Does the future of radio really lie in podcasts?

To a debate on the future of radio at the BBC where it turns out not to be a discussion on who’s listening now but how they’re listening. The Reithian ambition to inform, educate and entertain needs to change, says Mary Hockaday, controller of BBC World Service English, and become ‘inform, educate and connect’. But how do you find and hold on to your audience in the digital age?

The buzz word here is ‘podcast’ after the extraordinary success of Serial, the American-made documentary that went viral and has now reached an astonishing 75 million downloads worldwide, still rising. In many ways, though, Serial was very old-fashioned radio. True crime told as a long-form narrative in 12 episodes. A reporter sets out to find the truth about a murder case in Baltimore. Was Adnan Syed really guilty of killing his girlfriend, Hae Min Lee, in 1999? The techniques used were traditional investigative journalism: long phone calls with Syed in prison, interviews with his friends, family and defence lawyer, extensive trawls through the written records.