Podcast Review

Hi Robert and Martin,

I would also be interested in participating. My podcasts, Working Historians and Passion and Practicality, are most definitely lo-fi!

Robert, I'm interested in such a panel and would be happy to participate. My email is molliff@troy.edu if you care to touch base that way.

You can find the Alabama History Podcast on our "home base" of Soundcloud at https://soundcloud.com/alabamahistory that syndicates to most podcast distributors.

Regards,

Marty

Marty, I think you summarize how I feel here on these two issues. I would like us to think about the possibility of us and others from this network presenting at a future conference. I notice now each year there is a podcast panel at the American Historical Association and The Organization of American Historians Conferences. Years ago it was tough getting people out for those panels. I think there is a kernel in this discussion here we could explore and now there is an audience for this topic. That or the special issue of a journal.

Great reply, Stacey, and thanks for the Hoyt and Morris citation.

I can't speak for Robert, of course, but I inferred from his post that he warns against raising the barriers to entry into podcasting by raising the "floor of acceptability" in audio production to professional radio standards. I didn't infer from him, nor mean to imply myself, that podcasters should avoid doing anything they want with their products, including adding what you rightly call aesthetic elements or even going whole-hog on production quality.

Great thread here. Mack Hagood also writes about the lo-fi vs. hi-fi academic podcast debate in a recent edited collection chapter (OA). The terminology seems to be picking up speed.

Martin, thanks for pointing to this. Right on point I think. I like the introduction of the term "Lo-Fi podcasting," I think what I am nostalgic about is that point in time (first podcast boom?) when it was all Lo-Fi podcasting. To me Serial marks that shift (second podcast boom?). I remember at the time I was teaching a podcast class lamenting the arrival of Serial because I was predicting a migration of professional radio and TV people into the podcast space.

As if on cue, this showed up on the LSE blog this morning:

Mark Carrigan, "Academics Should Embrace Lo-Fi Podcasting," LSE Impact Blog, July 13, 2022, https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2022/07/13/academics-shou....

Carrigan argues in favor of more personal "self-publication" of podcasts by academics without regard for using tricks-of-the-radio-trade to garner audience numbers.

MTO

Robert, I agree with all your points but offer this as a palliative (not because you don't know this but I think it needs saying): Podcasts that pursue advertisers pursue listeners and their metric is popularity (within their format). This is to say that some will become shallow mass market things, many will try to balance historians' professionalism with that popularity, and many will (like my own Alabama History Podcast) will be "producer oriented" and not care about popularity because they're a labor of love.

Greetings all, I want to alert everyone that the Journal of American History published a state of the field piece at the link below. It is not a long piece, however it mostly concentrates on the most popular podcasts, there is some attempt to categorize them. I would like to see one of these academic pieces not centralize popularity in their analysis of podcasts and their worth to academic dialog. The point of podcasts at the beginning was that it was a media format anyone had access to (dare I say democratized?) and now it apes radio, only the number of subscribers matter.

Greetings all, summer is upon us. Can you spare some time this summer to write a review of a podcast? We have published seven podcast reviews since October, 2020. We have many podcasts in need of review so please volunteer and knock out a podcast review this summer.