Giving Voice or Creating a Spectacle?

Abstract

Abstract This chapter builds on existing work concerning literary journalistic and personal narrative podcasting to advance understanding of the use of intimacy in popular factual narrative nonfiction entertainment podcasts. It identifies two forms of intimate content in many first-person narrative nonfiction podcasts: revealing or vulnerable moments on the part of story subjects and personal reflections on the action from narrator-protagonists. The chapter argues that the deployment of these forms of intimacy is emblematic of the way that first-person narrative nonfiction podcasts sometimes privilege the relationship between the narrator-protagonist and the listener at the expense of the subjects whose stories they are telling. The podcast Missing & Murdered is used as a case study of a program that evolved to modify the format for a more equitable approach that better fits its objectives and subject matter. The chapter suggests that this example is indicative of podcasting’s ongoing maturation as a medium.