Bernie Sanders, Snoop Dogg, RuPaul—everybody seems to have a podcast today. The medium has transformed from radio for tech nerds to entertainment for everyone. But a decade before Start-Up and Serial and Missing Richard Simmons, there was Christopher Lydon’s Open Source, a RSS feed of audio files released in Cambridge in 2003. Here’s a look back at the medium’s earliest days.
Chris Lydon (host): In the months leading up to the war, every major news institution you could think of was gung ho for it. The conventional stewards of public conversation were asleep, and the country was unbelievably uninformed. I was dying to say something. Back in the late ‘90s I’d been part of “The Connection,” a call-in radio show on WBUR in Boston, and its fundamental promise was that grownups can make a hell of a lot more sense of things than standard media thinks they can. I needed something like that.
Mary McGrath (producer): We thought that the internet could erase the limitations of radio. The online format that we imagined could be honest and frank, and it didn’t have to have that kind of false balance that so much media had been encumbered by.
Jake Shapiro (co-founder and CEO of PRX and RadioPublic): Around March 2003, we set up a website, and we started “webcasting” a monthly show, interviewing Yo-Yo Ma, Steve Pinker, and Jared Diamond about how technology was reshaping the world, that people could download from christopherlydon.com. But we needed a place where we could record it regularly.
Lydon: The Berkman Center at Harvard had a wonderful cross section of minds thinking about the internet, so I leapt at the chance to record there. And not many months into it, Dave Winer arrived, and I instantly felt we had work to do together.
Dave Winer (software developer, RSS innovator): My goal then was to upgrade the blogosphere. At that point, it was a clubby social thing, and it was way focused on Silicon Valley and the tech industry. Syndication and RSS hadn’t been done on the web—my idea was that we could do blogging with our voice, but I needed a flow of MP3s that people would find compelling.
Lydon: He said, “Hey, Chris, you know radio. I know syndication. What the world needs is an MP3 that can be syndicated.”
Winer: At that point, these things were not called podcasts. They were called audio blog posts. And we would drive from Massachusetts to New Hampshire during the 2003 presidential primaries. There was one event, a backyard speech of Howard Dean in Concord, New Hampshire, on a very hot summer day, and Chris did an open-ended sampling of the crowd. It was intimate.
Nicco Mele (webmaster for Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential bid): I started listening to Lydon around 2003—I would import it into iTunes and onto my first-generation iPod—because he was right there in the thick of it. It wasn’t about the horse race: who was up, who was down. It was always the people who were involved in the actual grassroots stories of the campaign.
Lydon: Podcasting was where people could use four-letter words and speak a kind of raw, angry opinion that a great mass of the population believes and wants to hear. To be yourself, to be political, to talk the way that we talked at home, in the kitchen, even in a bar: It was a huge gift from the internet. We knew we were at a turning point. I would get into my car and listen to public radio, and I thought: God, this is like dark ages. The world is never going back.
McGrath: One of the reasons I think podcasting is having another moment right now, just like it was during the Iraq War, is because of the Trump campaign: people need help processing where we are in America, and where we’re going.
