# Worth a listen: Champions of Old Radio

**URL:** <https://forum.podcaster.community/t/worth-a-listen-champions-of-old-radio/4588>\
**Category:** Workbench\
**Created:** [July 4, 2025, 1:01pm UTC](https://forum.podcaster.community/t/worth-a-listen-champions-of-old-radio/4588 "2025-07-04T13:01:01Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![craigconstantine](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex030/user_avatar/forum.podcaster.community/craigconstantine/32/2322_2.png) [@craigconstantine](https://forum.podcaster.community/u/craigconstantine)\
**Post date:** [July 4, 2025, 1:01pm UTC](https://forum.podcaster.community/t/worth-a-listen-champions-of-old-radio/4588/1 "2025-07-04T13:01:01Z")

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This one is also JAMMED full of references. I’ve done _some_ digging for you— scroll down!

> Take a short walk into deep radio history. Julia Barton and Sarah Montague join Rob to talk about two audio storytelling classics from the 1930s: “Seems Like Radio Is Here to Stay,” an homage to radio by Norman Corwin, and the anti-fascist play “The Fall of the City,” by Archibald MacLiesh. Old school radio at its best!

~ from [https://transom.org/2025/champions-of-old-radio/](https://transom.org/2025/champions-of-old-radio/) or search for “champions” in the _Sound School_ podcast.

What’s captured here is more than nostalgia—it’s a layered appreciation for radio as a medium once saturated with commercialism, but still capable of offering moments of wonder, literary beauty, and political urgency. By resurfacing Norman Corwin’s “Seems Radio Is Here to Stay” and Archibald MacLeish’s “The Fall of the City,” the episode quietly proposes that many of today’s sonic experiments and narrative risks are part of a lineage. These early works wrestled with form, tone, and technology in ways that remain instructive: how to speak to a mass audience without dilution, how to conjure mood and meaning with minimal tools, and how to use the microphone not as a limiter, but as a conduit to something expansive.

The episode doesn’t treat these old broadcasts as museum pieces; instead, it offers them as working material—still alive, still resonant. The ideas they engage with—art as resistance, radio as an equalizing force, storytelling as a means to grapple with fear and freedom—are uncomfortably timely. And in surfacing voices like Julia Barton and Sarah Montague, the show becomes a kind of relay: past to present, voice to voice. It’s a reminder that the bones of this medium are strong, and that returning to its earliest aspirations can be a source of direction, not just sentiment.

**References**

Jonathan Goldstein’s Manifesto — [https://transom.org/2003/jonathan-goldstein-on-radio/](https://transom.org/2003/jonathan-goldstein-on-radio/)

_Audio Ancestors: Norman Corwin_ by Julia Barton — [https://transom.org/2025/audio-ancestors-norman-corwin/](https://transom.org/2025/audio-ancestors-norman-corwin/)

Continuous Wave – Julia Barton’s newsletter about radio and broadcast history, [https://continuous-wave.beehiiv.com](https://continuous-wave.beehiiv.com)

_Seems Radio Is Here to Stay_ — by Norman Corwin (1939, aired on _Columbia Workshop_) [Google search results…](https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Seems+Radio+Is+Here+to+Stay%22+by+Norman+Corwin+%281939%2C+aired+on+Columbia+Workshop%29)

_The Fall of the City_ — by Archibald MacLeish (1937, CBS _Columbia Workshop_) [Google search results…](https://www.google.com/search?q=%22The+Fall+of+the+City%22+by+Archibald+MacLeish+%281937%2C+CBS+Columbia+Workshop%29)

Norman Corwin Papers — at Syracuse University, [https://library.syracuse.edu/digital/guides/c/corwin\_n.htm](https://library.syracuse.edu/digital/guides/c/corwin_n.htm)