Tuning in 'The Divided Dial': Katie Thornton fell in love with radio in Minneapolis and went on to explore the medium's power and promise
Her work on the Peabody-winning series just wrapped its new season, with a different focus that zeroed in on some of the same themes affecting the "invisible backbone" of the U.S. media environment.
Katie Thornton fell in love with radio in her childhood bedroom in Minneapolis, listening to her friends on Radio K’s show for high school and junior high students.
That passion for the medium has fueled her work, delivered lessons and put her on the global stage with “The Divided Dial,” a podcast series that has also aired on WNYC’s “On the Media” news program.
Season 1, focused on conservative talk radio and the rise of one company with a big Twin Cities presence that embraced the format, won a Peabody Award, one of the highest awards for storytelling by electronic media. Season 2, looking at shortwave radio and how it’s been co-opted by different interests, just wrapped up.
“I’ve always loved the medium, I love listening, I love learning about its history,” she said.
Back in the Twin Cities days after the final part of Season 2 was released, Thornton was replacing the adrenaline from the yearslong reporting effort by easing back into daily life here, which includes playing guitar in two Twin Cities bands and DJing.
Thornton, 32, began her journey volunteering at KFAI-FM while she was at high school at Breck, then worked at WOBC in Ohio while at Oberlin for college. After graduating in 2015, she returned to Minnesota and was a KFAI staff member. She’s gone on to report features in the Atlantic, Rolling Stone, National Geographic and Bloomberg while also putting together audio stories for “99% Invisible,” the BBC and public radio.
Thornton also credits her Midwestern background for informing her interests in reporting and how she tells stories, by seeing how the media could also miss out on the narrative she knew firsthand.
“It’s really wonderful to be from a place that is so often misunderstood sometimes in the national press,” she said, talking about coverage missing the depth and richness that she knew was at the heart of Minneapolis and Midwest and wanting to tell stories with complexity.
In telling the story in both seasons of “The Divided Dial,” Thornton and the WNYC team examines the promise, “but also at times the failed promise,” of radio as a medium, she said.
“And to me, a love for anything is so much richer if it’s nuanced and embraces the realities of its potential and sometimes its failed potential and the ways that the intrinsic joys of the medium have been exploited, which was something we tried to explore in this second series.”
If trying to duplicate the award-winning success of Season 1 wasn’t enough, Thornton knew she had a challenge in her follow-up topic of shortwave vs. the better known rise of conservative talk radio.
“We had to introduce those listeners to an entire concept, an entire world that for the most part they were unfamiliar with, and then get them to care about it, and that’s a much different animal,” she said, summing up the response as really exciting.
“One of the best compliments that I got about season 2 was how many people told us that they went out and bought shortwave radios so they could listen.”
The new project opened with a look at the U.S. government’s use of shortwave during the Cold War. But what started as history then was transformed into current events as the Trump administration moved to dismantle the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and related U.S. government media outlets.
As her background piece “came back into the news,” Thornton was grateful for the many changes and chaos that delayed the release of Season 2 from January as first planned until May.
Ultimately the team decided to keep “The Divided Dial” a standalone, evergreen yet timely, piece. But being a part of “On the Media” also played an important role as the weekly WNYC show took on the duty of relaying the fast-moving news while her reporting also offered timely perspective on the headlines.
Both seasons point to the power of the electromagnetic spectrum, which Thornton says forms the invisible backbone of the media environment we have today, especially when it comes to regulation.
“The thing that sort of was challenging for me but also exciting in our reporting was that in the first season so much of what we did was like a political-economy deep dive. It wasn’t necessarily articulated as such because I think that sounds kind of boring. ”
“In reporting this story, we were like, ‘Oh, that was kind of a big-picture economics story, honestly … But Season 2, even though I think there was a lot of thematic overlap, it was less of a sort of systemic story. … We couldn’t point to the same sort of consolidation and long-term high-level political organizing as we could in the first season.”
“It was more a story of people using a very specific technology in a very specific way, a story of rhetoric and strategy on a more somewhat grassroots level.”
Thornton isn’t done with radio yet and is putting together plans for what’s next. “It’s a real gift to be able to do long-form and serialized work like this.”
She also hopes to find a home for the archive of shortwave audio she built to illustrate the stories that make up Season 2 with the help of the medium’s fans.
“So much of the credit needs to go to shortwave-radio lovers, because a lot of people who love shortwave document what they’ve been hearing over shortwave for the course of decades,” Thornton said, who credited her love of archive work to not only coping with the vast trove of material she accumulated but the time and effort needed to tap into it fully.
All that work, including an 11th-hour narrative-altering nugget found long after most of her reporting was done, paid off in bringing the story to life “in a way that just wouldn’t have been possible without that audio.”
Thornton has been sharing her love for audio and the lessons she’s learned with students at Macalester College in St. Paul, where she has been teaching a podcasting class.
For her, another key lesson is how her musical career informs her reporting, something she says took her a long time to acknowledge.
“To me, they’ve always been very obviously linked, but it’s a hard line to walk, especially freelancing in that you don’t have the sort of certainty and reliability of a job.”
She’s also grateful for living in Minnesota because “it’s possible to do all of that. I think it’s harder in some other places. There are different sort of professional pressures and financial pressures that make it even more challenging to continue to live a creative life into adulthood. It’s already challenging enough. … And it’s more possible here than I think in other places.”