I recently said to a friend:1
Podcasts are audio blogs! With all the good and ill that entails, but in our media culture, mostly good.
A small elaboration on that: like blogs, podcasts range incredibly widely:
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Shows with incredibly regular schedules, which are aimed at incredibly wide audiences, have large staffs, may even be basically spin-offs of other kinds of media — think NPR shows.
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Shows with much more niche audiences, which may still be very regularly produced and may even make significant amounts of money for their creators, but which are effectively “indie” — think something like the Apple tech focused Accidental Tech Podcast or, adjacent to it, the whole network of shows on Relay FM.
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Shows which have some aspiration to be regular but come out on something shaped more like “whatever the life schedule of the creators allows,” e.g. my own New Rustacean and Winning Slowly podcasts historically. Production quality can vary enormously here (as it did even over the course of those two shows!).
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Shows in the “whenever we have something specific to say” bucket. One of my current favorites in this category is Jane Street’s Signals & Threads, which is invariably interesting and went from a very regular schedule to as irregular a schedule as I can think of for any actually-ongoing podcast. That one has company backing, but there are plenty of independent shows with similar dynamics.
In sum: knowing that something is a podcast tells you basically nothing about it, just like knowing that something is a blog. It can be megacorporate and bland; it can be indie and quirky; it can be well produced or nearly inaudible; it can be wide or narrow; it can be anything you want it to, and at the end of the day it just runs on RSS. That’s what makes podcasts such a (potentially) great medium: they are audio blogs! They can be anything.