The Power of Podcasting: Telling stories through sound (Siobhán McHugh, UNSW Press)

It’s strange to think that ‘less than a decade ago, most people had never heard of podcasting’, as Siobhán McHugh points out in The Power of Podcasting. In this part how-to guide, part history of the form, McHugh—a seasoned audio producer, teacher and scholar—offers a brisk, enthusiastic walkthrough of the ‘grammar and logic’ of audio storytelling. She charts the rise of the podcast, which ‘arrived quietly as a tech innovation in 2001 and as a term in 2004, then exploded as a pop-culture phenomenon in 2014’. She explores the reverberations of mega-hit true crime podcast Serial, which pushed podcasting into the mainstream (‘podcasting’s history falls into two categories: pre- and post-Serial’), and the subsequent S-Town, which elevated the form to literary heights. In The Power of Podcasting’s most compelling section, McHugh takes us behind the scenes of celebrated podcasts that she worked on at the Age: Phoebe’s Fall and The Last Voyage of the Pong Su. This granular examination, including specific script notes and edits, will be most compelling to those seeking a crash course in the medium, from journalism students to anyone thinking of picking up a mic.   

Kim Thomson is a freelance writer and editor. 

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Category: Reviews