When the podcast Signal Hill launched last year, I was immediately struck by its formatting. Instead of seasons, it launches issues; episodes, which vary in length from less than two minutes to more than an hour, are broken down by type, like “dispatch” and “feature” and “profile.” It looks, in other words, like a magazine laid out in a podcast feed; it even includes editors’ notes and letters to the editors. The stories range widely: there’s a Talk of the Town-ish piece in which kids in the town of Madrid, New Mexico, literally talked to people all over town; a feature about lutes from writer and Great British Bake-Off runner-up Ruby Tandoh; and an essay about the Native American occupation of Alcatraz, contrasted with the Apollo 11 moon landing (which happened at the same time). No two stories are alike, just as no two pieces in a print magazine are alike.
I’ve been following Signal Hill since the beginning; last year, when Nieman Storyboard editor Mark Armstrong asked us for recommendations, I wrote that Signal Hill was “beautiful, weird, and mesmerizing,” and “the kind of stuff that made me want to be a journalist in the first place.” That remains true, but in the year since its launch the audio magazine has grown up. What started as an experiment is now on its third issue, which launched this month, and is even being broadcast on the radio.
At a time when documentary audio has contracted dramatically, Signal Hill seems to be the rare expansion. To learn more, I spoke with co-founders and editors-in-chief Jackson Roach and Liza Yeager over Zoom. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
We’ve considered it, but we can’t do bonus episodes that are at all the thing that Signal Hill is because every story takes eight months or more to make. It’s just so much labor. We haven’t completely ruled out doing some kind of lower-lift audio bonus for subscribers. We have a paywalled newsletter that our subscribers get, where we all write about different kinds of art that’s inspiring us and inspiring Signal Hill. So that’s kind of our answer to that for the moment.
