PODCASTS WITH PEOPLE TELLING STORIES
Podcasts can also tell stories through a sophisticated audio design, making use of various voices, sound effects, and music, intricately edited together. The producers focus on telling a captivating story to the listeners: They grip us emotionally, and we identify with the main characters who go through some sort of development, be it physical or psychological. Podcasts with people telling stories use the same narrative techniques that we know from films and TV series – e.g. plot points and suspense. To a certain extent, the audio design makes it sound like we’re watching a film with our eyes closed, putting us right into a dramatic scene and making us experience the events at first-hand. As in other media, stories in podcasts can be both authentic and made-up. For clarity, we’ll explore both, one at a time:
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PODCAST DOCUMENTARIES are non-fiction. They’re grounded in reality, authentic people and events. They tell stories through speaks, delivered by the reporter or host, and unscripted interviews with the people involved. To underline their authenticity, many podcast documentaries also make use of segments that seem to be unedited or have been recorded live. Also, real-life sounds and music that were captured on location during a recording session make a documentary seem more authentic. However, in order to make the story gripping, podcast documentaries also implement suspense, and sounds and music that trigger an emotional response in the listeners. That’s why many podcast documentaries are structured with the reporter as a first-person narrator, investigating the case and discovering new important facts along the way. This makes the real-life events much more personal: We feel like we are part of the investigation ourselves, primarily identifying with the reporter. However, a podcast documentary can also be shaped like a traditional news story presenting the facts and the people involved. Here, the reporter is a more authoritative third-person narrator making us focus on and empathise with the real-life participants and their problems. Although podcast documentaries usually trigger the listeners’ emotions and pull us into the authentic drama, most of them have more important purposes: First and foremost, to make us more conscious about the world and the people in it, creating awareness or joining an ongoing debate about issues in our society – violence, #metoo, climate change, etc. Other documentaries simply present facts – historical, scientific, etc.
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