Phonograph
A sound-rich audio zine about podcasts, hosted by former public radio producers Rob McGinley Myers (The Writer's Almanac, Anxious Machine) and Britta Greene (Minnesota Public Radio, The New Yorker Radio Hour).
Episodes
In the weeks since Alex Pretti's murder, Rob and Britta have been listening to numerous podcasts that covered the ICE invasion of American cities over the past year. Ingesting a year of audio ICE coverage puts this story (not to mention our conception of audio journalism) into a whole new perspective.
Come for the heartfelt media criticism. Stay for Rob's brutal takedown of The Daily.
Rob and Britta both live in the Twin Cities, so on this episode, we took a break from discussing audio storytelling, and Britta interviewed two photojournalists who've been covering ICE in Minneapolis. It's a conversation about what they've seen, about the vital role of photojournalism at this moment, and the personal toll of doing this work.
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At the tail end of 2025, Rob and Britta discuss work by Scott Carrier and Erica Heilman that captures something about how it felt to live through this harrowing year. To support our show and access our bonus story feed, follow this link to our Patreon.
Show Links:
- "The End of the World" from Scott Carrier's Home of the Brave
- "What Now Sounds Like" from Erica Heilman's Rumble Strip
- Rob and Britta's discussion of Scott Carrier...
To explore the phenomenon of podcast bonus feeds, Rob and Britta start by discussing an episode of Yowei Shaw's podcast Proxy (with guest Alex Goldman) about the struggle of podcasters having to ask listeners for money. We then dig into several podcast bonus feeds (This American Life Partners, Slate Plus, and others), to find what they're offering. And we are pleasantly surprised.
Episode Description:
With the triumphant return of the podcast Heavyweight, Rob and Britta trace the career of Jonathan Goldstein through several of his stories, including his early work at This American Life, the CBC radio show Wiretap, and his podcast Heavyweight.
Stories and episodes discussed:
As the 15th anniversary of 99% Invisible approaches, Rob and Britta dig into four very different episodes from the first four years of that show's run (as well as the story of the time Rob met Roman Mars):
- Episode 6: "99% Symbolic"
- Episode 29: "Cul de Sac" (Produced with Katie Mingle)
- Episode 103: "U.T.B.A.P.H" (Produced with Sam Greenspan)
- Episode 83: "Heyoon" (Produced with Alex Goldman)
To support Phonograph, subscri...
Episode Description:
Rob and Britta discuss Nancy Updike's podcast "We Were Three," which tells the story of one family devastated by Covid and what that devastation revealed. Also discussed: Nancy Updike's status as as one of the all time great audio producers.
To support Phonograph, subscribe to our new bonus feed, which features experiments in audio storytelling. This month's story comes from Rob: a collage of recordings he mad...
Rob and Britta discuss the new podcast Signal Hill, which takes its inspiration from the world of print magazines. Rob talks to Liza Yeager and Jackson Roach about the project, and then we dive into a handful of the stories from Signal Hill's first "issue."
Show Notes:
Fishing the Sky by Jackson Roach
Desperado by Neena Pathak
A Porous Place by Hannah Sassoon
On the Family Group Chat by Hannah Kingsley-Ma
Music by Blue ...
Rob and Britta discuss the classic Alix Spiegel story "Pray" from This American Life, including Spiegel's origin story as a producer and what happened to her when members of the megachurch she was reporting on urged her to become a Christian.
This is the second of three episodes Rob and Britta recorded in 2019 and never released until now. The first of those was our episode about TAL's "Notes on Camp."
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Rob is joined by the audio producer Sophie Nikitas to discuss Susan Burton's Peabody award winning podcast from 2023: The Retrievals.
Show Notes:
Sophie's online dating podcast miniseries The Zoo
Sophie's horror anthology podcast Out Cold
Susan Burton's story "In The Event Of An Emergency, Put Your Sister In An Upright Position"
Rob is joined by the podcast critic Samantha Hodder, who writes the newsletter Bingeworthy, to discuss the podcast Cement City: a sound-rich, character-rich, immersive exploration of the struggling rust belt town Donora, Pennsylvania.
Show Notes:
Rob and Britta discuss a ten year old story from This American Life called "The Problem We All Live With" produced by Chana Joffe-Walt and reported by Nikole Hannah-Jones. It's an example of the kind of documentary journalism we need more than ever, in a world where such journalism is increasingly under threat.
Show Notes:
TAL Episode 562: The Problem We all Live With
Rob and Britta dig into two classic episodes of the podcast Love and Radio, "The Wisdom of Jay Thunderbolt" and "Choir Boy," sparking a discussion about the appeal of abrasive art.
Show Notes:
The Wisdom of Jay Thunderbolt - Love and Radio
Salvatore Scibona reads Denis Johnson - New Yorker Fiction Podcast
Music:
Rob and Britta share a discussion they had in 2019 (but never released) about the classic This American Life episode "Notes on Camp." Topics include their own camp experiences, the power of scary stories, Rob's favorite thing ever recorded by any radio show ever, and the wild back story of the beloved camp counselor David Himmel, aka Mr. Popluar.
Show Notes:
Notes on Camp - This American LIfe
On the second of a two-part series about the podast Startup, Rob and Britta talk about how the mini-seasons of the podcast Startup about the growth of Gimlet revealed all kinds of details about the troubles at the company, the ill-fated sale to Spotify, and what all this means for the state of narrative audio.
Show Notes:
Skye Pillsbury's newsletter The Squeeze
Galen Beebe's website
Music:
On the first episode of the new season Rob and Britta talk about what made them want to restart a show about narrative audio. And they discuss the complicated legacy of a podcast that's having its tenth anniversary this year.
Show Notes:
Music:
Coffaro's Theme by Bill Frisell
"Arabic Tallow" and "At Our Best Alone" from Blue Dot Sessions
Audio Excerpts:
After more than five years of silence, new episodes of this podcast finally are on their way. Season 2 starts September 5, 2024.
Rob and Britta discuss This American Life Episode 37 - The Job that Takes Over Your Life, as well as Britta's former job fixing scandals for big companies, and Rob's former job working for Garrison Keillor. Other topics include the great radio reporter Scott Carrier and his masterpiece of a story The Test, and Rob interviews Peter Clowney, one of the original producers of This American Life, about what it was like to work on the sh...
Rob and Britta discuss whether this episode is TAL's first real masterpiece, the role of David Sedaris in the show's early years, why "The Man in the Well" is the rare example of great audio fiction, the bone-chilling music of the Bulgarian State Television Female Choir, and why an effort to keep children from excluding each other makes Rob weirdly emotional.
And we talk to the amazing Marlo Mack, from the podcast How to Be a Girl,...
Rob and Britta discuss This American Life Episode 14: Accidental Documentaries, including their own experience creating accidental documentaries. The main focus of the discussion is the centerpiece of this episode, a documentary edited out of reel to reel tapes that a family sent back and forth to each other back in 1967. And Rob talks to Joe Silovsky, the man who originally found those tapes and gave them to Ira Glass, and whose w...
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