Choose your own adventure 🎮

What’s the future of interactive podcasts?

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A few months ago I was in Portland, Oregon, reporting on a multigenerational living community that brings kids, families and elders together. The segment was for a new podcast, The Kind City, which tells stories from around the world that conceptualise what a compassionate city of the future might look like.

The job was different to other projects I’ve worked on, in that the podcast is interactive. You get to choose what stories to pursue, from tech hubs in Brazil to food banks in Scotland. From a producer’s standpoint, it required a lot of strategizing: thinking about what the listener will hear, what choices they have to make, how to naturally sign-post these choices. It also required a lot of post-it notes. 

Fireside, the new live audio app, promises that “the future of entertainment is interactive”. Meanwhile The Verge recently called interactivity the next big thing in podcasts, and Spotify launched new interactive podcast features including audience polls and Q&As. 

But how will this play out for the actual stories? How does interactivity look (and sound) in audio storytelling? 

Podcasts and creators are increasingly exploring listener interaction from many different angles, whether it’s using Twitter polls or codes that unlock specific episodes. I took a look at a few of these approaches to see what we as producers might anticipate. 

The Kind City

Hosted by Tan France, the project lives on a custom website and comes with beautiful illustrations to guide the listener along. You hear intro clips, then click to choose which part of the world or type of story you’d like to go to next. There’s also a crowd-sourced element that encourages listeners to share their own hopes for a kinder city. 

We are VOICES

We are VOICES is the award-winning podcast from the British Red Cross, about asylum seekers, made by asylum seekers (don’t miss my previous chat with producers Alvina, Jude and Bridey). The team released an ambitious interactive episode designed to put the listeners in an asylum seekers’ shoes, with immersive sound design and video game-style narration. You’re given choices and asked to make decisions; each scenario is based on real situations. “In the end, success or failure in the game depends on which stranger you bump into in the street, showing how it’s often luck rather than the system which carries people through.”  

Clearfield 

Clearfield is an interactive mystery and horror podcast, where the audience decides what clues to follow. The show tracks Agent Eric Rockford. Instead of allowing listeners to make choices within a website or podcast player, this podcast uses Twitter as its interaction tool. After each ep, there’s a Twitter poll for the audience to decide what the main character does next. Horror and crime thrillers seem obvious genres for interactivity; I think we can expect to see plenty more in this vein. 

And a few more…

🧩 5 Week Countdown: listeners solve mysteries to help a fictional victim escape.

🧩 3D Escape Room: Frequency: puzzle clues come in the form of codes which point listeners towards either correct episodes, or dud ones. 

🧩 Earshot: puts you in a “bar full of hidden dramas” with 12 audio plays to explore.

🧩 The Fairy Tree: fantasy adventure with multiple endings. 

Interactive audio blurs the lines with video games, social media and theatre in a way that feels full of potential; it will also be interesting to see how AI might allow us to further customise choose-your-own-adventure audio. Right now it seems we’re still in an era of experimentation, and there’s always the risk of productions being gimmicky, but I think the genre holds plenty of promise for storytelling and sound design. 

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Jobs

🎲 Executive Producer, The Experiment ~ WNYC ~ New York City 

🎲 Podcast Producer ~ Lower Street ~ Remote

🎲 Production Assistant ~ Western Sound ~ Los Angeles

🎲 Senior Editor ~ Futuro Media ~ New York City

🎲 Gulf States Newsroom Senior Content Editor ~ WBHM ~ Birmingham, AL

🎲 Morning Edition Host ~ WFYI ~ Indianapolis, IN

🎲 Health Reporter ~ Public Broadcasting Atlanta ~ Atlanta, GA 

🎲 Producer II ~ LAist Studios - Snooze ~ Los Angeles

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Grants, events and more

🥁 Year-long fellowships and research mini-grants are now available from the Oral History Association. The application deadline is 15 January, and there’s an information session on 8 December.  

🥁 Jahala Love, The Enchantivist LLC offer guidance for mono-cultural production teams in the area of Cultural Sensitivity Guidance. “Many teams miss a key additional prism, that includes historical legacies, current issues of racism, discrimination, and prejudice that impact many Black and Indigenous people of color’s (BIPOC) lives and narratives. Key lines of questioning are often completely missed, misguiding the direction of key research, depriving the storyline of  additional narratives or guest POV's when a team doesn't pick up on clues which may be nuanced to them, but obvious to the larger listening audience,” says Love, who is of African and Ameridian indigenous descent, and a graduate of Columbia University (NYC) where she specialized in advanced coursework via: CSER: Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, IRAAS: Institute for Research in African-American Studies, and AFAS: African American and African Diaspora Studies. Learn more. 

🥁 The virtual Charlotte Podcast Festival Pop-up is running from 30 November to 4 December this year. Speakers include Kelly McEvers; Ian Chillag of Everything is Alive; Vox’s VP of audio, Liz Kelly Nelson; WFAE’s Gracyn Doctor and plenty more. You can also register to pitch your podcast to a panel of judges at a live event on 4 December. 

🥁 UnionDocs is hosting a virtual Podcast School from 13-18 December. Led by Neena Pathak, the six-day intensive will give participants time and space to work on their own projects -- and there’s some top producers and practitioners on hand to give guidance. Early bird registration’s available until 6 December. 

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What I’m listening to 

🎧 Jon Hopkins’ new album Music for Psychedelic Therapy is nothing short of a masterpiece, IMO, so I was thrilled to nerd out on Jon breaking down each song for Tape Notes, going into how he made the tracks and what his hopes are for this new genre of music he’s helping to pioneer. 

🎧 More sublime music nerding-out on the latest ep of Song Exploder. I loved hearing how Hans Zimmer used the music to convey that women are the power and drive of Dune. Gorgeous.  

🎧 Escaped into this beautiful piece on BBC Radio 3, diving into the work of American poet Mary Oliver.

Thanks for reading folks! As always, send any tips, comments, concerns via email or Twitter.