At the 1995 Source Awards, Outkast, an unknown hip-hop duo from Atlanta, won the Best New Group award. For years, the rap industry had been dominated by the coastal powerhouses in New York and Los Angeles. But André Benjamin, a.k.a. André 3000, stepped confidently onstage to accept the award and deliver a clear message to haters: “The South got something to say.”
That statement has never been more true than now, almost 20 years later, as aspects of Southern culture have migrated into the mainstream, shaping our politics, music, and more. And with new WUNC podcast The Broadside, host Anisa Khalifa is setting out to examine how those stories at the heart of the American South reflect the communities who live here and the impact those stories have everywhere.
“A lot of stuff that happens across the country, it often starts in the South,” Khalifa says. “Whether that’s something rooted in Southern culture like language, food, social movements, or environmental justice, all of those things are in some way concentrated here first. I don’t think the South gets the recognition it deserves.”
Khalifa started working at WUNC in the fall of 2021 as a host and producer on the podcast Tested, which originally covered COVID-19 updates before evolving into a show tackling challenges facing North Carolina and the South. Then, in September, WUNC launched The Broadside, a continuation of the storytelling Khalifa and her colleague, producer Charlie Shelton-Ormond, had done while working together on Tested.
“We both really wanted to continue that work,” Khalifa says. “We felt it was important, and no one else was really doing it.”
Shelton-Ormond, who worked for several years as an audio producer at WUNC, including on The State of Things before the show was canceled in 2020 after 24 years, says the new show aims to build on WUNC’s legacy of featuring and spotlighting powerful storytelling across North Carolina and the South. He has helped lead WUNC’s growing on-demand podcast portfolio, which currently features four shows in-production, including Me & My Muslim Friends, a podcast Khalifa also helps produce.
“Having this podcast feed has been a priority, especially for us as podcast producers within WUNC,” Shelton-Ormond says. “It’s been really satisfying to be able to showcase stories and reporting through a method of podcasting that has different shapes and colors.”
The first eight episodes of The Broadside inspect topics ranging from the exportation of the Southern colloquialism “y’all” to why dollar stores are a ubiquitous fixture in Southern retail. Of all the programs the pair has worked on so far, Khalisa—who is Muslim and moved to the South from Canada when she was 11—says that the episode “Asian American Studies Has Arrived” is closest to her heart.
“I come from a background of fighting for Asian American studies when I was a student [at Duke], and it has been interesting for me to see how the movement has really taken off. Why is it happening here?” Khalisa says. “Why is it suddenly being successful? I wanted to talk about that. Asian American stories don’t get told that often, because that’s not really part of our narrative about the South even though Asian Americans have been here for, you know, hundreds of years.”
Topics may be weighty but, at 20 to 25 minutes, the breezy episode length sits comfortably between a broadcast news segment and an episode of The Ezra Klein Show.
“Being able to have this home where we can invite reporters or storytellers who are embedded in different communities both in North Carolina but more specifically across the whole region, and not be confined necessarily to any radio signal,” Shelton-Ormond says, “gives us creative confidence and freedom to expand, which is really exciting.”
At the end of October, WUNC also launched the station’s new daily broadcast, Due South, which brings renewed energy to the void left by The State of Things, the show’s spiritual predecessor.
Paul Hunton, the president and general manager at WUNC, says Due South, a broadcast radio show, and The Broadside, an on-demand podcast, are emblematic of the station’s strategy of applying a modern approach to storytelling throughout its programming.
“There’s always going to be some crossover, but we know digital audiences are different from broadcast audiences,” Hunton says. “So how do you tell stories across the WUNC ecosystem where you create a story for broadcast that can go on Due South or be part of one of our news features, but then our Broadside team could take that story and expand on it and do something deeper that reflects more of what digital audiences are looking for?”
Since the onset of serialized podcasting in the mid-2010s, media companies have attempted to crack the code on how to maintain an aging audience accustomed to catching the news on the radio during their morning commute while also leveraging new media platforms like podcasts and social media to attract younger, more diverse listeners. Hunton believes this is a natural evolution for public radio stations like WUNC, and that their mission is platform-agnostic.
“One of the things we have really tried to focus on is hammering down into who we are and what we do through the journalism and the stories we tell,” Hunton says. “When you align the focus of trying to reach different audiences, knowing that you’re gonna tell those stories differently but have the same vision for what stories to tell, you allow for collaboration more freely, and you can reach all the different audiences in North Carolina that we serve where they’re at.”
Legacy media organizations, even ones that have fully adopted podcasting, are struggling to adapt to a new landscape where social media continues to fracture audiences and siphon ad revenue. WNYC, which is operated by New York Public Radio, cut around 12 percent of its workforce in September. Hunton says WUNC is not immune to those same challenges, but he is confident that his team has the right approach to remain successful.
“I would love to say we saw the writing on the wall, but we also were aiming this way regardless, because we see this strategically as the way forward for public radio and audio storytellers.”
In the face of challenges across the industry, WUNC scored a big win in October when Embodied, a live radio show about sex, intimacy, and identity, announced a national distribution partnership with public media organization PRX. Anita Rao, the show’s host, was also recognized as a “rising star in public media” by news organization Current.
Whether WUNC shows are covering the taboos of sex or intersectionality in the South, audiences and storytellers alike have an appetite for a space to hold these conversations, Khalifa says.
“There’s a long history of things happening in the South and people often working on them in obscurity,” Khalifa says. “It’s been exciting to give people a place to talk about their work.”
Follow Reporter Justin Laidlaw on Twitter or send an email to [email protected]. Comment on this story at [email protected].
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