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2018 - 2020
Fort 806: The first local podcast this record can fix by name and date is a storytelling show. Input Fort Wayne's profile of its host, published 3 October 2018, describes Sonya, a first-generation Mexican American living on the city's south side, who "hosts a podcast called Fort 806 that focuses on the stories of Fort Wayne locals". The stated motive was the one the whole wave shares: she was interested in hearing stories from locals and creating a dialogue. No audience figure for the show was ever published in the sources found, and this section records the founding fact, not a reach it cannot prove.
Women Are: Fort Wayne: The wave's best-documented show arrived the next year. Stephanie Gottesman, who had moved to Fort Wayne from Los Angeles, teamed with Traci Henning-Kolberg to launch Women Are: Fort Wayne in the spring of 2019, under a production company, Monstrous Regiment Media, founded in March 2019 to produce, in the Fortitude Fund's words, inspiring digital content promoting diversity and inclusion. The podcast won Fort Wayne SOUP's event of 2 May 2019 and its $636 in startup funds. Its first episodes launched on 21 June 2019, built as ten-episode seasons of fifty to eighty minutes, local women interviewed on the big-picture issues of work and life, with music by local female artists. Gottesman, who also ran a student podcast at Purdue University Fort Wayne called Byte Sized History, told Input Fort Wayne the aim was to give Fort Wayne women a voice on a national stage. Input Fort Wayne's coverage of 24 July 2019 is the document: a local publication treating a podcast launch as civic news.
The directories fill in: The podcast directories, which are this wave's census, list The Front Porch, telling the unknown stories of unknown people in the Fort Wayne community, with nine episodes from 12 December 2019, and the Fort Wayne Local Podcast of Jacob McAfee, thirty-one episodes from 15 May 2020, connecting residents to the neighbors and business leaders around them. None of these shows published audience figures in the sources found, and the wave's significance is not in its numbers. It is that by 2020 the city had a shelf of its own voices, made without a transmitter, a press, or anyone's permission, which is the break every leg of the digital record keeps returning to.
Sources:
- Input Fort Wayne, #PeopleofNEI: Sonya, 3 Oct 2018: the Fort 806 podcast and its local-stories purpose.
- Input Fort Wayne, "Building sisterhood: Why an ex-LA resident is launching a podcast about Fort Wayne women", 24 July 2019; Fortitude Fund founder profile (Monstrous Regiment Media, founded March 2019): Women Are: Fort Wayne, the SOUP award, the 21 June 2019 launch, the season format.
- Listen Notes directory listings: The Front Porch (9 episodes since 12 Dec 2019); Fort Wayne Local Podcast (31 episodes since 15 May 2020).