In Slate Magazine yesterday, Mac Rogers- creator of the “found footage” style of audio drama that I’m going to call fictionalized podcasts or Podficts from now on. It’s a kind of fusion of audio drama and podcasting in which the hosts identify the podcasts and recordings as real, but they are truly fictionalized.

While some folks have identified this as “Docudrama” that doesn’t feel right to me either. Wikipedia identifies a docudrama as:

“A docudrama (or documentary drama) is a genre of radio and television programming, feature film, and staged theatre, which features dramatized re-enactments of actual events. On stage, it is sometimes known as documentary theatre.”

And these Podficts aren’t in anyway re-enactments of actual events.

What’s exciting is we’re looking at a very new kind of fusion of the audio drama form. Mac Rogers seems very excited at the idea of serializing story telling and he offers a look at some of the rules he would suggest to produce. While I love all kinds of audio drama in the foray, and I hope this brings new listeners to the medium, I’d hate to see this become the only form of choice. It would be like saying the only popular television style is first-person camera shows. After a while, it’s important to let the audience know the medium is robust and diverse!

Sibby Wieland, from Sound Stages Radio has been a long time advocate and champion of the amazing medium we all know and love- audio drama. Her seminal works along with those of Pete Lutz from Pulp-Pourri Theatre, Richard “Captain Radio” Summers, and our own efforts here at the Sonic Society have pressed to provide World Audio Drama Day on the 30th of October in fond remembrance of an age of panic during the initial broadcast of Orson Welles’ adaptation of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds.

In this article with Radio World the focus seems to be audio drama trying to reinvent itself. Is that really the case? Or hasn’t that happened over a decade ago now?