Is Podcasting the New Blogging?

By Kirsten Diprose, founder Rural Podcasting Co. Subscribe to our Newsletter!

“Podcasting is the new blogging. And it’s the best way to reach a highly engaged and loyal audience”. - Chase Jarvis

 I remember 'studying' blogging in my Media and Communications degree 20 years ago, when it was this new disruptive medium, which had the power to make ‘anyone’ a journalist. It was seen as the dawn of 'citizen journalism'… keyboard warriors, who didn’t have the same training as media professionals, with the potential to make traditional news organisations defunct.

That didn't happen.

 Meanwhile, while I was studying at the University of Sydney in the early to mid 2000s… there was this thing called "Facebook" that we were all signing up to. It was exciting and a little bit scary… a new way to socialise and ‘friend’ that good looking guy in your media and ethics tutorial. You could curate your life online and keep in touch with your school friends, in your hometown. At least, that’s what we thought it was for.

It makes me laugh when I look back now. That’s what we should have been studying. We were living in the dawn of social media. But we didn’t even have a name for it then. It was just Facebook and then and there was YouTube (MySpace was already fading into oblivion by then). Arguably, social media has done more to disrupt traditional media’s stranglehold over the news, than blogging ever did. It quickly became a source of news, feeding traditional media… and over time it has become the sole distributor of news for many people who don’t directly access a media outlet, but rather rely on their social feed to choose and aggregate their news.

Of course, the I-Phone has a lot to do with that too. When Facebook emerged, we were still playing snake on our little brick Nokias. We had to sit down at a computer to post on Facebook and manually upload our photos from our digital cameras with a cord (such effort!). No Wi Fi.

 Podcasts were emerging at this time too (not that I knew that back then). Not many people were listening. It was really for your tech geeks, because you needed a bit of technical and coding know-how to put it together and there wasn’t really a place for them.  So blogs continued their reign; they were much more convenient, rather than having to download a long audio file to your desktop.  In fact, the alternative name for podcasts was “audio blogging”. But when the I-Pod was developed, the term ‘podcast’ was coined in 2004…. And more importantly, podcasts became mobile.

In my opinion, that’s podcasting’s greatest advantage over blogging. The fact that you can do other things while listening to podcasts, has made them so effective and popular. Second to this, is the intimacy of voice, which quickly helps a listener to establish a para-social relationship with a host (where you think you’re ‘friends’ with them even though you’ve never met them). This makes them more trustworthy to a listener too.

Yes, I realise there’s a great irony in me raving about podcasts being more significant than blogs… in an actual blog. Blogging is still fantastic. But it never really became the “disruptor” that my university lecturers were theorising. So, will podcasting be a major disruptor, like social media?

 I think so, but in a different way. We have already witnessed the first wave of podcasting, when shows like “Serial” in 2014 burst onto our playlists, reimagining true crime and investigative journalism. The Serial podcast has now had more than 300 million downloads. Such reach is much harder to achieve these days, as audiences become more fractured and there are simply more podcasts to choose from.

 But since then, the true crime narrative-style podcast, where the host is often connected to the case and objectivity is blurred… has been defined as a genre on its own. There are many other successful formats too, used for comedy, business, human interest, marketing etc. But for public interest journalism, podcasting as a medium and a method is still coming into its own. It has found a successful format for investigations, but what about daily news delivery? Or local news? These areas are only in their infancy, in understanding what works.

 Local news podcasting (specifically for rural and regional areas) is an area I’ve only just started to research, as part of a PhD with Deakin University. There’s an urgent need here too. A large journalism hole has been left by all the local newspapers that collapsed, with the business model based on advertising revenues no longer working. During the onset of Covid, hundreds of local newspapers across Australia closed. These were newspapers like the Yarram Standard and the Great Southern Star, which had served small communities in Gippsland for instance, for nearly 150 years. 

 So, can podcasting be used in a way to address this? My early thoughts are around community engagement and ownership. Podcasting is a great vehicle to build trust. And we know traditional media has lost a lot of trust over recent years and people are tuning out, exhausted by all the ‘bad news’. But just as podcasting reimagined investigative reporting, can podcasting reimagine local news reporting?

 This is not “citizen blogger” stuff.  It’s where a journalist’s role becomes more of “community facilitator” or even “community member” rather than ‘objective observer.’ The purpose would be to tell interesting stories, as always…but also to enable others to tell their own story and for communities to collectively solve problems.

 Borrowing on the lessons from true crime, where the explicit point is to bring someone to justice or uncover the truth about what happened…. perhaps this can be applied in a local-community building context? But instead of justice, it’s about solutions. Constructive journalism talks about this, and I see podcasting as a good vehicle for an exploratory approach that can canvas multiple perspectives for a complex issue.

 Perhaps I’m too optimistic about the value of podcasting, particularly when it comes to good journalism (clouded by my own love and vested interest in the medium). But I am certain about podcasting’s ability to forge and grow communities – this has been proven time and again, usually for niche interests. But surely this could be applied to geographical communities, whose ‘shared interest’ is their own community?

 And to that end, some more irony for you; could podcasting’s greatest disruption… be one of unification?

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