How will public radio sound in 2026? Historian says it will still tell the story of a community

We continue now with our series of conversations about what the next year might bring. And today, we’re focusing on radio.

It’s no secret that 2025 was a seismic year in audio. Congressional cuts to funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting led to existential conversations about the future of public radio.

And podcasting went from surprisingly-relevant force in the presidential election to fodder for Hollywood’s awards season, with six shows being nominated for Golden Globes. For a medium that owes much of its popularity to its radio roots, podcasting is starting to have more in common with movies and television.

So what will the next phase of live radio look and sound like? To answer that question, The Show turned to broadcast historian and Nieman fellow Julia Barton, who’s also an award-winning editor of prestigious podcasts like Malcolm Gladwell’s “Revisionist History” and Michael Lewis’ “Against the Rules.”

Barton writes a newsletter called Continuous Wave, which looks for clues about the future of radio in its complex past.

Full conversation

SAM DINGMAN: Julia, I wanted to start with this quote from your newsletter, Continuous Wave. This is from the intro to a piece you did somewhat recently where you said, "the name of the newsletter exists because what we lack in audio production culture is continuity."

I wonder if you could tell me a bit about the backstory of that assertion. What do you think is missing when we talk about audio?

JULIA BARTON: Well, I just lived it myself as a person who edits other people who are making podcasts and before that, radio pieces. I would tell people what to do and I'd be like, "In audio, we do this," or "That's fine for the page, but for the ear, you need to do this." And at some point I realized, I don't know why, like, where these instructions of mine came from. Who first made that rule?

DINGMAN: Right.

BARTON: And it's not even a rule necessarily, but who created that practice? And you look at other fields, they seem to have origin stories for the way they do things. And I didn't feel like I really had a clear idea of that. And I knew radio had been around for a long time, and I didn't know what happened.

Why don't we know these stories? So I set out to kind of learn them.

DINGMAN: Absolutely, absolutely. You're making me think about — and tell me if you disagree with this assertion that I'm about to make. But I remember realizing at one point when I was listening to a very old episode of "This American Life," like circa 1995, that the reason for the kind of signature style of "This American Life," which eventually became the kind of signature style of a certain kind of narrative podcast, which is to say the host talking in a slightly stumbly, conversational way with music playing in the background, leaving in some of the fumbles and stumbles and stuff like that.

I realized at a certain point, because I could hear it in the background of this "This American Life" episode, is that he had to fill an hour of time, and he had to play all the stories live and mix all the music live on the board.

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And so doing this kind of meandering wander through an intro, it wasn't an affect. It was just him frantically trying to keep pace with this Rube Goldberg device he was operating.

BARTON: Yeah, it's crazy. And you realize also how much radio used to be live. And then you go back even further into the '30s and '40s, and it was live by design. Like, it kind of declared itself a live medium. And that was the excitement of listening to the radio is knowing that every voice you heard was being spoken simultaneously to you hearing it.

And then all the consequences of that decision, which means the networks actually banned recorded sound from their airwaves. Now individual stations played records, but it wasn't because it was so hard to get recordings. They sort of became the norm after Hollywood figured out kind of how to record sound for films. So you could, if you invested even before things like magnetic tape, you could record stuff.

But they just said no. They said, no, that's a hoax. Everyone thinks that everything on radio is live, so it has to be live if it's coming over the network. And so you had situations where (Franklin) Roosevelt, the president, would go on the air live to give these fireside chats to the nation.

And then a show that was sort of a roundup of the week's news would reenact the president's voice. They wouldn't play the recording of the president's voice. They would get an actor who could imitate him.

DINGMAN: Yeah, that is such incredible history to know. I wasn't aware of that. And it, of course, makes me think of the very famous example of "War of the Worlds" by Orson Welles.

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I don't know if that was originally performed live in the studio.

BARTON: Oh, yeah. Absolutely.

DINGMAN: It seems like because of this understanding that radio was something that was happening simultaneously with you listening to it in a studio somewhere, that would have been one of the reasons that people believed that there was actually this alien invasion taking place.

BARTON: Yeah. But interestingly — now we're really geeking out for your listeners — Orson Welles was one of the voice performers on the "March of Time," this sort of weekly roundup of news. And he played characters that maybe he shouldn't have, like Emperor Haile Selassie. He performed them.

DINGMAN: Yikes.

BARTON: Yeah, I know. And so he already was acquainted with this format of news-adjacent, let's call it programming. So it was easy for him to kind of imagine this, just applying it to science fiction. Wow. Radio invented all of the forms — the sitcom, the soap opera — that became popular on television. But it just became the sad stepchild.

So that's a big reason why we don't remember it as well. And in places like the UK, the BBC has continuous institutional memory going back more than 100 years.

DINGMAN: Right.

BARTON: And even some programs like the shipping news, where they tell the weather on like the islands and stuff, like people have sentimental attachment to that.

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And the closest thing we have in the United States is NBC, which was the first network.

DINGMAN: The National Broadcasting Corporation.

BARTON: Yeah. But they think of themselves as TV people now. So I don't know how well they remember radio. We'll see. Because next year is their 100th anniversary, 1926.

DINGMAN: OK. Yeah, well, I mean, we have this shorthand narrative when we talk about the rise of podcasting, which is, podcasting started in what, 2004, 2005?

BARTON: Even 2003. But I think other people claim earlier. I don't even know. I don't want to go there.

DINGMAN: OK, well, let's — we'll say early 2000s. Early 2000s, when podcasting began, but that it didn't really become broadly known until 2014 or '15 when Serial arrived.

BARTON: Yeah. And when Apple baked in the Apple Podcasts app.

DINGMAN: Yes, yes. And everybody talks about that as kind of the birth of big podcasting. But something that I think doesn't get talked about as much is that coincidental with that explosion, whether people realized it or not, they were also discovering a form of audio storytelling, the longform audio documentary, that was very synonymous with public radio in particular.

And in fact, what they were discovering was not necessarily podcasting so much, but public radio storytelling distributed via a different means.

BARTON: Yeah, I think that's partly true. It's also just like all of us in public radio, we had our time, our clock, chains of time constraints removed. And suddenly we were just eager to do our best work because it didn't have to fit in like six minutes anymore. I mean, the people may not know this, but you would work like three months on a piece, and it would air like once, and it would be six minutes long.

So yeah, people were eager to hear what we were eager to make. I also think between the '50s and the '70s, music took over radio, and FM radio had stereo and all popular music was created in that era. And when you listen to oldies stations, you know, like, why are they still playing this stuff?

And I'm like, that was the stuff that invented popular music. Because music didn't sound so good on AM. And so music took over and it was really popular and it was changing the culture. Radio still played a big role. It was just a totally different role.

And so podcasting has this problem where we have to license every piece of music. So we can't just play like a playlist and like sell it, sell ads against it. We have to talk about stuff. And so we're just blabbing because it's like the only affordable option. And so people were rediscovering new connections with voices in their head, basically voices in their headphones.

DINGMAN: The 2014 podcast Serial was created by veterans of This American Life, and it led to the breakout popularity of a storytelling style pioneered by public radio.

For a few years there, public radio and on-demand audio in the form of prestige podcasting were practically synonymous. But in 2025, is that still true?

So that moment, which was 2014, we're now over a decade past that. And I'm curious how related you think podcasting and radio are in 2025, heading into 2026. Because to my mind, there was a pretty extended period where they sat fairly closely together, format-wise and audience-wise, and I'm not so sure that's the case anymore.

BARTON: Yeah, I think it's kind of weird. Broadcasting is so different because it's not on demand in its purest form. You don't get to decide what you're listening to. The station decides.

But then also people are discovering — I mean, you see like these "radio stations" on Apple Music or Spotify. People are discovering that it's kind of exhausting to just pick your own adventure all the time. You're just like, "Ah, I don't want to do this. Someone else decide for me."

So I guess we call that passive listening. But it's a choice. I mean, now it's a choice, right? So I think that that is starting to come back. And our algorithms are doing it for us on places like YouTube. So people will just put YouTube on and just let it run all day. And they may have podcasts in there.

So I don't know. I think they're kind of merging in this backdoor, kind of algorithmic, streamy kind of way. But I do think that's a big appeal of listening to podcasts on YouTube. It's not the video of like three bros talking. It's just the fact that you don't have to make decisions all the time about what you want to listen to.

DINGMAN: So if the way that podcasts are delivered to people is starting to be more curated via algorithm, do you see radio as a medium playing a different role for people than podcasting?

BARTON: Oh, that's an interesting question. I mean, broadcast has the element of unpredictability. And I feel that some podcasts that are just pretty shaggy — you know, your Joe Rogan or whatever — they are a simulacrum of that. But there's nothing that can replace kind of like the unpredictability of live news, live sports, and that's what makes it popular.

This is an interesting side development is the rise of sports betting. So I edited the author Michael Lewis' podcast series called Against the Rules. And the season before this last one, he wanted to do a deep dive into the rise of sports betting. Kind of like how it got legalized in the United States. What is it doing to our brains?

And it was fascinating to be editing that series while I was also studying the history of broadcasting, because broadcasting was always built around live events. I mean, some of the first broadcasts that like broke through the popular consciousness were prize fights. Just live prize fights.

People were like standing in front of radio speakers on the street, like whole crowds, just to hear what was going to happen. Baseball, baseball announcing, like all of this just like powered the development of radio.

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And now you've got this in like sports, football games and stuff are like one of the few things that hordes of people all turn out to watch and listen to at the same time. And then they bet on them, and they like lose their life savings. So it's insane.

But now, CNN is trying to gamify its news. I don't know, it's just like politics, elections. It's like when the outcome is uncertain, we just have like this sort of primal need to share these events together. And that's, that's really what broadcasting is.

Podcasting, it's really hard to pull that off. I mean, once I, in my opinion, once you're doing that, you're not a podcast anymore, you know, you're a broadcast.

Like just an aside, but there's like ... I did a little review of TV podcasts on my newsletter. You know, podcast as depicted on television.

DINGMAN: Yes, Yes. I love that piece. I love that piece.

BARTON: Yeah. Well, they're all hilarious in different ways. But the one that was the most hilarious to me was this completely fake podcast called Talkback, allegedly run by this guy named "Bro" Brody, who was a podcast bro.

DINGMAN: This was on the Apple TV show, "The Morning Show."

BARTON: Correct. And so they needed a podcaster. This is in Season 4. So they brought him into the building. So he was doing his pod inside this giant network TV building, where everybody's running around saying like, "30 seconds! "30 seconds till air time!"

And then like he's supposed to be a podcaster. But he also has an engineer. He's like, "20 seconds till air time!" And I'm like, that is not real. It didn't work. He couldn't fit into the logic of the program unless he also had time constraints and was doing a live show. But they still called it a podcast.

Anyway, I just thought that was like a hilarious attempt to integrate some vague media development into their fictional universe.

DINGMAN: Yes, yes. So I love the way that you've answered this question, Julia, because one of the big questions I wanted to ask you in this conversation is with public media under threat, there are all kinds of active conversations about what the medium of public radio in particular needs to do in order to find new audiences, appeal to different audiences, break out of whatever arguably calcified bubble it's found its way into.

And one of the things that we often hear is, "Well, public media station, NPR station, you should behave more like a podcast network. You should leverage video more. You should have more personality-driven programming," these sorts of things.

But if I'm hearing what you're saying correctly, it is the essence of the live broadcast that is the enduring power. What would you like to see from the public radio stations of 2026 and beyond as they evolve?

BARTON: Oh, that's such a great question. I mean, it's such a time of flux right now because this hammer just came down on the whole system. It's brutal, and people are just dealing with it, as I'm sure you know.

And so I don't like to make unrealistic prescriptions, but say the public radio system got exclusive radio rights to the NFL season. Like, maybe they could pay for everything with that. I think it should happen.

But to ask listeners to fund so many things, it's just so hard. I mean, it's just not fair. No other system in the world runs on the back of listeners exclusively. So that's the problem.

But setting aside the money problems, if we're just talking about programming. Yeah. I think, you know, radio, it would be — you know, I used to be a public radio reporter. And it was just frustrating that it's like we only had three reporters in this major market newsroom. I wanted to be everywhere at once.

And I think people really do appreciate that, that sense that I could turn on this box, and I would learn what was happening in my community. I would learn about that protest that I'm afraid to go to, but they're there, and they're not sensationalizing it or spinning it. They're just telling me what happened and helping me process it.

And then I would like to hear the sort of podcast version, where they're unpacking sort of the origins of the issues that led to the protests. And they're telling the stories in a more thoughtful way after the fact, like what happened to people? Where did all this come from? Where are we going next? You know, like that analysis stuff.

You could do that in a weekly interview show, but then you could do a narrative thing if it warrants it. If there's like a big story that needs to be unpacked in chapters. There could be so many ways to tell the story of a community and what's happening in that community.

There's a series out of WGBH — now called GBH — in Boston, where I live. It's called the Big Dig. And so this producer, Ian Koss, and his team, he grew up in Boston and he wanted to tell the story of this giant infrastructure project to build a tunnel and route traffic underground through Boston.

And it lasted for decades. And it was a big scandal, cost overruns, lots of arguments. It was used as sort of the punching bag for like big wasteful infrastructure, socialism, blah, blah, blah. And now people use it, and it's great, and the city is so much better for it.

And so Ian wanted to tell that story, the whole saga from the point of view of people who got it going and saw it through and like all the political lives that were destroyed — and actual lives were destroyed, people died. So it was a crazy story, and it was a saga that deserved a multipart series.

And he had this incredible archive from GBH news coverage.

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He told the story,and then they put it on YouTube in a version. We say narrative shows are hard to do video with, but the GBH team actually just used the TV coverage and stills from the TV coverage to sort of illustrate Ian's reporting. So they still just used the exact same audio as the podcast version, the same music, everything.

But sometimes they would swap out the clips he used for the real clips.

So you felt like you were watching kind of a slideshow-movie-combo-thing that was really interesting, but you didn't have to watch it if you just wanted to listen to it on YouTube. And then people just poured out in comments and memories and just, like, appreciation for making sense of this story that had just hung over Boston for decades.

And then there was a live event. I didn't get to go, but Ian told me it was packed. So many people wanted to come and talk about the Big Dig and meet the guy who originally envisioned this infrastructure solution. And it was like one of those "we can do hard things" moments, people need, "Yeah, we did it, man!"

DINGMAN: And one of those rare moments where somebody who spearheads an urban infrastructure initiative becomes a celebrity.

BARTON: Yeah. But it was just such a beautiful thing because they just did everything right, and only public broadcasting could do that.