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- [00:01]
Julia Barton
Welcome to the new books network.
- [00:07]
Robert Boynton
Welcome to this special edition of the New York Institute for the Humanities Vault Podcast. I'm Robert Boynton. On May 13, 2026, Princeton's center for Human Values hosted a day long conference titled Audio and Exploring the Possibilities for Scholarly Podcasting. It was co sponsored by Princeton's journalism program and the NYU Podcast Initiative. Over the course of four panels, scholars, podcasters and journalists discuss how academics might employ the techniques of narrative audio as part of their research. In this fourth and final panel, Jody Avregan led a discussion about what it takes for someone to make an academic podcast. Avragan is a podcast host, producer and editor. His production company is Roulette Productions. Julia Barton is an award winning podcast audiobook and radio editor. Sarah McCrae leads podcast strategy and production at the Random House Publishing Group. Caleb Zakarin is the CEO and publisher of the New Books Network.
- [01:16]
Jody Avregan
Hello everyone, my name's Jody. We're not going to do little set piece introductions of who we are in our careers. I mean, I was thinking on the way over that one of the most corrosive, intrusive thoughts in modern America is the idea of maybe I should start a podcast that just sort of pops into your head from time to time. We're gonna go right at that today and kind of walk through what it takes and whether that's a good idea. I was thinking that we could structure this as. I don't know if anyone's used this before, but who, why, what and how? The basic question is, you know, who should host the podcast? What does it take to host? What is the sort of self interrogation you need to do when you say, oh, maybe I should start a podcast. And Caleb, could you start? Because I feel like you're at the front line of interacting with people who have that first glimmer of a thought.
- [02:05]
Caleb Zakarin
Yeah. So, hi everyone, I'm Caleb Zakarin. I'm the publisher of New Books Network. And New Books Network, for those of you who aren't familiar, is quite different from a lot of the podcasts that have been featured here. We do host narrative podcasts, but a lot of what we do is provide a platform for academics who don't necessarily want to create and manage their own podcast, but they want to be able to interview people. They want an excuse to have a podcast without having to do all of the work. So we manage these feeds that we sort of call organic feeds. Everything it's, you know, everything from new books in economics to new books in Canadian studies. Basically, if you look at a course Catalog you put new books in, then you'll see the subject. What we do is people will sign up as hosts and we will basically show them, okay, here's how you might do a basic interview. And we say stick to your subject, stick to what you want to do, and use it almost as like a
- [02:57]
Jody Avregan
tool in terms of the actual academics you work with.
- [03:00]
Caleb Zakarin
Yeah.
- [03:00]
Jody Avregan
Other than it would be cool to host the podcast, it'd be cool to have an excuse. Have you noticed anything kind of dispositionally about them or where they are in their careers that makes them kind of want to take that first step?
- [03:12]
Caleb Zakarin
Yeah. So I would say, like, the vast majority are grad students and postdocs. And I think it's because a lot of them are in the phase where they're trying to meet as many people as they possibly can in their field. And reaching out to someone as, hey, I want to interview you about your book, is one of the best ways to get someone to respond to your email. I think if sometimes, if you're just reaching out, otherwise it's harder. So sometimes it's people that are really, you know, it's in that early research phase. It's conversations that they might be having anyway, so might as well just like record it and, you know, let. Let everyone else listen in on your conversation that you might have in private. Otherwise.
- [03:45]
Jody Avregan
Either of you want to jump in on that?
- [03:47]
Julia Barton
I mean, mainly I've worked with magazine writers, but, you know, like, I've edited Jill Lepore stuff and her show the Last Archive. And I think it's great thing if you don't feel like waiting like seven years for your book to come out. So it's the same instinct like, that I turned to when I started my newsletter is like, I don't want to just wait. I want to, like, sort of rehearse and talk in the public realm. And I know for the hosts that I've worked with who still they publish in magazines, but those pieces take months to come out. Feedback is immediate, and then it becomes the preferred method of being in the world because you get immediate feedback from listeners, and that's just like a thrill. People who are not afraid of that, I think that's a necessary kind of like feature of it. And then the other one is people who are a little more collaborative. It's not like going off and writing your book, which, personally, I can't figure out how that is done. So I'm the opposite. But people have noted that it's very in your face. Like, if you're doing a Full on narrative production. There's like a lot of producers in your document, and it's weird. You gotta be able to enjoy that.
- [04:58]
Sarah McCrae
Yeah, I think similarly, it's come up several times throughout this afternoon. The idea of the host is someone who might not be the expert. My name's Sarah. I currently lead podcasting at Random House, the book publisher. But I have also produced many shows with academics or with literary figures, public intellectuals. And I think that I really like working with people who have a depth of knowledge and a rigor to their knowledge. And I think what I look for as an effective, like, for an effective host is a combination of that rigor, depth of knowledge, expertise, and someone who's open, who's a lifelong learner in that way, specifically because the host is often an avatar for the audience in a lot of ways. And so someone who's pursual of knowledge or narrativization of knowledge through the audio form can be something that welcomes people in rather than pushing them away. Feels like something that makes for really compelling audio.
- [05:51]
Jody Avregan
You have to kind of like dexpert them a little bit in order to serve that role of a proxy for the listener.
- [05:57]
Sarah McCrae
Often that's the job of the producer is to dexpert a little bit.
- [06:01]
Jody Avregan
I host a history show for Radiotopia. I'm not a historian, but I have two actual historians on the show with me, which I think distinguishes us from a lot of history podcasts that we have actual historians on. But I've talked with Nikki, who's at Vanderbilt, and Kelly, who's at Wellesley. They've said sort of point blank. Well, one, I think they're just very excited by the idea of being public communicators. And I think there's just some academics for whom that is something they want to do. But I think they've talked pretty bluntly about looking around at just like the academy and saying, I got to have some other tools or arrows in my arsenal here. Like, you know, who knows if this. What the future of this job is, but if I'm putting myself out there in other ways. Like, we interview folks who write books a lot. We have them on and you can tell sometimes, like, oh, you were like, you wrote a book. But like, you're down to just be in the academy, like, that's your world. We edit it and it works. But, you know, then you meet other people who just have that in them or they have that desire and they're just like, I want to take my ideas and communicate to the public there's no judgment there. I think that's an important thing to just interrogate in yourself and in a potential host about, like, do you want to, you know, do you really want to do that?
- [07:06]
Sarah McCrae
And it often does look, as was brought up earlier, a lot more like the work that that someone does in a classroom setting versus what they might do on a monograph page, of working with students, people of varying expertise and bringing them into your field of knowledge. Depending on your audience, of course. But I think, honestly, regardless, just in a dialogic form, that's where academics have this expertise they're doing every day with live audiences of students in front of them.
- [07:30]
Jody Avregan
Caleb, does that translate in the people you work with? Like, you're really good at giving a lecture, so you probably have what it takes to.
- [07:36]
Caleb Zakarin
Yeah, I mean, I think sometimes it's like piggybacking off of the fact that someone just spent five years researching a topic and they basically have almost like their speech down. A lot of people, like, you know, you ask them questions about their book, about the various chapters, like they know exactly what they're going to say, how they want to say it. So there are some people that are extremely effective communicators. It's great too, for people because sometimes listening to the podcast back for them is the very first time that they've really heard themselves give their speech. Besides people just giving them feedback. I definitely think to like, you know, narrative versus more dialogue driven podcast. I really do think every single book could have like a dialogue component to it. And sometimes it's interesting because, you know, it almost like pulls back the COVID of the book, the aspects of writing that might not necessarily be communicated in the book exactly, but can be really interesting and valuable for especially students. And sometimes then by listening to that, you can then decide, okay, should we go even further and produce a narrative driven podcast? Obviously, it would be probably next to impossible to produce a narrative driven podcast based on every single book, but I really do think it is possible to produce some sort of dialogue based on every single book.
- [08:44]
Jody Avregan
What have you learned about the institutions themselves? I mean, are there some institutions that are a little wary of their academics putting themselves out there?
- [08:52]
Caleb Zakarin
Yeah, I mean, for the most part, I, you know, and I mostly work with university presses. The very first university press that New Books Network ever worked with was Princeton University Press, and that was starting in about 2017, 2018, and they were really, I would say, early on the university press podcast wave. There are lots of instances of presses that tried to start their own podcast. And then it kind of died because they didn't really know how to do it in house. They want their authors out there. Their authors certainly say, hey, how can I get on a podcast? And I think they encourage their authors to do it because I think they recognize that even if a podcast only has a few hundred listeners, that's a niche of people that actually might be willing to buy the book, as opposed to, you know, getting written up in the Wall Street Journal. It might get read by 100,000 people, and it translates to zero sales.
- [09:38]
Jody Avregan
Julia, you mentioned Jill Lepore. So it's like, if we're trying to map the stages of sort of exposure for an academic, there's the first one. It's like, okay, I have good ideas. I'm good at what I do. I give a good lecture. Maybe I want to start a podcast project. I want to be a public communicator. Someone like Jill Lepore. You know, when you started working with her, she'd already gone through all that, right? She's writing for the New Yorker. What was the stage at which you started working with her and what was the next step for her?
- [10:05]
Julia Barton
Well, first of all, she knew what she wanted to do, and she wrote a three season arc for the Last Archive that was like, it was a book. And then later on became an audiobook called who Killed Truth? So she really had a plan, and it was about the history of evidence from three different angles through 20th century America. And it was an ambitious plan. But also, when I first met her, you know, she'd been on the New Yorker Radio Hour, she'd done pieces, but she'd never had her own show. And, you know, and I was kind of explaining the process to her, and I was like, this is your show. Like, I'm here to facilitate you doing the thing that you want to do. But in the end, and this is how I feel about all the hosts, it's like, you're the one on Microsoft. You are taking all the risks. You know, we want to help you do what you want to do. And I think she really just appreciated that. I don't know if it's rare, but it's just like something hard where it's like, you don't have to share this space with anyone else, you know, like, you will, actually. That's a lie, because we're all behind you, like messing with your script and telling you how to track and stuff. Just sort of like a little territory that you can own in the way that is kind of unique in the sense that your voice is on it. And it's also an interesting power dynamic, which I didn't really realize until I started working with more authors. And there were a lot of New Yorker authors kind of at Pushkin, is that they're very good about taking edits, but they also have a lot of anxiety around edits. And this also comes from people who come from newspapers, too. Maybe you've encountered this, but when you go into a studio, there is no way your editor can make you say anything that you don't want to say,
- [11:42]
Sarah McCrae
because it has to come out of
- [11:43]
Julia Barton
your mouth into the microphone. I mean, maybe we could cut some of it later, and that might make you mad, but it's a different dynamic than opening the magazine or the newspaper and finding that your lead has been rewritten. You didn't want any of that in there, and that happens a lot. So people get very like. And I'm like, I have no power over you. I mean, like, I literally have to convince you to do all of these moves.
- [12:05]
Unidentified Panelist 1
Right.
- [12:06]
Jody Avregan
But the good news is that when you convince them to do that and really embrace voice, that's also what makes for the best audio. Right? And so if you can. You know, I really admire what you did with what you've done with, like, Joe Laporte and also with. With Malcolm Gladwell, who, I mean, already had. You know, you read Malcolm Gladwell's writing. There's voice there. But I feel like you even were able to push him to another level of embracing that and expressing that in audio. Something clicked with the two of them of, like, wow, to make this medium really work, I just have to put myself out there.
- [12:35]
Julia Barton
It's a collaborative process. So, like, when I was talking in the other panel about the sermon, like, that was realization I came to with Malcolm's stuff. He's doing something, you know, that's kind of older than this podcast form. He has that sort of in his upbringing. There's a lot that they teach me as well. And also just they know their audience in a way that I think a lot of us coming from broadcasting, we only the vaguest knowledge of, like, who is listening, and just, like, a lot of just weird. But people have been writing books for a while, publishing books or publishing in magazines. They kind of know their audience, and that is a real G. Because you don't have to just, like, do jazz hands for all people. You know, it's like your people are the core.
- [13:21]
Jody Avregan
Do you want to talk a little bit about Sarah? Like, you work obviously with authors, Random House, but when you have a conversation with them, about where audio fits into their larger project.
- [13:30]
Sarah McCrae
Yeah, I mean, I think. And I'm still learning. I'm one year into working in like a corporate book publishing environment. So it's like a very different ecosystem. And so a lot of what I've been doing this year is just going on listening tours and trying to understand the whole set of dynamics in academia and the whole set of academics and corporate book publishing, where it is about not to be crass, but like it's about moving copies. Like the business model is selling books. And so everything you do is towards selling books in that very concrete way. And so I think that there's, you know, that obviously it's an arts business, so there's other dimensions to that. Like that's not the only way decisions are made, but there's that constant conversation happening and thinking. I think just the idea of audio specifically, there's definitely a reason that today is focused on audio, even when, you know, video is such a part of the general. If you go to any podcast conference right now, it's just like nonstop panels about video. I do a lot of work with a group in Brooklyn called the School of Attention and I think a lot about attention and that's shaped how I think about producing. And I think the mode of quality attention that audio elicits is very much an extension of the mode that either like really effective classroom teaching or reading text elicits. And that's why I think they're compatible mediums. But I'm not quite answering your question.
- [14:46]
Jody Avregan
No, I mean, but I think you selling people on that is a big part of it. Yeah, so I think it's very rewarding when you have that kind of right.
- [14:52]
Sarah McCrae
So I work in a book publicity department, so for me it's talking about, as Caleb was saying, pivoting our understanding from a quantity of attention to also a quality of attention and understanding that just because you see a bunch of TikToks from an author might not convert into book sales. Because the reason we watch TikToks isn't the same reason we read books. And so the reason we're interested in people who are really effective in a short form video medium, that might be the right form for them. And so often it's finding the right form for someone, I think I would say for like both Gyllepore and Malcolm Gladwell. I mean, well, for both of them, they are already so established as writers, but also audio as a form brought out a different dimension of their work that really served that work itself. And that's what I think of about when I'm working with authors on a producer level and trying to think broader about how we can engage book authors in different audio formats in a way that serves the book itself as well from the publishing perspective.
- [15:49]
Jody Avregan
It's funny, I mean, given the roller coaster that the larger podcast ecosystem has ridden over the last few years that we've all been right at the front of that roller coaster, throwing up a little bit, it has forced us to check back in with the things that make this world special. And I feel like one of the very first things I heard when I started to get into podcasting was like, you may have this niche podcast and you may only have like 2,000 listeners, but those 2,000 listeners would run through a wall for you. I mean, those are your people. And I was heartened to hear in the previous panel, someone talk about, like, yeah, wow, I reached 5,000 people. That's crazy. I've never, you know, the quality of the audience engagement really is special. And I think when you get academics to sort of realize that something magic happens, I also think advertisers need to realize that a little bit better. But, you know, that's another part of the conversation here. So that was a little like, who is right for this? Or what kind of questions you need to ask yourself. Obviously, the big question is, I wrote a book. I have a bunch of big ideas. How do I convert that into something that's actually a compelling listening product? So this is the classic, like, an idea is not a story. How do you bridge that? So, Sarah, do you want to jump on that? Like, what are the questions you first start to ask or start to think about when you're trying to convert?
- [17:06]
Sarah McCrae
Yeah, I mean, I think so much of what I understand is the difference between academic presentation versus podcast presentation is that often academic presentation starts the idea is the main. Is the paramount thing, and then stories come in as maybe supplemental evidence to the idea. And I think sometimes in podcast world, quite often you have to lead with the story. So that can bring out a really different dimension of your work. And I'm very interested in how do you adapt a book or a text product for audio in a way that both utilizes the form of audio itself and feels like an extension of the text product that something you can get to in audio that you wouldn't be able to get, because there's obviously an audiobook which is a one to one adaptation of your book, which is amazing. And there are so many, as we've heard today, like, so many uses for that, but thinking about what else is possible in the audio medium. For me, I'm really interested in, as we've heard also today, about the aesthetics of conversation and what introducing conversation and like a dialogue into the larger project or idea that you're working with can do for the idea itself. I can give a concrete example, as always, get a little abstract. Right now. I have a show coming out next week with Random House. It'll be Random House's first podcast that we've done across Random House Publishing Group. I embedded on a book tour with an author and an academic named Nomali Serpell, who's also a New Yorker writer, has worked written across publications. So already a public facing person. Also a brilliant novelist critic, but had never done a podcast before. And so she published a book with Random House in February called On Morrison, which is a very extensive study of Toni Morrison's work. It is critical, it's personable, it is rigorous, it's scholarly. It's a very unique piece of literary criticism, I believe. And so when the publicist brought to me, they said, she's going on tour, she's incredible, she's an incredible speaker. We want to figure out how to record her tour and turn it into a podcast. That immediately got me thinking about how the form of a live book tour could translate to recorded audio, which I think is something quite tricky considering a lot of live recordings. I mean, putting aside questions of sound quality, which was its own thing to figure out, sometimes when you're listening to a recording and you weren't in the room, it puts you at a remove from the recording. And so my.
- [19:30]
Jody Avregan
Not anyone listening to this recording.
- [19:32]
Sarah McCrae
No, of course not. No, you're here with us. This is parasocial in the moment. The challenge for me was, okay, how can we actually take the book tour format and make that part of the story? But this is the extension of an author's life. So I embedded on this book tour, I was like a literary groupie. And the two of us traveled around the country over the past few months and she talked to brilliant people, including Vincent Cunningham, who's one of our episodes. And at each stop on the tour, because so much of the book, when I read an advanced copy of it, is these really in depth, close readings of Toni Morrison's work, going down to the sentence level and understanding what an author like Morrison was doing on that aesthetic and formal level just opens up her work to you in this new way that to me as someone who did a Great Books program as an undergrad, it's like, that's so engaging in an audio format. Like there is something so narratively beautiful about not understanding that and then reading something again and understanding it. It's like a full hero's journey where you come back to where you began with a whole other understanding of what's present in a text. And so at each stop on the tour, Namali and her conversation partners opened up a different passage of Toni Morrison's prosecution. Each stop is a different episode. And then the intros for each episode I recorded behind the scenes in the book tour in real time where we're in a grocery store or we're in a park, we're by a lake. And she's musing about Toni Morrison while engaging with the terrain of these different cities that she was traveling through. So the show is called Passages Colon on Morrison and it's coming out next week and very excited about it.
- [20:59]
Jody Avregan
Look, you were able to find the resources to go on tour, but I think the bones of the sort of really brilliant thing you did was just like, how do we storify, how do we make scenes? This relentless pursuit of like turning things into a story, turning things into something
- [21:14]
Sarah McCrae
and work with what you have. Because yes, we had resources with book tour, but like just starting from even like I think there's so much question about either narrative versus chat. And I just want to like reframe that a bit. Just be like, just because something is not narrated doesn't mean it's not narrative. And you can infuse a lot of narrative thinking into any level of budget production.
- [21:34]
Jody Avregan
I got my start at WNYC in morning talk radio call in show with this guy, Brian Lehrer. The thing I learned from him is that Even in a 20 minute live interview show, you can still have a narrative arc. You can start in one place, introduce characters, have a twist. If you just sort of wire your brain that way and listeners brains are wired that way. There are all sorts of ways to infuse those beats and story into your work. So yeah, how do you storify things?
- [22:03]
Julia Barton
Well, I'm working. I'm actually the story editor on Fanny Graminski's project and it's been really great. And I think that the key is like getting the creativity and the collaboration and being willing to trust a producer even if it's just in a studio. This is an interesting aspect of audio. You really can't hear it yourself while you're producing it. You need an outside thing. There's like a reciprocity loop built into the form. It's hard to get distance on your own stuff and to use, you know, switch to that part of your brain without, like, considerable time passing. Like, Ira Glass would talk about how he can't really listen to episodes of the show for, like, six months because that's when he stops editing it and just can listen to it. You need another person, I think, for. For this form. I mean, you can do it as a monologue by yourself, and people do a lot, but you're basically recording a voice, a voice memo, you know, to think about that collaboration and also to just be. They'll give you different ideas, you know, like, you might get out of the studio. There might actually be an easier way to do this thing that you're all caught up in your head. So that capacity, it's kind of like one of the secret powers of audio, that it's collaborative. It just is of necessity. And so I collaborate with the hosts, but also the producers and the engineers so that I'm an extra pair of ears. When their ears are tired and they can't just can't. They don't know what. They're just like, I can't hear this thing anymore. You go crazy.
- [23:33]
Caleb Zakarin
Yeah, I want to take it sort of in a slightly different direction, but just because I think the type of podcasting that I focus on is different, and a lot of it has to do with producing podcasts for a very niche audience. The On Morrison project is unbelievable, but obviously extremely time consuming. And one thing I think a lot about is, you know, accessibility when it comes to academic content. And we've done studies of, like, the NBN audience, and, you know, a significant portion of the audience have Master's degrees or PhDs, but a minority of them work on college campuses and have access to research libraries. And for a lot of these academic monographs, they're priced, you know, ridiculously high, they're inaccessible. And if you want to access them, you've got to go to a research library, or in many cases, like, if you want to hear what someone says about what the book is, you have to wait months for it to get reviewed in a journal. So I think sometimes a podcast is the number one place to go and actually get that kind of instant review, that instant lowdown of what's in it. So I think that a big thing in general, too, is just accessibility. Not just making something available to a more general audience, but also just like, making it available, period, because this stuff is not available to most people.
- [24:43]
Jody Avregan
But I'm curious for all three of you, when you think about the availability and the accessibility of work if it's coming from an academic home base. I've struggled with this and actually sort of changed my thinking a number of times around this, you know, the wonkiness level, for lack of a better way of putting it. There's been times in my life where I've done projects where it's like, gets pretty wonky and my, my instinct has been, well, let's make this as accessible as possible for everyone. And there's been other times where it's like, no, let's embrace the wonkiness because people really like that. And even people who don't fully get it, they'll just like that it's true to the world that it comes from. How do you navigate that?
- [25:19]
Julia Barton
I mean, I think about that all day long. That's basically all I do. I think the feedback loop again can inform, like when people are like, oh, wow, that was a cool piece you did about Hawaiian. And everyone's just like, that wasn't Hawaii, that was the Cayman Islands. What are you talking about? And they're like, oh, I didn't, you know, like, that's a dumb example. But, you know, like it's, you can immediately know when you're just like right over people's heads. But also I think the form itself, it is a challenge. I mean, I often think of it as like we're trying to stuff this whole book through a tiny straw into people's ears, you know, so breaking things down into beats and doing all that storyboarding, you're serving the larger challenge of the idea by making it linear to suit the form. And you just have to kind of like help people understand. Like, yes, the ideas will come, but they need to sort of like almost occur in people's heads before they know it. And then they hear the voice of the host confirming the sort of connections that have already taken place inside that brain. And when that happens, it's amazing. And it's just really a challenge in a narrative ideas based show to get there. Places like Radiolab, I mean, they, you know, they will sit on a story for a year until it's sort of like all the elements are in place. And that's a luxury that like a lot of productions don't have. But it just speaks to the challenge of taking big ideas and putting them into a forum that I often equate it to. It's like, it's not like a book at all, it's like a scroll. Like if you took all your ideas and wrote them on a Scroll and then you had to, like, roll up and roll down. That's what the listener is going through. If they're listening in the fashion that we design them, like, they could be clicking around on, like, time codes on YouTube. We don't know what they're doing out there, but. So there are a lot of challenges to it. But there's also, like a magic that happens and the sound design and other things, those provide subtextual clues that help the listener sort of like, keep track of characters and ideas.
- [27:12]
Jody Avregan
In reaction to what you just said, I just feel like I've had a number of times where, whether it's in a chat show or a narrative show, you're kind of taking an idea that comes, and I'm sure Alan has many thoughts about this, but you're taking an idea that comes from a pretty small place and you're trying to present it to a larger audience. And when I've done that and done it successfully and you kind of turn it into a story that people can glom onto. It's pretty rare in my experience that you get feedback from that small little world where it started that's like, oh, you made a hash of this or you glossed over it or whatever. Mostly people are like, thank you for talking about our thing, you know. And so I don't know if that's a universal lesson, but generally I find myself deferring to the, like, core storytelling instinct. That doesn't mean dumb it down and make it accessible to everyone. But, like, even the really wonky folks still like stories.
- [28:02]
Sarah McCrae
I think the questions of audience. Sometimes we use talking about audience as a way to, like, mask that we're actually talking about funding models and like, where. Where your money is coming from. And so I think that, like, not to reduce it to that, but I think that there's different, like, freedom with how wonky something gets based on whether you're like, on an advertising, like, cost per listen model or not. I do think that I was really just on the feedback cycles thing. I was trained as a print journalist originally, like, working in all weeklies. And there's a lot of craft language around print journalism and just print writing in general. There's a lot of craft language. It seems like these rules. So then when I came into Audio World, working at Pushkin and Slate and these different places, I was surprised how much the feedback language was often, like, my attention drifted at this point. Like, this feels long. Like it was this very affective feedback language that I think might be surprising to some academics and was definitely surprising to journalists, I think, coming into it. And. And that's something I've actually grown to really love about audio because it shows how subjective feedback is where when you're in a cycle where as a producer, you are the feedback giver to the host and then the editor, if you're lucky enough to have an editor, is the feedback person to the producer. And then hopefully it just keeps going where by the time it reaches the listener, it's been through these different cycles. That's why it's important to have collaborative processes in your production, to have different perspectives and voices in the room. And then sometimes it's becomes less about audience and more about. I believe I heard. I'm thinking it was. Mia Lobel, who worked with Julia Pushkin, has been a mentor to myself, who said something about how it's not always about audience, but it's about intent. I hope I'm not like totally attributing something to everyone's life, but I think it's a really smart thing. Often it becomes more about what is our intent with this, rather than let's, in the kind of marketing MBA way, let's make up a fake audience member and tape their picture to our. Well, because I think the intention is a lot more important.
- [30:00]
Jody Avregan
When we spoke last week about what we were going to chat about here, but someone said, you know, that a lot of academics like citation anxiety is very real. But yeah, I'm curious. Well, okay, that was you. So you get to sort of elaborate on that. But also, I'm sure you encounter that all the.
- [30:14]
Caleb Zakarin
All the time just to pick up on the last thing really quick. Like, I love sometimes wonkiness. Sometimes I feel like I like to listen to an interview where there's almost no regard for there being listeners because it's that feeling of like being in college again. You know, one of the ways that we sort of get around citation anxiety is I always tell guests that that's why there's a book attached. You know, that's why we oftentimes like there to be a book attached to it. Or we'll put, you know, references at the end. And if anyone writes in to complain, be like, well, what they said was inaccurate. We say, well, the truth is in the book. So if you're going to cite something, cite the book or cite, you know, the references. And I also think to a certain extent too like part of conversation that might be different than writing. You know, people sometimes will just naturally crib each other's writing sentences and styles, even if you don't get directly. Someone isn't directly cited. I think that there's a way of doing it without necessarily, like, stealing. So I think it's always important to. If you are referencing something to, like, put it in the. In the notes so that someone can go further. It's not something that I worry about terribly because I oftentimes think about it as, like, well, you know, there is a text or there is something else associated with it, and that's just only in the case of this monograph. Obviously, it's a different story if it's like a narrative podcast and, like, there is no monograph attached to it, though,
- [31:30]
Jody Avregan
or it's a little harder to sort of pop out and offer a citation and a narrative.
- [31:34]
Julia Barton
Can I just say, while we're on an academic campus, this endowed chair thing in people's titles has got to stop. People's titles are, like, a mile long
- [31:42]
Sarah McCrae
now when you're introducing things, three different
- [31:44]
Jody Avregan
names before you even say the name of the guest. Because you have to do the chair.
- [31:47]
Julia Barton
Yeah, I can't. I just can't with that. No, And I also. What is the difference? Yeah, what is the difference between an associate professor and an assistant professor? Like, I don't understand. Okay, thank you. I mean, I. I should know that. I should know that.
- [32:03]
Jody Avregan
Triggering question.
- [32:05]
Julia Barton
It is, but I'm like, yeah, all this stuff. I mean, we spent a lot of time, like, trying to get this stuff right, because we know that that's really important, but the endowed chair thing is, like, driving me nuts.
- [32:15]
Jody Avregan
Yeah, I hear you. The show I currently host, the History show. It's a conversation show. And so we can square the citation thing a little bit better, because I actually think there's a real power in a passing citation or like, a hat tip to an idea that came from someone. I mean, I think a lot of people have talked about it today that actually, that, like, humility of showing that you're part of a larger, evolving kind of idea space is really powerful and connects with listeners. You know, they don't want you to be every one of your thoughts to be completely authoritative and come only from you. So I actually sort of look for opportunities to cite stuff. But, yeah, sometimes it can be a little difficult. But that's why, you know, reading lists, newsletters, supplemental material really helps if you square it right. There can be, like, a real spirit of, like, generosity in the citation itself, and it can sort of burnish. It doesn't have to feel like a side thing that you were obligated to do it. It can actually be part of the story you're telling. Okay, let's talk a little bit about archival, because I think that's one of the secret elements to all of this. And again, it depends a little bit on what your format is. And I know we've been jumping around on all sorts of different formats here. I did a series called 30 for 30, which were sports stories that didn't come from the academy, they came from the world of sports. But, you know, in that series, archival was the secret weapon. We would often ask people like, hey, do you have a box of tapes in your attic or your basement? You know, just like finding a treasure trove of great archival, that can be the starting point for a piece. And so I think academics have a real advantage here because, like, you're used to going into the dusty box of tapes or into the microfilm or whatever. And so how do you feel like that fits into the work that we do?
- [33:52]
Julia Barton
Yeah, I mean, that's the last archive was based on that. But it was also an interesting learning experience for me because the producer of that show, Ben Nadif Haffrey, he was Jill's student at Harvard and he did his thesis about radio drama. And they did a lot of reenactments when there wasn't recorded sound. Sort of like the first season was very sort of like old radio style, and listeners hated it. They were so grumpy about it, and so they kind of toned it down. That opened my ears to like, how much Americans only expect the voices that they hear to be non fictive voices. But I've used that since on other series that I've edited. I edited a series from Pushkin called the Chinatown series, which was a court sort of drama over the course of many years. But there was the consistent voice of the court document. You know, they weren't all the same court documents. There were many different trials. But we ended up hiring a voice actor to be the voice of the state. And I think that kind of solution is something that you can. You can deal with non audio sources as well, non audio archival sources, and make them part of the texture of the story. And that worked really well, doing stuff like that, the way Radiolab would put ideas to music and, you know, just like it can force you to think about the archive in new and interesting ways when you have to sonify it.
- [35:09]
Sarah McCrae
Yeah. And I think the archive can be such a powerful aesthetic tool as well, in the storytelling. And just the way that throwing to archival material, either read or reenacted or something that you find can be part of the sonic landscape of. Something has definitely come up. And I think it doesn't have to be. Like often when I think archival, I think, okay, really expensive from a production cost perspective. I mean, of course, as was said earlier, there's many creative ways of getting to fair use. We all become versed in as producers. But I think that there's a lot of benefit to thinking about how you can use different aspects of the audio medium to create a sound rich story. Like what the samples that we heard today. So at Pushkin, I wrote and produced a show called McCartney A Life in Lyrics. It was taken from an archive of conversations of like hundreds of hours of conversations between Paul McCartney and Princeton Professor Paul Muldoon, the poet. And we were given this mountain of tape and it was like 24 narrative episodes, like somewhere in this mountain of tape. And so really thinking about building out a show like that. Obviously music was so key to the landscape of. Of that show and to the form of it where each episode was digging into a different song. And so I would often look at like the structure of the song we were talking about, thinking about how could I mirror the structure of the episode so that you'd feel like it was echoing the structure of the song. And one main way we did that was relying on archival material, both archival recordings, the archives of the conversations themselves, and then other forms of archives. So just quickly as like a way of getting around the licensing thing. McCartney was very inspired by BBC radio dramas that he would hear growing up. And for our Maxwell Silver Hammer episode, he had been talking about how he was deeply inspired by an Alfred Jarry absurdist radio drama he had heard on the BBC growing up. And we approached the BBC and I think it was like it was going to be thousands of dollars to use, like one second in one market. Like it was just not gonna happen. So the producer I was working with, Pike Malinowski, who's a brilliant radio host, artist and sound designer, he found us a vocal cartoonist. I don't know where you find a vocal cartoonist in New York, but we retranslated the play from the French, so it was like a new form. And then we had this vocal cartoonist do all the voices. It's the cold open of that episode, and I just think it's so much better. That was kind of the problem becomes the solution sort of thing. It's so much better than if we just gotten it from the BBC. And it's like, great. It's like this totally new rendition that became part of the show. Do you think about archival and your vote? Yeah. Does that come up?
- [37:46]
Caleb Zakarin
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I was like, Bob. Well, I was actually thinking a bit about this project that New York Institute of Humanities does called the Vault, where basically these old, you know, some are new, but like, I'm sure this will appear on that. But basically the Vault will have old recordings of, you know, people like, like Hannah Arendt giving, you know, lectures in the 70s, and you can listen to those old lectures. So I think that there's like, there's such a treasure trove of old academic lectures out there. And part of the problem is that, like, you can go and find them in all sorts of different sources. They're not necessarily, like, a lot of the times these archives are not well kept, which is, I think, part of the, the issue. And, you know, one, one thing too, as far as, like, actually, like having things appear within the episodes. Like, we've run into a lot of trouble in the past of basically things especially just getting struck down on Spotify. I think they just use some sort of AI tool. They just pull it down. Yeah. So like, like, Dan, we experienced this problem where like, we were using like 4 second clips of films and it was. They, for some reason it would just be able to determine. It's like, oh, you used four seconds of Chinatown. Like, you know, we're taking it down and if you do this again, then we're going to, you know, hunt you down.
- [38:58]
Jody Avregan
Shazam.
- [38:58]
Sarah McCrae
Technology.
- [39:00]
Caleb Zakarin
It's, you know, in my experience, like, I've sent like long emails, like, arguing like, no, this is fair use for using three seconds of it. And it's quite a challenge to like, get past that sort of thing. And I mean, I think, Sarah, like, I think the solution that you came up with is like, is like a cool, better solution.
- [39:16]
Jody Avregan
So if you take one thing from this panel, it's get a vocal cartoonist. Yeah. So write that down, everyone. Just one.
- [39:23]
Caleb Zakarin
No, I feel like in 100 years, whoever's making podcasts, they'll have so much content that they'll be able to use fair use. The podcast will be great.
- [39:32]
Jody Avregan
Then I will say, and then we'll take questions. But you said something about you got to get outside of the studio and add. I like to use the word texture a lot. Just a little texture. Whether it's archival or anything. Scoring just elevates things. But there are ways to get outside of the studio without actually getting outside of the studio. And I've made a lot of documentaries, but I also love talk. And you can inject in just a conversation in a studio. These moments that feel like you're going out into the real world. And I, for instance, on my history show, I found myself asking my co hosts about their times in the archives. Or I've asked them about, oh, when you talk about this, whatever subject, you know, we're doing that episode. When you talk about this with your class, how do you talk about it? How do they react? And all of a sudden, you know, we're painting a scene, we're telling a story. There's characters.
- [40:21]
Julia Barton
So just.
- [40:22]
Jody Avregan
It's great if you have big budgets to pay for archival or you can hire a vocal cartoonist, but there are ways to also just get that texture, even if it's just.
- [40:29]
Julia Barton
I also added Michael Lewis show against the rules. And he would always be like, explain it to me. Like, I'm seven and he's talking to the federal prosecutor or something. You know, he's like, explain to me, like. And people do it.
- [40:41]
Jody Avregan
Yeah.
- [40:41]
Julia Barton
They're like, oh, explain to me like, I'm your kid.
- [40:44]
Jody Avregan
Right?
- [40:45]
Julia Barton
Yeah, they'll do it. And it's great.
- [40:47]
Jody Avregan
And, you know, getting people to talk in visual language, I mean, those are. You know, you can do all that stuff in real time. You know, we'll look at photographs together and describe.
- [40:55]
Julia Barton
That's a good one.
- [40:56]
Jody Avregan
We'll look at old newspaper headlines and read them. And it just forces you to now use some more visual language and paint a picture and sort of take people there. So there are ways to get outside of the studio without a. Without a real budget.
- [41:07]
Caleb Zakarin
Yeah, I think, like, that. That question, like, asking people, like, what the experience was like for them doing archival research or, like, what was the moment, you know, where they stumbled upon the document or, you know, the, you know, the recording that then led them to come up with their idea or come up with their story. That stuff is oftentimes, like, not present in monographs. So I think sometimes, like, as far as thinking about podcast is like, supplementary to monographs, asking questions that might not necessarily appear in the forward or in the afterword or in the footnotes. I think that can make it, like, extra valuable, especially for, you know, grad students who might be thinking about, like, how do I turn my monograph into a book? You know, well, here's someone explaining how they wrote their monograph in the first place.
- [41:49]
Sarah McCrae
Yeah, I think also, like, getting outside the studio. Also getting outside the talking points is, like, a big part of that. And so one thing I've learned from really gifted interviewers is to. If you're taking a book, you're interviewing an academic who has work, who's talked about their work in many different settings. Especially if they mostly talk about it in academic settings, they could fall back, back into those talking points. And so showing someone, there's like one approach which is explained to me like, I'm five, then there's the other approach where it's like, I've heard you say this. I'm curious about this aspect of it. So you're actually starting with where the conversation is and then going further. I think there's different hosts I work with who will consume all of the interviews that anyone has ever done. And then they say, okay, what's the next question? I think that that's a really powerful tool. And taking the conversation to new places.
- [42:34]
Jody Avregan
I'm a big believer as an interviewer in your first question sends a signal to the person, you know, especially if they're on a book tour or whatever, they have their talking points. Like, you ask a sort of benign first question, they're like, oh, I can put this in second gear. And we're just going to cruise here. And if you ask a destabilizing first question or you force them to tell a story, or you pick up on something else that they said, it just sends that signal right away, like, we're up to something different here.
- [42:57]
Sarah McCrae
Even naming the dynamics of the interview. I worked a bit on this interview show, Talk Easy with San Fragoso. One thing I noticed he often does, he is interviewing people who've done a million interviews, like huge celebrities. And one thing he'll do is he'll kind of just name the dynamics, like, even of the conversation. Like, if something. If you feel someone's being closed off, he'll say, are we okay? Like, he seems a little closed off and sometimes calling attention.
- [43:17]
Julia Barton
That's not.
- [43:17]
Sarah McCrae
He doesn't do that all the time. But I think that sometimes calling attention in the conversations I've heard to the weirdness of being in a studio and talking to someone you don't know and just not trying to pretend like your best friends is pretty effective.
- [43:30]
Jody Avregan
Okay, folks have questions, they can line up there. But if also, if we've just said everything that needs to be said, that's fine, too.
- [43:38]
Caleb Zakarin
I've noticed in interviews that the rapport is essential to get the academic to talk about how they personally got interested in the subject. And while someone can't see that, they can hear the rapport, the enthusiasm or the banter or the reaction, the emotion, tone of voice. Can you talk about how what it
- [43:56]
Unidentified Panelist 1
Takes to build the rapport.
- [43:57]
Caleb Zakarin
Rapport in person and how that actually translates onto what the listener is hearing on the audio.
- [44:04]
Julia Barton
I think, like, read their book. That's a really big one. But. But also just show that you've read their book. Yeah, that's a. That's a big one. And just be curious, you know, just like, be curious about some aspect of. Notice something. I think that really, for people who put years into a project, for it to be noticed in a significant way and for it to be noticed in front of a microphone is really gratifying.
- [44:31]
Unidentified Panelist 1
Yeah.
- [44:32]
Sarah McCrae
And establishing comfort for people. A lot of that has to do with the host and the producer or whoever the person is who's coming, welcoming someone into a space or a studio. There are certain things you can say that you might say to an academic who's never done an interview before, which I'm really curious to hear what you'll say about this, Caleb, versus, like, a politician who's coming in where you might care a little bit less about establishing their comfort. I think there's ways to put people at ease. One thing is if you start saying something and you don't like where it's going, you can start at the start of your sentence again and the producers will catch that. That varies in terms of methodologies, journalism, et cetera. But I'm curious, how do you make.
- [45:13]
Caleb Zakarin
I remember the first interview I ever did, I was so nervous for it, and I read the book, like, literally twice and was underlining everything. And then I get to the interview and it was the person's first time ever being interviewed, so they were, like, more nervous than me. And I think what's useful is just like, having conversation. Like, you know, however, if you. Obviously people sometimes are on short schedule, but, like, just talk for 15 or 30 minutes beforehand and then. Yeah, I also, like, before. It's different, you know, for different types of. Of recordings. But, you know, I always give people, like, the opportunity after every question to, like, pause as long as they want. Like I said pot, you know, pause for 60 seconds. It's really easy to see, like, dead space and audio and just cut it out. And like, yeah, if you want to. If you start answering a question and you don't like what you're saying, like, you can get. Get a redo. Like, yeah, it's. It's obviously different talking to an academic that you're, like, trying to, you know, be friendly with and developer rapport versus, like a politician that you're trying to, like, get in, you know, get a gotcha question at? So I think it all depends. But yeah, I feel like always, you know, just, yeah. Making people realize that, like, you know, they can. They can take a. Take a beat, they can breathe and, yeah, they can. You know, you can have a little chat beforehand too.
- [46:25]
Jody Avregan
This is a little philosophical, but I talk about it all the time with hosts that I work with, and I think about it in my work as well. But it's like, to me, the sort of worst kind of interview is one in which, you know, the host is just extracting information from the person sitting across from them. And it's like, we're here, right? And to me, the most compelling interview, and maybe it's not an interview, it's a conversation, is we're not this. We're actually shoulder to shoulder looking at another thing, an idea, a story, something you're fascinated about and I'm equally fascinated about. We're talking about that together and whatever. You know, there's lots of techniques to kind of get to that dynamic, but showing them that, like, you're not here because you wrote this book and there's a bunch of ideas in this book that I need to extract from you. But, like, you wrote this book because you're really interested in a bunch of stuff and you're fascinated by stuff, and I want to sort of like, be co. Fascinated with you for the next 45 minutes.
- [47:14]
Unidentified Panelist 2
I've had this question all day. It's kind of a hard one, but it's really great to bring up on this. No, no, no, no, not even close. Much harder. Because, you know, Jodi, Julia, you know, we've worked with a lot of academics. We've also worked together in audio for a long time. We bring a lot to the table to this intersection of podcasts and academia. But there was something that Fanny brought up the other day. You know, she was talking about peer review. And let's just face it, there's a certain processes that scholars go through with their work that we don't do. We don't do peer review. And when she brought that up, I almost felt like attacked in a way. Like, oh, well, yes, we don't do that, but we are rigorous. We do bring things to this table. But when we are working with scholars, I've been thinking about this a lot as I've been at this intersection of academia and podcasting this last year, and I'm so curious what others might have to say about this. In your own recent work, working with
- [48:07]
Jody Avregan
scholars, my instinct is that it's just understanding that these are different animals. And obviously you want to be fact based, but it's just a different method of communication. It goes back to what we first started with, which is like, you know, when you talk to an academic who wants to take a step into this kind of communication, you have to get them to understand this is different from all the other stuff.
- [48:28]
Unidentified Panelist 2
Yeah.
- [48:28]
Julia Barton
And it's like, it's just respecting each other's like, where you're coming from. Right. So I'm not in academia, even though, like, I draw on the works of scholars, you know, when I write about radio history and stuff like that. But it's like I'd also, I don't, I don't know if I could hack it, you know, like, I respect what they've been through and the difficulties of getting to where they are. And I have my specialty and we're coming together for this particular project. I'm not trying to convert anyone into podcasters because they got their thing, I got my thing, you know, but it's just like, where's the intersection between the two of us so we can make something new and that's enough, I think.
- [49:11]
Sarah McCrae
Yeah, I think it's like aligning incentives and aligning intention on a project will get you pretty far there because, yeah, like Apple podcast reviews aren't peer review and you shouldn't listen to them.
- [49:27]
Jody Avregan
Look, I hosted, I worked at this place called FiveThirtyEight for many years and I hosted a bunch of podcasts there. It's a data journalism site. It would do very rigorous almost, I would say, I'm sorry to almost academic level kind of work for publish. Right. Data analysis. And that would go through just an incredible process. I got to witness that. We would get on the podcast and it was a little looser. Right. And I think we came to embrace and I think listeners came to understand that the podcast was, was a place in which you could actually express a little uncertainty in which you could explore a half bake idea. It's just the power of your voice, the nature of the medium. And so I think listeners understand, academics understand people who do this work, understand that they're just different, they're different spaces and they have slightly different.
- [50:17]
Sarah McCrae
And I'll just say, for tossing to you, I think that one thing, I mean this depends on the host producer relationship, but at least for the most recent project, I've done really involving the host in the edit process. So they're open to that and allowing them to. You know, I've worked with different academics, with people who are very, very Meticulous with fact checking, and I respect that. And I feel that that is a very important part of the process. So if someone tells me that they accidentally misquoted something in conversation, they're not comfortable with that going out. I do everything I can to cut it out of the tape.
- [50:46]
Caleb Zakarin
Yeah, I mean, I agree with everything that was said. And I also think that, you know, there's something like, very, like, liberating also about sounding kind of silly and having it be out there for the world to hear. There's definitely, like, hours of me sounding not that intelligent out there. I'm adding to it right now, but. But I think that. I think that it's, you know, I think that writing is very different than. Than speech. And I think that there's something nice about, like, Jodi, what you were saying about it being a little looser. I think people appreciate that, and I think they understand that going into the medium.
- [51:21]
Unidentified Panelist 1
I just want to. I value peer review. But on that note, I think it's also important not to over fetishize academic peer review, especially given the publishing industry where you just have reviewer number two, like, you didn't cite me type shit, you know what I'm saying? And also, you know, one of the reasons why we have to figure out how to fund this is because I think some processes of podcasting are really robust reviews. It's not blind, but it's. I mean, like, if you've ever done something for like this America, I mean, you know, it's just brutal. New set of editors, they chop the this, they chop that. Way more robust exchange than what I experienced in scholarly review. Just to say, because there's more touch points. It's not just about being bad. My question is this. Thank you for saying the part about how to use documents. I think that's really useful for people who are trying to think about their work. This is a question a little bit about storytelling and a little about interest. When you're doing history and science and certain things like that, where there's, like, tangible archives and stories like that, it's maybe a little easier to think about how to build narrative, how to build interest. But some people are dealing with very abstract ideas. And I'm curious about how you approach a sort of, you know, getting people to care about that or building stories out of things that seem abstract without kind of like instrumentalizing them, those ideas.
- [52:36]
Julia Barton
That's so hard. Barry Lamb, it was at the last one of these, that symposia, he's great with hi Fi Nation. It's a philosophy show. Just sort of, like, trying to figure out how to bring to, you know, narrativize philosophical. I mean, like, every field has, like, the case study or the. There's some way in which our brains. We are primates, you know, like, we have certain limitations, most of us. So, you know, and then also turning it into audio. But there are certain. Like, I started reading Ben into this. Like, I was. I wouldn't say I was an editor, but I was, like, one of the note givers on Tim Harford's show Cautionary Tales, which is very narrative based, but there's always a big idea moment. And his sound designer just had, like, a sound bed that went under every sort of, like, idea moment. And so it's like, it started to be like, Tim is talking about things, and now he's thinking about things, and now he's doing things. And there was, like, different kind of musical. There was, like, a musical palette for each of those sort of moves in the show. And it was a little formulaic, but it also really worked because he was dealing with such complicated ideas. Like, the sound design became simpler. There was still a lot of fun and, like, Foley stuff, but there was always the, like, thinking about things. Sound bed. And it came back in every episode. And it gives the listener permission to just sort of relax and know the rhythm, you know, like, this is the moment where this is happening. So that's one technique, is just, like, acknowledge that you are. You're in an idea world, and there's a moment in your show where you're doing that and give the listener cues so that they can just absorb that. Thank you, guys. Yes. Thanks to princeton.