August didn’t bother with nuance, at least as far as podcast-land was concerned. First came Amazon’s dismantling of Wondery, the last major brand standing that emerged from the 2010s podcast boom. A week or so later, almost as if to emphasize the point, the very famous Taylor Swift appeared on her boyfriend’s football podcast, New Heights, to announce her next album; a tentpole dog days of summer cultural event if there ever was one. And when the pair sent the content mines screeching to a halt yesterday with a lunchtime Instagram post announcing their engagement, attention naturally turned to New Heights once again for a debrief, which came tucked in between chatter of Kelce’s preseason prep. (He’s still an active player for now!) AI companies might be propping up a shaky economy, but it’s the pop star who continues to bail out the content business.
Anyway, with the smoke of Pineapple Street’s June closure still polluting the air, stories published in the wake of the Wondery news were mostly funereal (“Who Killed the Narrative Podcast?”, “Podcasting’s Serial Era Ends as Video Takes Over”), though, really, the medium has been living in this particular post-apocalypse for a while. It’s hard to dispute that ambitious narrative audio-only shows, once the center of the medium, had been in retreat since Spotify’s closure of Gimlet Media in 2023, if not since SiriusXM’s acquisition of 99% Invisible in 2021. In their place, video-first talk formats have triumphed, with podcasting now principally looking more like daytime radio or, for that matter, television. Narrative podcasts are still being made, of course; tales of all those dead bodies have to go somewhere. But the ambitious ones have become rarities, much like long magazine features and serious documentaries, surviving either as luxuries created by the privileged few or as labors of love made in the margins by committed independents who will labor to keep the form alive. But the terms of survival have only grown harsher. The pool of well-resourced creators (and funders) has shrunk, and the prospects for independents have worsened, especially after the weakening of the public radio system following the federal government’s defunding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
This context makes another podcast trendlet from elsewhere in the summer pretty interesting if a little melancholic: the arrival of two grand canon-making gestures. Time published its “100 Best Podcasts of All Time,” curated off the tastes of its internal team that sought to build a canon around the “most innovative, influential, and informative listens in the history of the medium.” Shortly after, something called the “Essential Listening Poll” was unveiled, an effort organized by a studio founded by Alan Black, the former director of operations at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival in Toronto. Modeled loosely after and inspired by Sight & Sound’s famous once-a-decade film poll, Black’s project surveyed about 300 audio creators, podcast hosts, writers, and academics (including, I should add, myself) from 23 countries, asking each to submit five picks that “most inspired, influenced, and enthralled” the respondent.
Both are efforts to settle the unsettled: What belongs in the podcast canon, if such a canon can and should exist. But it’s not hard to discern the inherent tension. By virtue of the “listening” frame, the Essential Listening Poll centers audio-first work, while the Time list utilized a similar framing and consequently produced a list that heavily skewed narrative audio. This makes sense, of course, since it encapsulates podcasting’s history up to this point has been dominated by narrative shows and audio-first aesthetics. But it also comes across almost immediately outdated, an expression of the difficulty of telling any coherent story about the medium at a moment when it’s already shifting into an entirely different shape. This isn’t so much a critique as a statement of fact.
For what it’s worth, I like list-making efforts like these. Of course, I would say this, as I make lists like these myself all the time. (Where, you ask? Why, right here!) But I sincerely mean it as an appreciator: I enjoy reading such lists from others and thinking about them and complaining about them (the five-month old Good Hang making the list? Sure!) and wondering just how out-moded or boring or better or basic my personal tastes are relative to other people. Stuff like this helps me locate myself within a conversation. And I like these lists! Obvious picks like The Daily and S-Town are clustered near the top, which is natural because they’re obvious for a reason, but the rest of both lists are a mish-mash of interesting, debatable, occasionally surprising ones. And for the most part, they do reflect an integration of narrative and conversational entries: In the Essential Listening Poll, stuff like The Bill Simmons Podcast, Scriptnotes, and The Best Show with Tom Scharpling rub elbows with Floodlines and The Ballad of Billy Balls, which is more or less what you want out of these things. Haters like to dump on lists because they’re supposedly reductive or stupid or demeaning or whatever, but the fact is, list production and canon-construction are worthwhile critical endeavors. It’s easy to not take a stance, wave your hands around, and utter some pablum like “everything is important to someone.” It’s much more difficult to argue for the importance of something.
Yes, I understand the critiques. The methodology that goes into these things are naturally biased and limited. In other words, they’re human. “Lists of this sort, and really of any sort, are inherently imperfect metrics for measuring the impact of any given piece of work,” wrote Normal Gossip co-creator Alex Sujong Laughlin in a Defector post on the Essential Listening Poll that’s ultimately laudatory of the effort. “They function more as a sort of popularity contest, one that reflects recency bias and the scale of marketing efforts much more clearly than anything as slippery and subjective as quality.” These processes inevitably overlook entire subgenres, scenes, and traditions; there may not be enough audio fiction, no Doughboys, no mention of Cumtown or the influential pod-originated dirtbag left, a lack of emphasis on 2010s comedy pods. They face the same philosophical problem awards face in an era of supposedly democratized cultural production: How do you name the “most important” when every corner has its own rightful claim to importance?
But the response to that difficulty isn’t to back away. The point is to produce an ongoing field of debate that ultimately operates on a shared framework acknowledging how podcasts, past and present, audio and video, all exist in the same cultural space. Even in the infinite horizon of the internet, what happens in one corner affects the rest. Podcasts seep into TV writers’ rooms, book deals, newsrooms, memes. They shape politics and popular culture. They influence the larger economic structure that impacts each other. Lists (and awards) may be blunt instruments, but they’re still helpful ones. In the absence of the effort they symbolize, podcasting’s story has no shape.
Anyway, it’s not as if podcasting exists without clear hierarchies even within the context of their infinite publishing horizons. It has a very obvious one: money. Big media companies, ad dollars, platform deals, these forces currently determine what thrives, what fails, and what gets remembered. The project of canons, however flawed, is one of the few ways to push against that flattening logic, to argue that history should remember more than what, say, SiriusXM chooses to bankroll and gets an authoritative New York Times write-up as a vessel into the historical archive.
Canons aren’t objective truths; they’re snapshots of what feels urgent at a given moment. The Sight and Sound film poll has shifted dramatically over the decades not because cinema changed overnight, but because taste, scholarship, cultural priorities, and most importantly, the pool of who gets to vote did. Each poll becomes part of the archive. Drawing from its inspiration, the Essential Listening Poll will follow similarly. If all goes well, Black tells me, the project will continue, each successive edition refining upon the last.
And podcasting badly needs an archive. The medium is just two decades old, yet already, whole swaths of its history have been lost: feeds taken offline, platforms shuttered, files no longer hosted. Ask any longtime listener about shows they loved in 2009 or 2012, and there’s a decent chance some of them have simply disappeared. Without some effort at collective memory, podcasting’s history will be written almost entirely by corporate acquisitions and forgotten RSS feeds. Such lists and canons will always be flawed, partial, and contested. In that way, they’re like memories, and having a flawed memory is better than having no memory at all — and in my recollection, something like this particular New Heights stretch definitely has to be there. It’s nothing if not emblematic of podcasting in 2025.
