The Problems and the Promise of the Audio Industry

Why "podcast pessimism" is the wrong reaction to Spotify's layoffs

There’s a snapshot in my mind of the moment I fell in love with audio storytelling. 

It was the fall of 2008. A few weeks earlier, a tornado had torn a gash 30 miles long through eastern New Hampshire, a freak storm in a place that doesn’t see tornadoes. It killed one grandmother as she huddled over her baby grandchild, saving him. Nearby, the tornado decimated a wholesale nursery, uprooting trees and launching a worker driving a golf cart high in the air before landing him 30 feet away, shaken and bruised but alive. 

Equipped with a digital recorder I barely knew how to use, I visited. A freelance journalist, I was producing my first feature for New Hampshire Public Radio. At that point, I’d been a magazine writer and editor for 20 years, but my words had been confined to the printed — and the digital — page.

Inside a steamy warehouse, two women sat at a table, tiny pots piled in front of them…