My obsession with podcasting about language now has a business plan
I lacked even the basics of running a business, so I went back to school.
Having an obsession enriches your life. It drives you to learn and improve, to engage with those of a similar bent. It pays to have an obsession.
But sadly, obsessions don’t pay in dollars, or at least mine doesn’t. Here it is: Making audio stories about language and our bumpy adventures with it. It’s niche, I know — but I also know there are plenty of people like me. We are intrigued by humanity’s endless reinvention of language, wowed by metaphors and wordplay, angered when people use language as a tool to divide, saddened at the loss of its countless varieties.
There are so many stories about language. I know this and I want to keep telling them. My podcast, Subtitle, is moderately successful. But it is one of dozens of language-themed podcasts. (Check them out, there’s one for every taste.) And it is one of millions of podcasts overall. Because the odds of making a living aren’t exactly in my favor, I went back to school. I participated in a brilliantly conceived business program for independent journalists, more of which later.
It’s been 30 years since I graduated from UC Berkeley’s journalism school. Many — probably most — of my fellow students from back then have quit the profession. It’s understandable. As journalism has tried to reinvent itself, many newsrooms have become dispiriting places to work in: Oh God, another restructuring. Another new boss. Another email, explaining-but-not-really-explaining why the colleague who used to sit next to you got canned last Friday.
I stayed in journalism, where I eventually discovered my obsession. I was employed by The World, an international news and culture program that airs daily on U.S. public radio stations. I went on reporting trips all over the place: Bosnia, South Korea, Bangladesh, Poland. Each time, I returned with five or six ready-for-broadcast stories. After a while I recognized a pattern: Of those half-dozen stories, one would invariably be language-themed. From South Africa, I came back with a report about the language of local rappers; from Québec, the French words that native English speakers had adopted; from Singapore, the street mashup language known as Singlish, beloved by its speakers and belittled by the country’s prudish government.
The penny dropped. I pitched my boss, the executive producer of The World: “How about I establish a language desk in our newsroom? We’d be the only broadcaster in the English-speaking world with a language desk.” (I’m still not sure if that is true, but it’s what I said.)
Despite his misgivings, my boss said yes. Within a few months, I had started a podcast, The World in Words, and was commissioning stories. We covered, as we put it, “everything from bilingual education to the globalization of English to Icelandic insults.” I was learning how to podcast while also feeding the daily radio show with stories about Spanglish, minority language rights and international Scrabble competitions.
Eventually something had to give — my boss with his misgivings was right — and I left The World to fully commit myself to language journalism. My new podcast, the aforementioned Subtitle, secured a partnership with the Linguistic Society of America and a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. This was a fabulous launching pad — but it also covered over the cracks of the enterprise. With the exception of the sale of a few radio stories and the odd podcast ad, my income came from just a single source: the NEH, aka the U.S. federal government. And the grant would run out after twelve months.
That was when I turned to the Journalism Creators Program at CUNY’s Newmark School of Journalism. I’d heard that it was teaching the new tricks of journalism as practiced by a growing number of independent writers and podcasters: less emphasis on how to write or speak; more on how to write or speak successfully. The program’s instructors taught us how to identify our audience, listen to them and connect with them. We were learning how to become journalists of value. It required the acquisition of new skills, like writing an email newsletter that people would actually open and read, or conceiving a monetization plan that would appeal to our community. More than any single skill, though, the program gave me — and many others in my cohort — hope.
We wondered among ourselves why a series of Zoom sessions on the basics of running a business would leave us so disconcertingly emotional. (Every one of us has a vital, fascinating project that now has a greater chance of success.) I’m still figuring out the emotional reaction, but I think hope may be the key. For decades, the news industry has been in what seemed like an inexorable decline. During the Trump presidency, decline morphed into a multi-dumpster-fire crisis. Yet, after just 100 days, we had come to understand that journalism could actually thrive when a maker’s relationship with their community was re-imagined as dynamic and reciprocal. It could even help revive newsrooms.
I don’t exactly know what this will mean for Subtitle, except that I will be connecting with listeners — present and future — in more ways than I do now, which is mainly just on Twitter. I’m starting an email newsletter. I’m planning podcast episodes that will rely more on listeners’ questions and participation. (The substance of the podcast won’t change but the treatment will.) And I will seek out more collaborators to add to the valuable partnerships I have with the Linguistic Society of America and the Hub & Spoke podcast collective.
Of course, there are people who didn’t need to go to school to figure out how to pivot to the new realities of independent journalism. Some of those have been wonderfully generous with their time and advice. But for many of us, “business” has been this thing that other people do. I no longer believe that. One hundred days of learning and a bit of introspection may just make my obsession sustainable.
Patrick Cox is the founder and co-host of Subtitle, a podcast about languages and the people who speak them.
