How to make compelling narrative news podcasts
An opinionated guide
Why do some news podcasts really sing, while others sound flat?
I was reminded the other day of a mini essay I wrote for a few colleagues at The Times, where for four years I worked on the daily narrative news podcast The Story. (I’ve since worked on a few other news podcasts and narrative projects, ranging from very quick turnarounds to documentary series which are months in the making.)
Nearly everything we do in audio journalism is subjective; the product of somebody’s taste and judgement. My aim wasn’t to say that this is the only way to make a daily news podcast, but to provoke conversation and debate. Others would have different views, especially when it came to crime and sport stories, but these were mine.
The audio industry is, by and large, a friendly and open place, and I’ve enjoyed reading the insidery thoughts of others (some recommended Substacks: Nick Hilton, Talia Augustidis, Matt Deegan, Chris Stone). So I thought a public version of those guidelines might be useful for a slightly wider audience, too.
Who this is for
By ‘narrative news’ I mean richly produced, storytelling-driven news podcasts. Chat formats are a different thing.
The first part is for anyone who has to make decisions about which stories to say yes or no to – either as a commissioner, an editor, or as a producer evaluating their own ideas and pitches. You might be working in news, or you might not. Hopefully this is useful for people working on non-news factual programmes or one-off documentaries, too.
The second part – on the special ingredients great stories have – is for anyone working in narrative audio production.
Ask these questions first
It’s tempting to go straight to commissioning an episode if the subject being pitched is already prominent in the news – an event, a topic, a war, a person, a zeitgeisty thing – or if a producer (or an editor) is very enthusiastic about an idea.
But before you start making an episode, you should be able to answer these questions:
Would this episode help the listener pursue their curiosity?
In other words: what are we going to tell people that they don’t already know? Is this on people’s minds?
Put yourself in the listener’s shoes. People who listen to news podcasts are bright and already pay some attention to the news. Podcasts are probably not their primary source of news – they’ve already heard the main points about the big events – so what are we giving them?
What are the questions they might have, having already seen push alerts and heard occasional news bulletins? What’s the extra depth, the amazing detail or insight, the first-hand reporting no one else has got, the different way to look at the world? (‘It’s a good yarn’ and ‘it’s a nice piece’ are not good answers to this question.)
If you’re honest about what you are genuinely curious about today, the question you don’t know the answer to… what is it?
Two follow-up questions:
Will the presenter be able to do this on the listener’s behalf? Will they be pursuing their curiosity too? Will they find out something they didn’t know? If not, and they have to pretend, the episode will sound artificial. Listeners will definitely notice.
Will the answers contain any element of surprise or novelty? If not, what’s the point?
Is this a story?
Is it more than just a topic or an issue? Can the producer tell a story with a beginning, middle and end? It sounds obvious, but not every podcast which sets out to do narrative storytelling achieves its aim.
The first reason we tell stories is because telling a story is the best thing you can possibly do to make your episode impossible to switch off.
This was Ira Glass’s key insight 30 years ago: that radio was a brilliant medium for telling stories, and not enough people were doing it. Once you start telling a story, if you tell it well, you create a curiosity gap and listeners want to know how it ends.
That insight led to This American Life, which in turn led to Serial and a boom in narrative podcasts, which led to The Daily, which led to a series of other narrative news podcasts starting around the world.
Which brings us to the second reason we tell stories: the key insight of The Daily was that abandoning the ‘inverted triangle’ of news, abandoning discussion formats, and instead explaining the news in story form – using all the tools of narrative documentary audio – could make for a really rewarding listening experience (and many millions of downloads).
What we mean by ‘story’:
Is it a sequence of events, told in some sort of order, involving scenes, characters, and dramatic tension?
Is it about people?
Does it contain some element of conflict? (i.e. somebody wants something and can’t get it, or two people want different things, or someone is conflicted about what to do?)
Could it be told in a few ‘acts’ (three acts, five acts, or however many you like), and is there movement or change across those acts?
Could you imagine it as a film or TV show? Yes, it might have a single strong opening scene, but the best episodes are made of scenes from beginning to end – so does it have those? Many items in a newspaper are not stories in this sense. (The language of news can be confusing here. Something might be ‘a story’ worth printing in the paper – e.g. ‘profits at M&S are defying expectations, up 56%’ – but we are looking for something more like the dictionary definition of a story.) Good stories are held together by ‘buts and therefores’.
This is a must-read: Former host/producer of Reply All, Alex Goldman, on what makes a story worth telling.
What’s the thought / idea at the heart of it?
What is this small story really about? Is it about something bigger than it seems? It doesn’t have to be about something much bigger, but it does have to be about some idea beyond just the people and events involved.
The reason this is important is because the best stories move seamlessly between ‘action’ and ‘reflection’ and if there’s no idea at the heart then there can be no reflection, really.
If you’re having trouble writing a good episode title, it’s probably because the idea is missing.
Why now?
On a news podcast you might have no end of terribly interesting episode ideas, but if I’m your listener, you need to answer this question: why are you telling me this today? (Sometimes I might wonder why you’re telling me this at all!)
Every single episode intro – bar none – should answer this question. I might have been curious about something last week. I might be curious about it again in a month! But why is this the thing I absolutely must hear today? Why will I tell my friends they have to listen now?
Is this more than a recap? Is it still happening? Recaps are sometimes worth doing if the story is still happening but very complicated, or if it started a long time ago. A good example might be the history of Trump and Zelensky’s relationship.
Have you got your sense of proportion right? A story might matter somewhat, and there might be enough to sustain a listener’s interest for 5-6 minutes, but would a good newspaper or magazine editor commission 4,000 words about it today? Because that’s roughly the word count of a half-hour podcast. Aim for the New Yorker rather than the One Show.
Does it matter? What are the stakes? Who cares? If you only have five episodes a week, why should this be 20% of your output? An idea doesn’t have to be about war to matter. Cultural and social issues matter too. So do fun stories. One of the characters in the story just needs to care about what happens. Even better: Perhaps this story matters more than people realise, and will matter a great deal in the future. Maybe you’ve spotted it early! Maybe it’s in the public interest.
Is this journalism worth paying for? Is it ambitious, or just filler? Your podcast probably isn’t behind a paywall. But it might have to be one day. The economics of podcasting are still in flux. Try to give listeners something better than what they’re getting for free elsewhere, just in case.
Expanding on the ‘does it matter?’ test
The joyful and the silly
These can absolutely matter. A news podcast cannot just be a compendium of the worst things that happened in the world this week.
Joyful, silly stories can give us a window into the human condition. They’re not necessarily shaggy dog stories.
But these stories do still have to be rooted in some sort of curiosity, an idea, something bigger; be journalistically rigorous (even if they’re about the Oscars, or the killer whales who sink boats for fun); and have enough juice in them to sustain 25 minutes.
Thoughts on crime stories
I’ve produced and edited crime stories, and sometimes I was the person making the case for running them. But frankly, I think a lot of crime stories don’t pass my test, and because they’re so depressing we should subject them to a high bar.
I think parts of the media – especially podcasts and streaming services, though they’re not alone – already give too much prominence to violent crime. Something awful might have happened which matters hugely to the victims and their families, which will doubtless happen to someone else in the future, but about which you and I can do absolutely nothing.
What will be the effect of giving this story the long-form narrative treatment, other than making the listener sad or anxious or, if we’re honest, revelling in someone’s misery? Allowing ourselves to be grandiose about journalism for a moment, will the story help listeners participate in democracy in some way? Because if not, then what is the point?
There is a reason why The Daily doesn’t do many violent crime stories, and why I wish news organisations would stop sending me so many push alerts about grizzly murders. Someone else’s suffering should not be my entertainment.
White collar crime stories, on the other hand – stories of corruption, insider trading, money laundering, and so on – are right up my street, particularly if they expose something about how power works.
Thoughts on sport stories
Sport for most people is a form of TV entertainment. These stories matter massively to the fans, but usually they matter not at all to anyone else. If I’m in a provocative mood, I sometimes say they’re in the same category as recaps of last night’s Coronation Street. One or two sporting events a year might matter to so many people that that gives them extra salience, but even that’s not necessarily enough for a narrative-driven, long-form podcast.
Moreover, audio sport stories suffer more from the lack of pictures than most other categories of story. I can think of half a dozen outstanding cinematic sport documentaries which would not translate well to audio. And getting access to good audio from the scene is usually fraught with copyright issues.
EXCEPT… There are some sport stories which provide an amazing window into the human condition or life outside of sport, with images vivid enough to work even in a medium that relies on the theatre of the mind. For example:
The absolute gold standard (to me) was this episode of The Daily about the time the NBA moved to Disneyland because it was the only way to live anything like normal life during the early stages of the pandemic. We were all wondering about pandemic bubbles, and this was about that – taken to an extreme. You didn’t have to care about basketball at all.
Gareth Southgate’s story is the basis of an actually-quite-good play because even if you don’t care about football, he tells you something about detoxifying masculinity / Englishness / leadership / building teams.
Sunday Times chief sports writer David Walsh was played by the lead actor out of The IT Crowd in a Netflix drama directed by Stephen Fears – and for good reason. You don’t have to care about cycling to care about a classic Icarus story, plus a bit of David and Goliath, aka Lance Armstrong vs The Sunday Times.
Sport stories should only run on narrative news podcasts if they’re also interesting to people who don’t follow the sport in question.
The special ingredients great episodes have
If an episode pitch can answer those questions then there are good reasons to do it. But the devil is in the detail and the difference between a great episode and a bad one can all be down to the execution.
Great episodes usually have these ingredients:
Grab listeners in the first three minutes. And usually, you should put the best stuff – or a flavour of it – at the beginning. If a journalist has gone undercover, best not to bury that audio 12 minutes in.
An amazing talker. Someone who’s a real expert and can’t wait to tell everyone about what they’ve found out. Someone who could make anything interesting. Without this an otherwise good idea might be doomed. But in the right hands, an otherwise borderline idea might be solid gold.
Tonal variation. Even episodes about very tough subject matter can have moments of light relief. Talk to any war correspondent and you’ll learn that people in horrible situations use humour to get through the day. You shouldn’t be monotonous in your tone. Working in news, we should cling on to any moments of lightness we can get. I am more of a fan of doing light and shade within each episode than I am of trying to force light and shade across a week’s schedule.
Great audio. For every episode, you should be asking what you can do to make it a sonic experience. Otherwise, why is this a podcast and not a newspaper article? You should go to great lengths to dig for the non-obvious archive clips. (Descript lets us comb through many hours of archive.) You should get out of the studio and send producers to report alongside correspondents. If nothing else, you should be dissatisfied with low quality remote interviews – not least because good sound quality literally makes people sound smarter, and that’s a scientific fact.
The structure of a story, not an essay:
Good structure: This happened, therefore this happened; BUT THEN this other thing happened! Which meant another event was set in motion… and a surprising twist unfolded. Therefore ENDING / BIG IDEA.
Bad structure: In part 1 we will talk to a case study about their life. In part 2 we will talk to an expert or correspondent to get a broader view. At the end we’ll come back to the case study. (If we are still awake.)
Action and reflection: Good stories weave moments of reflection in between the key plot points. Some journalists do this seemingly without having to think about it, but it’s worth planning these moments.
Like this: Action… action… reflection! Therefore, action… action… another thought! BUT THEN action… action… and that made me think this big idea!
But not like this – the high school science essay structure: Part 1: Introduction. Part 2: Background. Part 3: Methods. Part 4: Results. Part 5: All of the conclusions and discussion at the end.
Tell me something I don’t know: At least every two or three minutes, the listener should learn something they didn’t know before. It can be a small thing or a big thing, but it has to be something. This needs to happen all the way through the episode. If they have to wait 15 minutes for this, we might lose them. It might seem obvious but lots of news podcasts don’t do this. Word-of-mouth is the primary way new listeners find out about podcasts. Let’s give people things to tell their friends about, which make them feel smart.
Shapes: Stories have shapes. What shape is this story? An origin story? A rise and fall? An e-shape?
Sparse, economical script: Just enough to do the job. No adverbs or hyperbole. Written the way normal people speak.
Music which works the way good cinematic music works:
i.e. not descriptive (person tells sad story, music goes all sad piano) but instead empathetic or subtextual (i.e. the music opens the door to having some kind of feeling, but doesn’t tell you what to feel; or maybe it communicates something about the subtext).
Or it helps us follow the characters through the story by using leitmotif.
But you shouldn’t use music alone to move from one section of a story to another – music can’t paper over a disjointed episode structure. Throw in a clip montage, though, and you might get away with it.