Interview: Seth Lind, This American Life

Seth Lind is the Director of Operations at This American Life. In this interview, he explains why quality content comes before any business model (see: Serial), the importance of audience building, and public radio’s current identity crisis.

Seth Lind, who’s worked at This American Life for almost ten years, has never seen the audio industry so in flux. From the emergence of podcasting networks to experiments in advertising, from public radio’s brain drain to the disruption in distribution, the audio industry is, in Lind’s words, experiencing a major “identity crisis.”

This American Life is no exception. The show has spent the last year reshaping its identity and asserting its independence from traditional methods of distribution. First in 2014 by delivering its shows through PRX’s online platform (rather than via its longtime distributor PRI), then by spinning off Serial (essentially becoming a network itself), and finally by breaking away from Chicago Public Media and establishing itself as a public benefit corporation owned and led by Ira Glass.

According to Lind, This American Life’s primary goal has always been to reach “the largest audience possible” — which, in the traditional public radio model, meant giving away the content to listeners for free via wide-reaching national networks (while charging radio stations carriage fees). However, the show has since become successful enough to shed its network ties, cultivate/tap into its own audience, and earn more from advertisers. In fact, the show recently made a switch you may have noticed in your Podcast App — for the first time ever, TAL episodes are now available not one, but four at a time. As the revenue from paid downloads plummets, Lind explained, it has become more valuable for TAL to get more listener impressions, which it can then sell to advertisers.

In future Lind sees downloads disappearing entirely as the industry moves in the direction the music industry has: with audio becoming “something you access, not acquire.” The Podcast App has already made technological strides towards that end; Lind is confident the technology will only improve over time. One technological development that would greatly increase podcast listenership, of course, is a podcast app baked into android devices: “There should be a petition. Dear Google, let people listen to podcasts on your phones.”

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Seth Lind, Director of Operations at This American Life[/caption]

Of course, as Lind points out, none of the technological barriers to audience growth matter if one fundamental is not taken care of: quality. “Sometimes I get annoyed with Ira because he’s busy and won’t meet with me, but then — he’s working on the show. There’s nothing to put ads around or fundraise around if this stuff isn’t good.”

It’s a lesson that was hammered home for Lind when they released Serial. Although they considered potential spin-offs year after year, they ended up waiting nineteen years for something worthy enough to engage a large audience and sustain its own business model. Serial, one of the most successful podcasts in history, was worth the wait. “Make something people want,” Lind advises, “and the business model is going to follow.”

Not surprisingly, then, Lind believes there’s only one potential barrier to podcasting’s growth. “The barrier is creativity — who has the next idea for something truly new. I personally think that that’s gonna be fiction, I think someone’s gonna make The Breaking Bad of audio, and you’re gonna realize: this is as good as TV, but I’m listening in my commute. And it’s free!”