I recently wrote some friends, “I watch/listen to zero podcasts. Unbeknownst to me, this has become mainstream media consumed by hundreds of millions of people monthly.” In hindsight, I didn’t understand how “podcast” fit into the media landscape.

If I had a nickle for every time I read or heard the phrase “available wherever you get your podcasts,” I could afford a subscription to all their newsletters. There are indeed many podcasts, consumed by countless people around the world each month. Thing is, a podcast is one distribution form among many for what are known as “independent media enterprises.”

To explain what this means, let’s look at someone with whom many readers of this blog are familiar, Heather Cox Richardson. Letters From an American is Richardson’s signature daily publication, distributed through multiple channels. I get mine as an email from substack in what is usually the first email I receive each day. While she has a podcast of the letters, my long time email use is a habit in which I find comfort, and likely why I did not recognize her as a podcaster. Why would I?

Richardson is an individual expert in her field (history, teaching, and apparently, Maine lobster fishing). She developed her letters on Facebook and publishes them today in multiple channels that also include Substack, email, YouTube, Spotify, radio, Instagram, Bluesky, Threads, TikTok, and a website. There is more than just letters. She has series known as Politics Chat, American Conversations, 250 on 250, and the program she does with Paul Krugman called Lunch Money. All this suffices to call Richardson a media enterprise.

With the success of Letters From an American, she has been able to hire staff, yet at its core, she is independent, and that’s part of what makes her insights engaging. She is an example of an independent media enterprise.

Richardson is not the only one. Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize-winning economist, left his job as an opinion writer for the New York Times, started on substack, then branched into other media. Mark Elias is an election law expert who represented Iowa Democratic Party chair Rita Hart when she lost her 2020 congressional race by six votes to Mariannette Miller-Meeks. Joyce Vance is a former U.S. Attorney, law professor, and legal analyst, whose Civil Discourse publication explains current events through legal and governmental knowledge. They all produce their work in multiple media. As you may know, there are many more.

The rise of independent media enterprises is directly related to decreasing amounts of news available from conventional sources. Readers of this blog should be well-familiar with the decline of newspapers since the turn of the century. Newspaper readership was reduced by more than half, advertising revenue dried up, independents exited the market through mergers, acquisitions, and going out of business. Hundreds of U.S. counties have become news deserts with the loss of local newspapers. The collapse of newspapers over 25 years created the economic and technological space for independent media enterprises. Mainstream news organizations consolidated and with fewer owners, and efficiencies of scale, there are fewer jobs for everyone, including the people who would venture into the new space of independent media enterprise. There are also fewer points of view.

I probably won’t be consuming a lot of podcasts, even after understanding how they fit in. Some people listen to them while doing other things, in fact, about half of the people I pass on the state park trail during my morning walks are plugged into earbuds, oblivious to nature around us (and to me). It is important to accept independent media enterprises as a thing because they may be our last, best hope for media delivering information useful to us in our daily lives. Don’t like podcasts? There is probably a different medium with the same information.