Why Podcasters Are Turning to Crowdsourcing During the Coronavirus Lockdown
As the world locks down, podcasters are reaching out for our stories.
We’re in the midst of the first pandemic of the internet era, the most anxious moment of our extremely online age. Unsurprisingly, there has been a surge in the number of podcasts about the coronavirus. All the usual big names have started one to keep us up to speed with the news: NPR (Coronavirus Daily), ABC (Coronacast), BBC (The Coronavirus Newscast). Many more existing podcasts are devoting episodes to discussing the many angles of the situation, often bringing in experts to delve into the epidemiology, economics, and end-time scenarios of the fast-moving virus.
There’s another side to the coronavirus situation, of course: the shared experience of social-distancing and self-isolation, as a third of the world’s 7.8 billion people are currently on lockdown. That’s around 2.3 billion people who are now mostly confined to their homes. The wish to gather those stories in one place has kicked off another audio trend. These podcasts approach the subject of living through the pandemic in a very different way: through sourcing audio from listeners, and potential listeners.
Why crowdsource audio for podcasts?
Well-known UK audio producers such as Renay Richardson (founder and CEO of Sony’s Broccoli Content), Eleanor McDowall (series producer on Radio 4’s Short Cuts) and Cathy FitzGerald (whose work is regularly heard on BBC Radio 4) have all launched new work that is made up of audio sent in by strangers. It’s a much more time-consuming way of making podcasts, so what’s the motivation?
For Renay Richardson, launching her new series, NOTED, was about finding our way back to a sense of community after the shock of isolation hits hard. “When our office closed and we began social distancing,” she tells Bello Collective, “we realized, even if you love being inside, life was pretty isolated.” In the teaser episode that Richardson hosts (there will be different presenters on each episode), she says: “Covid-19, aka Coronavirus, aka The ‘Rona, put a stop to that. It’s cancelled us.” She’s framed the virus as supervillain, breaking into her house to dash her dreams of a perfect 2020. Richardson’s narration brings the worldwide panic down to a more manageable, domestic level. She’s stuck at home, wanting to hear about what it’s like to be trapped at yours, instead.
Just send them a voice note
Isn’t that what all of us want when we get bored during lockdown? Accordingly, NOTED comes with a promise: “We will be hearing from YOU, fellow isolated person.” Richardson tells Bello Collective: “Asking people to send us voice notes of their experiences would not only highlight that we’re in this together, but it would also highlight the other people feeling the same. Crowdsourcing audio means we’re able to include voices of anyone who has access to the internet from anywhere in the world; inclusivity is really important to us.”
The emphasis on gathering audio via voice notes also reflects a general shift in our pre-lockdown communication style, from sending written text messages to leaving more personal voice messages for our dearest ones. “Our increased love of a voice note indicates that we want to hear human voices in an increasingly digitally-focussed world,” journalist Charley Ross writes for Stylist, “and this has never been more important than in the age of a worsening global pandemic.” Reflecting the rise of the podcast, a voice note delivers spoken words by appointment. It doesn’t intrude upon another’s time and mood in the way that a phone call can, or a cut to commercials on the radio. It’s a message in a bottle that exists to be opened at a later date, in a different place.
Gathering coronavirus-related stories
Stories that span the globe are a consistent theme in Cathy FitzGerald’s Life on Lockdown. She opens the programme, made for Radio 4, by narrating her journey from New York to her home in Wendover, England. She has to leave her partner David behind, so that each of them can be near their families. The whispered, sleepy conversation feels exactly like those ones you have on weekday mornings before commuting to work (remember those?), but FitzGerald’s journey is much more serious. A New Yorker yells at her “to go back to Britain, and take the virus with [her],” and we can feel the borders beginning to close around us.
“I thought that audio diaries would be a really nice case of form fitting function; these little pools of aloneness at the moment, isolated in our houses,” FitzGerald tells Bello Collective. “There’s something about the audio diary in its solitariness and its intimacy that really seemed to fit really well with that. And I like the idea of making something where we hop from little world to little world.”
FitzGerald’s phone calls with David punctuate the episode; the thread of their story strings the crowdsourced vignettes together, reminding us that the person putting this audio together is struggling under lockdown conditions just like us. While it’s fascinating to hear the stories of strangers, the intimacy of the calls are a reminder that we need the voices of loved ones to get us through these challenging times.
A podcast without voices
Still, it’s possible to launch a podcast that barely involves voices at all. For Eleanor McDowall, developing Field Recordings was a response to feeling burnt out by the news cycle. By withdrawing from it, she found the space to bring a long-nurtured idea to fruition: recordings of nature in “these moments of silence and stillness,” as she tells Bello Collective. It’s a gentle joke on the title of field producer. In our locked-down times, that’s now anyone who gets to spend time somewhere peaceful outside — and their first instinct is to hit record.
The result is an auditory tour of the world, spiriting us into the middle of an Australian thunderstorm, then letting the waves lap our toes on the shore of a Puerto Rican beach, then dropping us in the centre of Rome to hear Italians singing from their balconies during the early days of the city’s lockdown. That episode is one of the few times we hear voices on this podcast; there’s no introduction, no narration, just pure soundscape.
“I was crowdsourcing all of these fragments from around the world,” McDowall says. “I wanted to be able to transport my head to other places. They’re kind of like the dawn chorus popping off. These little bits of respite are like taking a deep breath.” It’s the antidote to our constrained lives, reminding us of what we’ve lost, even if accessible international flights also helped coronavirus become a pandemic so much faster than the Spanish flu could, back in 1918–20.
When podcasting becomes ASMR
Asking listeners to contribute audio for podcasts is not a brand-new phenomenon. Podcast Champion Helen Zaltzman, known for podcasts The Allusionist and Answer Me This! tells Bello Collective: “I’ve been crowdsourcing podcast material since I started podcasting 13 years ago. We decided to build Answer Me This! around listener-supplied content so that we didn’t have to come up with all the material ourselves! At that time social media was still fairly nascent, so it was accidental that we also benefited from how this created a community around the show quite quickly, and listeners came back again and again to hear if we had used their contributions.”
While she is no stranger to crowdsourcing audio, Zaltzman’s two most recent episodes of The Allusionist, cleverly named “Tranquillusionist,” are closer to ASMR. In the first episode, “Tranquillusionist: Your Soothing Words,” Zaltzman reads out the words that her listeners find most soothing, because, as she says in the opening: “Your podcaster friends that live in your brains are here for you in times of need.” In the next episode, “Tranquillusionist: Nmiigea,” Zaltzman, “for the purposes of quelling anxiety and stress and sleeplessness, read[s] the lyrics to ‘Imagine’ by John Lennon, with the words arranged in reverse alphabetical order.” Both episodes are scored by Martin Austwick’s soothing original compositions, and they aim to bring down the anxious listener’s heart rate.
“We hope listeners feel connected, inspired and see the light side of the situation we’re in,” says Renay Richardson, summing up NOTED. For Cathy FitzGerald, it’s “important to acknowledge the fear and anxiety,” in Life on Lockdown, “then move from those places into hope.” Eleanor McDowall thinks that the “little bit of escapism” of Field Recordings “might be a nice thing right now.” The latest episodes of The Allusionist throw storytelling out completely, to experiment with the power of sound to affect the mood. We can’t tell exactly what we need to comfort ourselves in this unpredictable historical moment; but crowdsourced podcasts let us know that we’re absolutely not alone in our confusion and isolation.
The Bello Collective is a publication + newsletter about podcasts and the audio industry. Our goal is to bring together writers, journalists, and other voices who share a passion for the world of audio storytelling.
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