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3 weeks ago | 
continuous-wave.beehiiv.com | Julia Barton
Dear George, Of course, we have never met. You are a famous actor, currently headlining Good Night and Good Luck, one of the highest-grossing Broadway shows of all time, based on a 20-year-old movie you co-wrote about famous newsman Edward R. Murrow. In a couple of days — June 7, 2025 — you’ll be live-streaming your next-to-last performance on CNN. So your movie about television has been adapted to a play that will be on TV: you are truly “platform agnostic,” as they say.
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1 month ago | 
continuous-wave.beehiiv.com | Julia Barton
“You just flip it” McBride set a pattern for a type of program that’s more popular than ever: the personal interview show. These shows are based on free-ranging, informative conversations that we, as listeners, get to eavesdrop upon. At their best, personal interview shows pull us into a kind of flow-state with the guest and host. But these shows have a paradox built into the format: the guests are always changing. What keeps the listeners coming back is the host.
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1 month ago | 
continuous-wave.beehiiv.com | Julia Barton
Take for instance, how you perceive your own voice when you hear a recording of it. Do you think, “That’s not me! I don’t sound like that…do I?” 🙉 Yes, you do sound like that — but also not as bad as you think. There are anatomical and neurological reasons why our recorded voices may feel weird to us. Those reasons have to do with how sound waves are funneled into our inner ears and turned into electrical impulses that are then interpreted by the brain.
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1 month ago | 
continuous-wave.beehiiv.com | Julia Barton
Plans for the US Naval airship Shenandoah (National Geographic via airships.net) We no longer look to the skies and expect to see giant balloons the length of a stadium, but shaped like suppositories, carrying people to and fro. I am fascinated by these blimpey anachronisms. One of the favorite podcast episodes I ever got to edit was Tim Harford’s The Deadly Airship Race, part of his Pushkin show Cautionary Tales.
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1 month ago | 
continuous-wave.beehiiv.com | Julia Barton
Those of us at RadioWright LLC (me) have had a busy week ‚ÄĒ among other things, we are preparing a new article for Transom and editing narrative podcast episodes that will soon be out in the world. But it‚Äôs also been a busy week of epic battles for the soul of audio journalism. Some new documentaries offer a bit of historical context. Links to those are below.
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1 month ago | 
continuous-wave.beehiiv.com | Julia Barton
Welcome new subscribers! This is one of those posts that benefits from toggling the “display images” option if you’re reading it in email form. The header photo in the web version is a picture of legendary child star Baby Rose Marie, who in fact did not fear microphones at all, as proven by her incredible 90 years in show business. You know how you’re down in a research library sub-basement looking up one thing, and another thing just leaps off the page?
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2 months ago | 
continuous-wave.beehiiv.com | Julia Barton
Thanks to all the new subscribers coming over from Transom. I’m gratified by everyone’s interest. Special shout-out to Sound School Podcast host Rob Rosenthal, who just had me on the show along with producer extraordinaire Sarah Montague. Note on this edition: This is the second of a mini-series on how radio got established as a live medium in the US. (Part 1 is here.) It’s probably the most academic thing I’ll post for a while.
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2 months ago | 
continuous-wave.beehiiv.com | Julia Barton
I just got back from Podcast Movement in Chicago, where I smuggled in a panel with media historian and critic Neil Verma (more on that convo next week). Everything at Podcast Movement this year seemed designed to create excitement and anxiety about video. First the news, which is not so new, that more people than ever are finding and consuming media, including podcasts, via YouTube.
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2 months ago | 
continuous-wave.beehiiv.com | Julia Barton
Note: Today, I’m publishing a piece on the public media site Transom about Norman Corwin, a radio great who came up against his network’s ban on recorded sound. Wait, a ban on recorded sound? It will take some explaining, so this the first of an occasional series on why radio chose to be live. And yes, it was a choice, as scholars explain. First, as the cliché puts it, we are going way back in time. I thought I’d expand a paper I wrote for a course at MIT while on a Nieman Fellowship.
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2 months ago | 
continuous-wave.beehiiv.com | Julia Barton
I got to interview Northwestern professor and audio scholar Neil Verma on stage at Podcast Movement in Chicago on April 3, 2025. We were talking about his latest book, Narrative Podcasting in an Age of Obsession, which is a fascinating backwards look at the recent past. Podcasters may think of our medium as new — but Verma, who studies radio history, knows better. I promised the crowd at Podcast Movement a reading list, so here it is.