For many of us, podcasts are quintessentially an audio format: news shows, stories, and investigations we can listen to while on trains or out walking, doing chores, waking up or going to sleep.
But the format that found widespread popularity for making us listen in is undergoing another change: some podcasts are going visual.
The video site YouTube has become a huge listening platform — in the United States it is now the top platform for podcasts, according to the latest Digital News Report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. And the platform’s popularity ranks second in Australia and Germany.
While some podcasts featured on YouTube contain just a still thumbnail image for hungry eyes, others are now being filmed entirely in a studio. Increasingly, podcast fans are given the option to listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or to “watch on YouTube.”
Watching, in this instance, means watching the podcast host and interviewee as they speak in a recording studio. The audio microphone still takes center stage, and what you hear on the audio podcast is exactly the same as what you hear on the video, the “extra” is that you can see the host, the facial expressions, the pauses.
“You can’t just record in a cupboard anymore,” said Dinos Sofos, the former head of podcasts at the BBC and the founder of Persephonica, which makes The News Agents, a popular UK podcast show. “Having a video strategy is really important.”
That might mean “cameras, lighting, makeup,” he added, while speaking at the Podcast Show in London earlier this year. “You aren’t producing a TV show” though, Sofos acknowledged, “it’s a lot lower maintenance.”
But filming a chat show podcast is not the same as producing an investigative report. Can detailed, complex, narrative stories be told in a video podcast? And doesn’t that destroy the very things that made investigative podcasts so popular in the first place: the intimacy between storyteller and listener, the time to unfurl complex stories, the ability to be nimble and get people on the microphone who would not agree to go on TV?
Everyone GIJN interviewed for this piece was very clear that visual podcasts can’t be full-length feature television, which requires infinitely higher budgets and larger crews.
“Elevating a podcast from an audio to a video requires investment, time, money,” said Raphael Rowe, a former BBC investigative journalist who recently added a YouTube offering to his Second Chance podcast. But, he says, there are compromise possibilities.
“Some of my audience had been asking if I could video record some of the guests,” a middle ground that avoids needing a full film crew and a big editing budget, he said. While this was “a big decision, because a lot of the people we talk to are talking about sensitive issues,” ultimately he decided that video can augment his stories.
“When I am speaking to someone who is trying to say that they did not mean to kill their daughter, hearing that person — someone might dislike them. Seeing them, they may understand that person differently,” he told GIJN. “Given that my mantra is really about changing the narrative; it’s one thing doing that through storytelling, it’s another thing doing that from expression.”
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