Honesty and solid research rather than sensationalism are the backbone of a good podcast, according to three longtime podcasters I interviewed this week. Podcasts are in the limelight due to a skandaal that erupted recently in the media, to the extent that the chairperson of parliament’s communications portfolio committee, Khusela Diko, is calling for them to be regulated. This after the public backlash over the derogatory remarks made about celebrity Minnie Dlamini by MacGyver Mukwevho, on his Podcast and Chill with MacG.
“To make a great podcast you have to be balanced and back up what you say. People get worked up in the short term by misinformation, but over time they gravitate towards the truth,” says Desmond Latham, creator of the History of South Africa series. He adds: “I don’t like podcasts done in a long-discussion-between-participants format, which I feel is a lazy way of doing things — they tend to be bombastic and irrelevant.”
Shanice Ndlovu, a Zimbabwean writer who lives in Joburg and runs a poetry podcast called the Poedcast, says: “A clear understanding of the objective and target audience — and honesty — makes a great podcast. If a creator of content is clear on their aim, they're able to cater to the specific audience they intend to reach.”
Longtime journalist and DJ, Charles Leonard spends a seven-day week meticulously researching and creating each of his podcasts. He works as a podcast editor at the Casual Workers Advice Office (CWAO), an organisation that deals with the rights and struggles of precarious workers. He says a great podcast is: “Intelligent, but it’s not too clever for its own good; humorous, but not disrespectful to anyone (no racism, sexism, fascism, classism, thank you); has good storytelling; and clever use of sound, so that it takes me there and makes me want to come back for more — rather like a good meal.”
What are podcasts?
Podcasts started in 2003, when software engineer Dave Winer developed an audio RSS feed — making it easy for users to find and stream in an app of their choice — for radio host Christopher Lydon, who used the new technology to provide audio interviews on his blog Radio Open Source. The first podcast hosting platform, Libsyn, came into being in 2004, and in 2005 Apple users could subscribe to podcasts. It wasn’t until the true-crime podcast Serial launched in 2014 — and soon had 5-million downloads — that they became mainstream.
They took off during the pandemic and there are now between 3 and 4-million podcasts worldwide, with nearly 60-million listeners downloading or streaming them. About 30-million podcast episodes are published each year in about 100 languages, most of them (60%) in English. They’re six times more popular than audiobooks. The most popular are cultural and educational programmes, which comprise roughly a quarter of all podcasts; listeners generally tune in for about seven hours a week, mostly on their cellphones.
Nobody knows how many podcasts there are in South Africa, but there’s a huge array that provide in-depth information on news, wine, coffee, the markets, sport, music, religion, education, celebrities ... you name it. Trevor Noah’s podcasts are popular; among other favourites are BizNews Radio, True Crime and The Money Show. There’s more than three million local listeners, most of whom are young and employed — and they often support podcast sponsors, so businesses are pricking up their ears.
Why the appeal?
Unlike radio, a podcast can be streamed when you want it. I started listening to BBC podcasts two years ago because my eyes were tired after work; instead of reading in bed, I listened to something interesting or entertaining before dozing off. My wife says she enjoys podcasts while doing chores that don’t require her full attention, like sewing. Her brother tunes in to them when he does long drives. I love podcasts where the narrator has a powerful style — think Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History Series — and he or she pulls you along with their tone and content.
It’s the intimacy of podcasts that make them powerful, says Ndlovu, “There’s something about being read to — it settles the mind.” She started the Poedcast during lockdown, placing readings from local poets together (sometimes with background music) with classics from Poe, Byron and Rimbaud — and was amazed to find that within five years her podcast is being listened to in about 100 countries. “More than that, it provides local poets with access to each other’s work, which has always been the ultimate goal.”
Leonard says: “It’s the people whose stories you tell, the sounds of where they work and live, right there in the ears of your listeners. You don’t get closer than that.” His podcasts on Mixcloud include a 12-part series on his hometown Joburg, funded by the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Studies (JIAS) at UJ. In the episode Voices of Brixton, he interviews experts on the suburb’s demographics and history, goes into a church where a choir sings, and walks the streets of the Joburg suburb to conduct interviews — between taxi hoots — with the people he meets there, many of whom are street vendor migrants from across Africa. The sounds and stories eloquently capture the melting pot of myriad cultures and classes the city comprises in what he calls “a love letter to this ugly, beautiful town of ours”.
Audio is extremely emotive. “It’s right there in your ear as you lie in bed listening before going to sleep, which is its power, its intimacy,” says Latham. As a historian, he finds that the real world is far more fantastical and unpredictable than fiction; he started making podcasts in 2017 and is now on episode 221 of History of SA. “We should be proud of our heritage, no matter what our ethnicity is; we all have our origin stories, and they were handed down orally. I believe that podcasting is African; it has its roots in sitting around a fire, in oral history and in storytelling.” South Africa, renowned as the cradle of humankind, with the oldest continually inhabited caves, is perhaps where podcasting — or certainly storytelling — actually began.
Technicalities and sponsorship
Podcasting technicalities are actually more difficult than those of video production, says Latham, who does video and audio production as a career. “They tell you in film school the most difficult thing to get right is sound.” First you need a hosting platform — which isn’t a distribution platform, such as YouTube or Spotify — then you need to understand how RSS works, and how to use microphones, record digital sound, master it and export it. “My aim wasn't to make money initially, but due to the costs involved it was a welcome relief to get sponsorship from entities [such as] iono.fm, which is good at finding agencies and sponsors.” These days, Latham has sponsors, advertisers and gets donations, “which are sometimes incredibly generous”, from listeners.
“Setting up the podcast wasn't difficult; I had a friend who ran a podcast called The Dabblers, and he referred me to a platform where I could record, edit, upload and distribute audio,” says Ndlovu, who runs the Poedcast strictly for the love of it. She collaborates with artist Thuthukani Myeza, who designs the cover art each week for the episodes, then circulates and promotes them on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. “The difficult part was starting in lockdown — I could only receive audio via email from the poets, then edit on a third-party app before uploading to the distributing site. But I got the hang of working with audio quickly.”
Leonard, who worked as a radio journalist in 1987 at the SABC, says podcasting is technically similar. “Podcasting was a return to my first love, radio — and, when I worked for the JIAS, I was getting paid to do it.” But setting up his own podcast site was tough. “I had to do everything myself: research, recording, editing, production, post-production and promotion.” He now makes a living from his podcast editing work at the CWAO, which produces three podcasts a week on workers’ rights and labour issues.
Will podcasts be regulated in the future? Diko points out that right now there’s no legislation in South Africa to enable that. It may be as impossible as trying to regulate the internet, but one thing is certain — podcasts, unfettered or not, have seized our imagination and keep growing in popularity.
