My name is Nikolas Harter and I am a surfer aboard the wave of this new medium we call “podcasts.” When I used to run the studio at my local city college, my professor called me a “one-man radio station” because of my skillzz in all the technical elements that go into making podcasts. That was 7 years ago, at the start of my career. If I were writing this blurb back then, I would’ve waxed on about how podcasts have an amazing potential to harness the intellectual energy of passionate creators from across the globe, creators who will educate new audiences with longform interviews and thoughtful narratives, who will fill the gap from the collapse of local journalism and create their own unique media ecosystem.

“I was not entirely wrong,” I thought with chagrin as I watched Trump ride the podcast wave to victory in 2024, what many folks are now calling The Podcast Election. Nowadays, Joe Rogan is still the #1 show, and it’s become clear that the same mechanism that makes podcasts empowering (the RSS feed) also makes them dangerous. Meanwhile, I continue to toil away in my small slice of the news, working for a massive corporation and doing my best to game the algorithms while clinging to what remains of my soul... So I’m not as idealistic as I once was. BUT I still have my principles:

Every podcaster should know the fundamentals of journalism. That includes journalistic ethics and methods—and I’m not just talking about those of us who make the news. History has shown that the marketplace rewards creators who provide accurate information that has a tangible impact on audiences’ lives, even if the purpose is just to amuse. In media, trust is currency. Driven by content feeds: sensationalism, polarization, and clickbait are on the rise, an inevitable consequence of algorithms whose primary purpose is to addict us, not inform us. We can game this system without succumbing to it. In this industry, each of us chooses whether Truth matters and mutual understanding is possible, or whether nothing is certain and propaganda reigns.