From Duke to Tribeca: Four Questions with “Scene on Radio” Host John Biewen
The newest season of the documentary podcast “Scene on Radio,” produced by the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University in partnership with PRX, is an official selection for this year’s Tribeca Festival. Titled “The News,” it focuses on the current state of the media in the United States and how we got to where we are today.
How did Duke become the home of this acclaimed podcast?
In this edited interview, “Scene on Radio” host and producer John Biewen talks about how he ended up working and teaching at Duke, how he developed a podcast that takes deep dives into big issues, and why he’s happy to be at the Kenan Institute for Ethics.
Sarah Rogers: How did you end up at Duke after a decades-long career in audio journalism?
John Biewen: I arrived in Durham and at Duke in 2001, but I wasn’t working for Duke yet. At that point, I was still working in the public radio system for American Public Media. The Center for Documentary Studies provided me with office space, and after some conversations with Tom Rankin, who was CDS director at the time, I became director of the audio program in 2005. I managed to create a job for myself that I liked even better than the one I had — being employed by a university to produce audio documentary work for the public radio system. I was in that job for 18 years, and it involved teaching audio documentary courses to Duke undergrads, graduate students, and continuing education students.
In 2023, I was lucky to move to the Kenan Institute for Ethics, doing similar work to what I was doing at CDS; namely, producing “Scene On Radio” and teaching Duke courses in Documentary Studies, Ethics, and Journalism and Media.
SR: When did you come up with the idea to launch a podcast, and how did it evolve over time?
JB: My whole career had been producing for public radio programs and networks, but there were a lot of constraints there in terms of time and format. And then with the explosion of podcasts after “Serial” (2014), I realized, okay, you can have your own thing, with editorial control and creative freedom.
I had this idea to do a season on whiteness and white supremacy, because of some things that were happening in the world and some things that had been nagging at me for a long time. “Seeing White,” our second season, came out in 2017, and that really shifted my thinking about what “Scene on Radio” was and what it was going to be.
That was the result of two things. Certainly, the response was not what I expected — the very tiny audience that “Scene on Radio” had in 2016 grew by ten, twenty, fifty-fold. And then also just how satisfying that work was, and how much I learned, and it was like, oh, I could do this, because of the wonders of the podcast series format, where it’s roughly akin to writing a book. You spend a year and a half or so doing a whole bunch of research and a bunch of interviews, and take listeners on a journey through a very big and complex topic.
It was really a gift that there I was, in my 50s, and it was like, oh, this is a different approach to the work that I just love. And it became, from that point on, these deeply researched, season-long series on huge and audacious topics.
SR: How is producing audio documentary different from traditional journalism?
JB: One definition of documentary that I like — it’s not mine, somebody else said it — is, “Documentary equals journalism plus art.” I don’t know if the definition encompasses documentary, but it’s a useful one.
There’s the research and the reading, and setting up interviews with experts and with regular people, and writing and editing the script, and working with the team, but maybe the most pure joy that I have in doing this work is in the crafting of the audio. You’re sitting there moving sound around on the screen, and deciding on the pacing, and which piece of music to use, and exactly when to bring it down, to the tenth of a second, to make the experience for the listener as inviting as possible. That’s my absolute favorite part of the work.
SR: How do you see your work fitting into the mission of the Kenan Institute for Ethics?
JB: I’ve long been interested in this tension in the documentary world, where there are people who are absolutely committed to doing documentary work that is addressing issues in the world, and then there are other people who are just primarily interested in working with the form, and they’re not so concerned or are maybe even turned off by the idea that you’re trying to make the world better. Obviously, it’s a spectrum — it’s not just two camps.
But I have tended to be, for the most part, in the first camp. Ethics is just everywhere in the issues that I’m exploring. It’s really at the core of a lot of the work that I’ve done for a long time, which is — how do we create a society in which people can live together and create a better world for ourselves?
So yeah, Kenan is absolutely a fit. It’s an absolute honor to be associated with this place, and to have my work associated with that mission.
