Introduction

THE FIRST EDITION OF Reality Radio, published in 2010, celebrated a blossoming of creativity in journalism and nonfiction storytelling on the radio. In the 1990s and 2000s, a growing cohort of innovators showed up on public radio shows telling stories that sounded different, in a variety of ways, from the detached, relatively formal reporting usually heard on National Public Radio’s newsmagazines. “We are living in the golden age of radio documentary,” Samuel G. Freedman wrote in ...