium. And I don't think anyone did it intentionally necessarily, but it was like stomped to the ground [basically around 1947].

The end of the end of World War II [also] kind of ended a certain rhetorical style that was “necessary” and was fostered by the government, sort of like a “unified speak to the nation” style. People were a little bit tired of that as soon as victory was declared.

But there was still a huge infrastructure [to radio], and everyone listened to the radio all the time [in the US]. They had their favorites, mostly it was entertainment. It was not high flying oratory. Or even radio drama. It was crass comedy; it was minstrel stuff.

It's embarassing to listen to now and was embarrassing at the time. It was soap operas, which did sell soap. And then, I'd say by 1953, that was pretty much it. It [turned into] short form news reporting [from] spoken word.

Other countries that had state broadcasters, the radio drama and the social documentary style, they survived. But in the United States, it kind of died out until the beginning of public radio, [which began in earnest] after the Public Broadcasting Act was signed into law in in 1967.

We were cut off from the people who could have really taught us how to do this work. And the listeners, more importantly, a new generation of listeners, they use the radio to listen to music, which is totally legit.

Basically, [it wasn’t] until the seventies [that public radio came into being]…a big gap was created by this extinction event.

3. Julia Barton would like to be enchanted by audio…for now and for always…and here’s what that means

We were now well over an hour into our conversation, where we had traversed more than 100 years of radio history, talked through a raft of stylistic trends, referred to multiple well-known industry folks…and I asked Julia if she had been able to pull some threads together about all of these connections she was making.

Was it about the craft, or the business, or the technology? With all of her diverse reading and thinking, had she been able to pick out a leitmotif?

[Julia Barton]: The word that has stuck with me, actually through reading Anthropology, is “enchantment.” Audio is this medium of enchantment and the enchantment is powerful; it's always been. Enchantment is what has led to the changes in the use of the technology.

Radio was actually discovered mathematically; and then applied to Morse code for ships at sea. And then it became this enchanting other thing that people like went insane for….I can bring Voices and music into my house? You could do that with phonographs, but now I can just turn on this thing and I can hear people speaking to me and I know that they're right there, speaking somewhere? That was an enchantment thing.

And so there's this interplay between the audience, which is enchantment, pulling the technology into a new place. It comes and goes in waves, and it's just fascinating to me. We see that with podcasting now, right? It was kind of this dormant little thing…and then suddenly it became this medium of enchantment, again.

So I want to trace that story, and then break it down into things that we do as a craft as well. So when we write those cold opens, we're thinking, is this enchanting to an audience? Can we enchant their attention? We can we enchant them with the podcast artwork, and the repetition of a host, across time, so that they become subscribers, and then they become a community of listeners?

So it's this theme of enchantment that I'm really finding useful as a thread to pull together both the history and the craft and the disruptions.

And then there's the question of monetizing that enchantment…can you do it? Should you do it? These are all just problems that never go away, but I think they're powerfully expressed in this audio form, because there's something always mysterious and freaky about it, no matter what era you’re in.

People are like: this is crazy, I don't know why I can't stop listening, or why I can't stop thinking about it. Or…you know the other thread…I need to drop everything and become a radio producer and go to Alaska!

So it's this theme of enchantment that I'm really finding useful as a thread to pull together both the history and the craft, [as well as] the disruptions.

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Calling all makers! Next week I’ve got an exciting announcement from the Audio Flux team…you’re not going to want to miss this…Forward this email to your audio-maker friends so they don’t miss it!

Hey, are you all caught up on the sonic scrapbook Lowlines?

Highly recommended to listen while quietly travelling somewhere on your own. Headphones most definitely suggested.