Why Do Personal Stories Reign Supreme in the World of Podcasting?
After listening to Classy, by Jonathan Menjivar, and The Salmon People, by Sandra Bartlett, I've got some new questions about how the "personal" fits into the structure of a "topic" podcast.
Every now and then after I’ve gone through a new batch of shows, I stop and ask myself: Wait…What just happened here?
Sometimes it’s when I notice a new convention that stops me in my tracks.
It might be a subtle thing, like when I hear a fresh new performance from a narrator, like with Love, Janessa. Or, when I realized that Believable: The Coco Berthmann Story was the first use of AI voice that I had come across in a podcast.
Going back in time, when I listened to Alone: A Love Story, and somehow I felt, for the first time, that someone was talking, speaking, right to me, like it was a one-to-one conversation.
Or when S-Town came out, and suddenly a podcast could tell the story in chapters, instead of episodes. I loved how S-Town overtly blurred the genre of novel / audiobook / podcast. As I listened I thought; of course. It makes sense. It’s a long and convoluted story, much like a novel. Why has no one thought of this before?
These last couple of weeks, I have been simultaneously listening to two very different shows
At first, this was an accident; both were on my list, and I couldn’t decide which to listen to first, so I started both of them, swapping back and forth between episodes.
The Salmon People is reported and hosted by Sandra Bartlett, now with Canada’s National Observer, but she worked as a CBC journalist for decades. The Salmon People is an investigative podcast about the fight to save BC wild salmon.
Classy is produced and hosted by industry stalwart Jonathan Menjivar. For decades he’s been working as a producer to shape popular shows like Fresh Air, This American Life, and now at Pineapple Street. Classy finally puts Menjivar behind the microphone to host a series that investigates all the layers and nuances of class in America.
These shows both dive deep into a singular topic…the wild fish salmon, and the invisible/highly visible class structure of American society. Both stories perform diligent research and investigations. Neither story provides any tangible conclusion about how to solve the issue. When we get right down to it, both topics are slippery fish.
As I began to listen to these series, I realized that I was bringing my own bias with me. A question kept poking me in the arm, like the bratty younger sister.
Do all narrative podcasts need to be personal…in order to succeed and be massive?
The answer, I would venture, is a qualified yes, just as much as it is a qualified no.
But to get to all of these questions, we should jump into the podcast time machine and press the button for somewhere in 2017.
Alone: A Love Story and S-Town both hit the apps in 2017, that wild and wooly time of the podcast universe. This was before big money and celebrities flooded the podcast landscape. It was before the big mergers. It was when public radio still reigned supreme.
What is clear now, with the benefit of hindsight, is that 2017 was a time of high innovation in Podcastlandia.
These days, I would argue, innovation is slower
That’s not because producers are less creative; more that it’s a numbers game with how innovation works.
I often go back to the moment back in 2016 when a senior media professional asked me if “I actually thought podcasts were innovative?”
Sure, the first wave of innovation feels huge at the moment. But then, after all the big rules have been broken, some hits have set the bar a bit higher, the pool for Big New Ideas gets smaller, or more refined. Or both.
While this was happening, the market massively expanded. This made it more difficult to spot changes as they arose because these new gems are buried inside a tidal wave of content.
Meanwhile, while the number of ears that listen grew exponentially, now these new ears are also split in so many directions, between all their new favourite shows.
Along with a few dozen other changes I will not outline here, to bring you up to this present moment, I notice that everywhere I look, a narrative podcast follows a very personal journey. They seem to all be about a very unique story, often from their personal life or family history, and they all seem to want me to grapple with what that personal story says about the outside/wider world.
And I’m now at the point where I’m ready to ask why.
Can we still get interested and excited about a topic…an essay-driven narrative, or an investigation? Will a classic and dogged investigation, about one exact issue or idea, capture my attention if it’s not about a personal story?
As I listened to these two shows, I began to realize that my brain has been trained to look for the personal angle. How does that event, situation or idea, relate to the host? What is the big personal reveal that the host is going to unfurl, which will make me connect, or understand, to a much bigger issue?
I watched these questions surface and travel across my brain like a ticker tape. Is this my bias? Or is it my taste?
It started to bother me, so I asked myself why the personal angle always seemed to work
As I listened to these two topic-driven series, I realized that they each approached the idea of topics in two very different ways.
I have very little emotional connection to BC wild salmon. I don’t live there, I don’t have relatives who are fishers….I actually can’t even eat fish because I’m allergic to it. But I am interested to learn about The Salmon People, and what it would take to make sure that salmon are always there. And from a climate perspective, I clearly understand the importance of salmon and how underlies everything—and that matters to me.
Classy goes right to all those uncomfortable details about class in American society. I have about as much connection to class in America as salmon in BC. I’m from Canada and grew up in the suburban melting pot of Scarborough, adjacent to Toronto. My claim to fame is that I went to Band Camp with the Barenaked Ladies, and listened to Steve and Ed sing “If I Had A Million Dollars,” the song they wrote when they were 16-years-old, to a rapt audience of teenagers, circa 1987. What class does that leave me in? Hard to say.
The series Classy details that many people would rather gloss over. It outright asks if rich people are bad? It tags along with a military recruiting team, investigates why people who receive food assistance cannot buy grated cheese and plays the game Am I A Classhole? with JP Brammer, the one behind the Hola Papi advice newsletter.
As the host Jonathan Menjivar peels back each new layer, he folds himself in as well. And maybe because he gets vulnerable, the subtext of all of these questions manages to do a 180, so that I then ask myself: What class am I? Where do I, and my story, fit in here?
The Salmon People leads the listeners through a complex web of science, bureaucracy, and some dirty politics to attempt to find some answers to the question of how to save the wild salmon of BC. But more precisely, it begins with a very thorough analysis of the salmon fish farms, which are at the root of the problem of why the wild salmon are disappearing.
The host Sandra Bartlett trudges through some tongue-twisting, rather boring, industry speak to answer these and other questions. She manages to make the story interesting and engaging, which is a true accomplishment, given the complexity of this topic.
The main character in the story is a scientist and activist named Alex Morton. She is an excellent speaker; her knowledge and grit easily jump out of the script.
From a production perspective, I was disappointed that almost none of her interviews from Season 1 were done in person. This bothered me as I listened…that trick of explaining away bad tape was not used (I wondered if it was Covid, or budget). Morton gave many great interviews, and her tape appears in almost every episode. But having her recording quality be secondary always left her at a bit of a distance.
The unintended consequence of this production choice makes the narrator sound more trustworthy or knowledgeable because she has very good tape; she sounds more comfortable to listen to…I wanted the same for Morton, and I felt like I had to fight through bad tape to get to that conclusion. I was happy to notice that Season 2 has just launched, and the production quality has changed. Alex Morton appears to sound like she was recorded in person; which is either better engineering or different production choices.
Aside from an obvious disparity in production value—perhaps it’s ironic, or maybe too much on the nose—Classy has extremely high production values. Everyone sounds great and they worked really hard to find action scenes that could involve field tape. I’m glad they are there, but they frankly are not as good as the interviews that Menjivar delivers (like in Episode 1, with the Sociologist Rachel Sherman, is a standout for me). And at the end of each episode, the lengthy list of credits at the end of every episode could almost be an SNL skit.
But to go back to the narration tone for a moment, what I’ve realized is that because there’s a big difference between the approach that these two hosts take—Menjivar is always pushing the limit of personal sharing one notch in each episode while Bartlett remains the reporter, the cool observer at a distance—it changes my connection to the story.
It changes how I think about it, in the moment. And it also affects what lingers with me after I finish listening.
The best way to illustrate this difference is to use pull quotes. The first is from The Salmon People:
[Sandra Barlett, Host, The Salmon People. Episode 5]:
The BC government regulated fish farms from the beginning, since right back when they arrived in the 1980s. But it wasn’t really a provincial responsibility.The oceans come under federal jurisdiction. For whatever reason, Ottawa and Fisheries and Oceans, never challenged it.
But Alex [Morton] did. She asked the court if it was constitutional for BC to have this power. The court said it was not.
It ordered Fisheries and Oceans to step up and tell responsibility for the fish farms in BC.
It was a big deal.”
This is classic journalism. It offers a great amount of accurate and precise details. This clip tells us an important underlying principle to remember: that oceans are the responsibility of the Federal Government, which means that much of what happens at the Provincial level is not relevant, or can be dismissed.
It’s an unsexy, but important detail. And it works to be relevant by using a phrase like “it’s a big deal,” rather than something that sounds more scholarly, like “this was an important regulatory detail to watch.”
Let’s contrast this with a pull quote from Classy:
[Jonathan Menjivar, Host, Classy. Episode 1]:
Until the revolution comes, we’re going to live in a world where some of us have access to money, and power. And some of us do not.It’s hard not to get upset about that. It’s hard not to blame someone. But the whole idea that people are good or bad, based on how much they have, or don’t have,
Rachelle [the Sociologist interviewed] is right. It’s a distraction.
Are rich people bad bad?
I don’t know man. There are assholes all up and down the class ladder.
Just try not to be one of them.
Notice how the language between these different examples is very stark.
Both are accurate, but one is trying to teach you an important distinction; and the other is attempting to drag you inside a complex problem and outsource the decision, the conclusion, to you.
Both are working to frame their topics; but the one that connects the topic, or the question, to you, feels different.
As I listened and went about my day, the way the topic of class was explored stayed with me for much longer than the topic of how fish farms have ruined and polluted entire wetland ecosystems in BC.
Ultimately, I care much more about the salmon than if I’ve ever been a classhole. But my values don’t seem to matter here. In the world of narrative podcasts, the ones that reach me on a personal level stay longer.
I’m left with this uneasy feeling of needing to steer around the pothole of a question: Must all narrative podcasts be personal?
So far my answer is: I don’t think so. And then I’d like to follow up with: I hope not.
So I thought that examining the ending of Classy might help me to understand why this works, so thoroughly, so many times.
Here it goes: The way that Menjivar opens up to describe his family, the fact that “violence is only one generation behind,” is very personal. The feeling that comes to me after listening to this can be summed up in one word: connecting.
The mystery of this emotion, which is a recognition of what actually we feel when we listen to stories like these, even if we don’t have the same, or even similar, experience, is because it’s delivered to us as a story. And now, we feel part of the weight. It’s like a psychic transfer from his consciousness to mine.
Now that I have listened to this story, to these facts, his facts, I have borne witness to them, and I get to hold them for a moment. Maybe this makes the weight of them feel a bit less for someone else.
The fact that he phones his grandmother, after decades of estrangement, to try to get to the bottom of his family narrative that swirls uncomfortably around the proto-reality television show Queen For A Day, raises the stakes and puts a great amount on the line. As you listen, you might reflect on one of your own relatives that you don’t speak with anymore, and maybe think of calling them.
And then, when Menjivar pulls his cousin into the studio to do talk through the side-by-side comparison of their childhoods, which then uncovers a new analysis of Who Had It Worse with adult eyes, another word that you might feel comes to mind: compassion.
Here, there’s no mystery to uncover. That feeling of wanting more emotion, of allowing emotion, to enter a space is somewhat like an invisible hand-holding experience. It’s an easy bet to make that we all have some form of these tensions within our own families, or close friends, or chosen family. When your blood cousin lived adjacent to you, but had a completely different circumstance, and you stop to consider: if one slight thing had gone differently for that person, this whole story could be radically different.
So here’s where I get to at the end of both of these series: It’s not a judgement call of what is better or worse, although I do have an opinion about that.
The storytelling techniques that take us to the end of these sonic adventures are a lot about the details and choices that are made during production. It’s in the scriptwriting, and the choice of how to record an interview. It’s in the order of who speaks, and who gets the last word.
What I realize is that when a story turns personal, some invisible force puts me inside that story for a moment. And for whatever reason, I like that effect, and I will chase it down. This is what makes sense to me at this current moment, and I expect that will change, with another wave of podcast innovation on the horizon.
But until then, please, pull me inside your story. However you do.
If you’re curious to listen to these shows here are some links: