The Sorting Hat Of Podcasting
Both Julie Shapiro and I listen, a lot, to a lot of podcast audio...here's how we both keep track of all these hours
Last week Julie Shapiro and I sat down to a summer-sticky Zoom meeting. Halfway through our meeting her orange cat appeared, perched itself on the windowsill behind her, and moved its head like a typewriter back and forth.
Most of our conversation was for an article that will appear in the print version of POV Magazine this September. Later in the fall, I’ll share some of our conversation here in a different way.
I’ve known and followed Julie’s work for years (co-founder and Artistic Director of Third Coast, Exec Producer at Radiotopia, VP of Content at PRX). Last month we officially met in person at Tribeca, where we settled to find an hour for a sit-down Zoom, which finally happened last week.
In preparation for our interview, I spent some time trolling the internet for different references to her work and legacy (which is lengthy, tbh). I went back and (re-)listened again to some of the early years of the different shows that she shepherded into the collective fold while at Radiotopia (The Kitchen Sisters, Song Exploder).
I listened again to the early days of Ear Hustle, the cultural phenomenon and Pulitzer Prize-winning podcast that shares stories about life inside San Quentin State Prison, co-produced with two men who were initially incarcerated, and then released (and still continue to work on the show now from the outside), along with a woman named Nigel who got to know them after volunteering in the prison as an artist.
Deep into day 3 of this research, I stumbled across an old podcast called The Wolf Den, from Ear Wolf, then hosted by Chris Bannon and Lex Friedman, from 2017.
I had completely forgotten about this “podcast about the business and people of podcasting” that folded in 2019. Back in the twenty-teens, it took me a minute to figure out that Earwolf had actually grown out of an all-comedy format, to an all-about-everything-podcasting format. So I might have missed this episode originally.
But as I scrolled through the eight years of archives, from 2011 through 2019, I realized it’s basically an oral history of the podcast industry. Check it out if you feel like taking a trip down memory lane. Think of it as a Zip Recruiter-sponsored time machine trip back to Ye Olde days of podcasting.
It’s funny to think of 2017 as a year from the deep past. I suppose that the intervening pandemic has made this era feel much further from the time before it. But on balance, it’s still only seven years ago. Hardly enough time to call this “historic.” But given how much has changed this quickly, it does have a whiff of microfiche to it all.
The timing of the interview with Shapiro was relatively soon after Radiotopia had wrapped their Podquest - that callout for podcast show pitches from 2017 that ended up with precisely one winner - Ear Hustle.
It was too early to imagine what Ear Hustle would become, which is to say both an excellent show and a cultural phenomenon at the same time. But both the legacy of Podquest and then also the winning show itself offer new chapters in the ongoing history of podcasting. This episode offers a portal to that time.
One of the questions thrown to Julie in The Wolf Den interview was what she had learned about the podcasting industry, or what she perceived the state of the industry to be at, after having gone through, rated, discussed, categorized and listened to, precisely, 1,537 different pitches?
Julie quipped that spending all these hours here allowed her to create a taxonomy of different types of shows that were being pitched.
As I listened back to that episode, it grabbed my interest, so I made a note to ask her about this again in our interview.
Much like Julie, I also spend a lot of time listening to shows, think deeply about them and then do supplementary research. My listening spans a wide range of people, subjects, topics and ideas. I’m always looking for ways to help me recall these details at a later date when I sit down to write these reviews.
I asked Julie about her taxonomy, and whether or not she’s seen things change or grow in the years since she began this idea.
JULIE SHAPIRO: I got some good mileage out of that thing! I presented at Third Coast as a Provocation; people wrote to me wanting to use it in their classrooms….you know, I always said, this is complete. This is like an exercise in writing. It's very tongue-in-cheek; but it's very accurate, I think, in a kind of light-hearted, humorous way.
It is not an academic treatise on taxonomy, or on podcasting. In fact, the whole joke was to elevate it to a ‘taxonomy.’ But really, I'm just kind of laughing or pointing out where the similarities are. Because you get buckets, buckets of kinds of things.
After our interview, Julie circled back and shared her original document with me.
Her buckets were organized using a term that was sort of part of the wider lingo of 2017. I’m sharing a portion of this with you with permission:
Her list goes on to list more…CHUMcast, HUMBLEcast, FICTIONcast. On balance, I would say that many of these stand up. The main difference perhaps between 2017 and today is that there is actually now academia on podcasting. And this could swim in those waters, if you swap out the humorous language, source the material, and offer some analysis.
I also keep track of my listening
I’m slowly building a database in Airtable to track some different trends and ideas as they emerge. I’ve got fields that track by producer, publication day and date, release structure, distributor, co-production structure and Indie status.
But then I also track things, similar to how Julie did; themes, keywords, host style, host gender/pronouns, narrative style, sound design approach, and a bevvy of other things that I adapt each time I revisit the database.
My recall of details is reasonably good for a period of time after I listen to a series. But ask me some of those same questions six months down the road, or to spot trends and waves and styles and changes over the course of a few years—that’s where I’m going to need some help. I hope that a combination of sorting and hindsight will help me to spot things that I didn’t realize were there when I tour around the database. It’s also a way to make sure that I’m listening and reviewing a diverse range of podcasts, and not being stuck in a same-same rut.
When I decided to begin preparations for a Year End Best Of Bingeworthy list, I knew that this kind of database would be essential. So here’s a hat tip to all the closet database programmers out there…we’re in good company. And it’s good to know that there’s a Field and a Filter for everyone, and everything.
How do you track your listening? Drop a comment in the box below if you’ve adopted a system that helps you remember and track details.