The Journalist-as-Guest Format in Daily Deep Dive Podcasts: Building Authority Claims Through Metajournalistic Conversation

Abstract

This paper examines how conversational daily deep dive news podcasts build journalistic authority and legitimacy through what we call the “journalist-as-guest” (JAG) format. Applying a deep analytical listening methodology that honors the aurality of the medium and positions listening as a core analytical method, we analyzed eight daily deep dive news podcasts from Canada and Australia, attending to how sonic elements interact with conversational performance to produce podcasting’s characteristic intimacy and parasocial listener bonds that support authority and legitimacy claims for journalism. Our findings expand on our previous identification of the JAG format as a key element of explanatory-type daily deep dive podcasts. Here, we reveal how it operates through three key mechanisms: recurring self-referential speech that reinforces journalistic cultural belonging; intentional unpacking of the reporting process to reveal behind-the-scenes work; and the careful construction of journalists as subject-matter experts. Together, these mechanisms transform performative conversation into metajournalism, creating a space in which journalistic expertise is displayed and validated through colleague-to-colleague dialogue. We term this dynamic “intimate authority.” We argue that the JAG format capitalizes on podcasting’s affordances for intimacy, parasociality, and extended metajournalistic conversation to invite audiences into the news-making process while positioning journalists as credible experts and sense-makers. In doing so, it functions as a mechanism for establishing authority and legitimacy claims in digital media environments. As daily news podcasting becomes increasingly central to remediation efforts aimed at restoring trust in journalism, both legacy and independent news podcasters appear to be counting on the JAG format as a strategic response to concurrent crises of news avoidance and relevance.

1. Introduction

It was early 2017 when The New York Times podcast The Daily dropped its first episode, marking a before-and-after in podcast journalism. The 20 min “audio news report” (Barbaro, 2017) was a deep dive into a single news story—the nomination of a new Supreme Court judge—and featured a conversation between host Michael Barbaro and his two Times colleagues: Carl Hulse, whom Barbaro introduced as “the dean of congressional reporters,” and Adam Liptak, a former Times lawyer turned reporter and chief legal correspondent. The conversation often and expressly highlighted each reporter’s deep knowledge of the subject matter, professional credentials, and expertise. An article announcing the first Daily episode that was penned by Barbaro praised the new product as the epitome of a new form of podcast journalism. “This is how the news should sound,” it read (Barbaro, 2017). Indeed, The Daily quickly became the format to follow as newsrooms all around the globe emulated its style, now largely known as “the deep dive” news podcast (Newman et al., 2025).

Despite the relatively recent intersection of journalism and podcasting, podcast journalism has begun to take distinct shapes and remains an area of growth for news media globally, particularly among the younger and well-educated (Newman et al., 2025). While news podcasting remains a minority form of media consumption, the numbers reflect strong momentum in the two countries that concern this paper. In Australia, 52% of Australians now report listening to or watching at least one podcast every month (Commercial Radio & Audio (CRA) & Triton Digital, 2025), more than doubling from 25% in 2020. News is the most listened-to podcast genre in Australia, reaching over 4.66 million monthly listeners as of December 2025 (Commercial Radio & Audio (CRA) & Triton Digital, 2025), up from 3.8 million in the first half of 2024. In Canada, news was the most downloaded podcast genre for the April 2024 to March 2025 reporting period (Triton Digital, 2025), and monthly podcast consumption reached an all-time high of 46% of Canadian adults in 2025, representing the largest single-year jump on record (Signal Hill Insights, 2025). Since 2019, daily deep dives have been identified as one of four established news podcast categories in a proposed typology of news podcasts alongside brief news round-ups, extended chats and documentaries (Newman & Gallo, 2019; Newman, 2023). Daily deep dives have become a lucrative and well-established form of podcast journalism across media markets (Newman, 2023; Turvill, 2020). The format consistently tops charts of news podcasts in many countries, including the United States, Canada, Australia, Denmark, Norway, and Spain, among others (Newman, 2023), and has become a distinct production with its own identity and style (Martínez-Costa Pérez & Lus Gárate, 2019).

Notably, daily deep dives reward producers with high levels of audience engagement and loyalty from those seeking depth and explanation, with listeners playing several episodes per week and listening from beginning to end for the most part (Newman & Gallo, 2019). These podcasts are primarily produced by legacy-media brands and public service media, with some countries like the U.S. and Australia also showing strong commercial and independent networks, as well as digital-native startups, as leading producers (Robertson, 2025). All that said, even though major organizations are behind most of these products, news podcast listening overall remains a niche activity in most countries and is not a main source of news. Rather, it plays “a complementary role in people’s news diets,” as per the most recent Digital News Report (Robertson, 2025, p. 53).

For media producers and publishers, the importance of podcasting goes beyond publishing a successful series. From the outset, the daily deep dive format in particular has doubled as a news product and marketing device—Barbaro’s introduction of his colleagues as prestigious figures within The Times in that fateful first episode set the tone for the format’s inventive ways of luring audiences into the NYT brand with the promise of finding more expertise of the same caliber across its products. For that and other reasons, legacy-media brands have embraced podcasting in markets across the world, ushering in an era of news podcast mainstreaming that presents both great opportunities to revitalize journalism, such as conquering new (and paying) audiences and combating news avoidance (Perdomo & Lindgren, 2025) and potential pitfalls, such as the weaponization of intimacy and podcasting’s “expressive power” by nefarious actors, as Dowling’s work suggests (Dowling, 2024).

The mainstreaming of podcast journalism and the rise in popularity of daily deep dive podcasts in particular are occurring against a backdrop of increasing anxiety over threats to journalistic authority (Cheruiyot, 2022) and mounting news avoidance (Toff et al., 2023) across the globe. It is therefore a rich moment to examine how journalists, in particular those with the resources of strong media brands, are building claims to journalistic authority and legitimacy in one of news podcasting’s most successful formats, the daily deep dive.

This paper explores the daily deep dive podcast format in two similar but distinct media markets, Australia and Canada, through an aural qualitative analysis of four leading podcasts from each country. The theoretical framework draws from Matt Carlson’s work on both metajournalistic discourse and its potential for transforming journalistic practice (Carlson, 2016) and the relational nature of journalistic authority (Carlson, 2017). We also echo Dowling’s (2026) proposed approach for theorizing audio reporting. This study expands on our previous work, where we identified conversation as a core element of news podcasting and the JAG format as a key element of explanatory-type daily deep dive podcasts (Perdomo & Lindgren, 2025), to address the following research question:

How are journalists leveraging podcasting’s affordances to promote metajournalistic conversation and boost claims to journalistic authority and legitimacy?

Through a deep and rich analysis based on listening-first methods, our findings show that both legacy-media productions in Canada and independent and digital-native news podcasts in Australia are producing daily deep dive podcasts and are relying on journalist-to-journalist conversation to build authority and legitimacy claims by turning their performative conversations into works of metajournalism. They do this by using podcasting’s affordances of intimacy, parasociality and conversation through the conduit of what we called “the journalist-as-guest,” or JAG, in our previous work (Perdomo & Lindgren, 2025). We argue that, while colleague-to-colleague conversation has long been a staple of broadcast journalism, the format of these conversations takes on a particular shape in daily deep dive podcasts such as The Daily (US), The Decibel (Canada), and The Full Story (Aus), given that they intentionally elevate the status of journalists to guest experts and open space for key “ingredients” of authority and legitimacy claims—references to the guest experts’ belonging in the journalistic culture, explanations of the behind-the-scenes elements of the journalistic process, and space for the self-celebration of journalistic acumen and expertise.

The analysis and discussion center on highlighting how leading daily deep dive podcasts in each of the countries are capitalizing on this JAG device and critically engaging with what the benefits and pitfalls of this approach might be for news podcasting more broadly as the medium continues to rapidly evolve and navigate threats to its value—such as the rapid irruption of AI technologies into the space—and threats to journalism more broadly, such as increasing news avoidance and information pollution.

2. Literature Review

Contemporary scholarship increasingly recognizes that journalistic authority operates as a dynamic, relational construct rather than as an inherent institutional property. Carlson’s (2017) foundational work demonstrates that journalistic legitimacy emerges through ongoing negotiations between media professionals and their various publics, requiring constant validation and performance of credibility claims. This theoretical framework positions authority not as something journalists inherently possess, but as something that must be continuously earned and maintained through strategic practices.

The relational model of journalistic authority encompasses multiple dimensions of professional validation. Journalists establish credibility through repeating cultural practices (D. M. Ryfe, 2012), orientations, the development of recognizable news formats, and the circulation of personal narratives that reinforce their privileged position as information intermediaries (Carlson, 2017). When journalists engage in metajournalism, understood as journalism about journalism (Ogbebor, 2020) or journalistic discussions about the processes involved in the production of the news, they can reassure audiences about their credentials and bona fides as members of the journalistic culture. Metajournalism, therefore, can become an effective tool for building claims to journalistic authority (Carlson, 2017; Perdomo & Rodrigues-Rouleau, 2021).

This relational understanding of journalistic authority becomes particularly significant in digital media environments, with podcast journalism in general and the daily deep dive format specifically providing examples where journalists construct and perform their work in ways that listeners understand, in the words of Carlson, as “authoritative” and “legitimate” (Carlson, 2017).

The democratization of content creation and distribution in the past two decades has intensified competition for audience attention and trust, pushing journalists to develop new strategies for establishing and maintaining their authoritative voice in an increasingly crowded—and polluted—information landscape.

Our theoretical framework also engages with scholarship theorizing podcast journalism specifically. Dowling (2026) proposes three defining characteristics of podcast journalism: “Intimacy (manifested in personal narratives and parasocial relationships), reflexivity (evident in metajournalistic transparency and postmodern approaches to evidence), and democracy (leveraging progressive inclusivity or its oppositional countercurrents)” (p. 1). The author notes that any of these features may find variations or be more or less salient depending on the type of production, yet it is worth considering the three conventions as possible markers of what makes podcast journalism journalism.

2.1. Journalistic Authority and Podcasting

The digital transformation has fundamentally altered journalism’s epistemological foundations and professional practices. Traditionally, in the Anglo-American dominant model of journalism (Chalaby, 1996), journalists were positioned as authoritative gatekeepers who delivered information through top-down, one-to-many communication structures, but they have increasingly adopted the role of sense-makers and accepted that audiences play a more active role in making sense of the news. Journalism in the digital era, as Kovach and Rosenstiel argued in the early aughts, was suddenly well suited to “play the role of sense maker—to put information into context and to look for connections so that, as consumers, we can decide what the news means to us” (Kovach & Rosenstiel, 2010, online).

Scholars have found that journalists have oriented their style to provide more context and analysis in their reports (Fink & Schudson, 2013) and have embraced interpretation and analysis as part of their functions (Salgado et al., 2016). This re-orientation has amounted to an ontological transformation of journalism, as D. Ryfe (2019) argues.

In the rise of explanatory and interpretive journalism, journalists have still maintained the role of experts and gatekeepers not just in selecting and delivering information but also in making sense of the news story, thus adding another dimension to their authority. That said, other forms of contemporary journalism are experimenting with conceding more space to both sources and audiences in the process of making news—and making sense of it as well. This collaborative orientation is obvious in podcasting, often visible in the true crime genre (Witmer & Dowling, 2025).

Beyond this turn towards more explanatory and interpretive journalism, journalism in the digital era has also been marked by embracing transparency (Karlsson, 2010) and personal authenticity (Hayes et al., 2007) as mechanisms to build authority claims. In podcasting in particular, as Perdomo and Rodrigues-Rouleau (2021) found in their study of The New York Times podcast Caliphate, the podcast medium has transformed traditional journalistic transparency from occasional behind-the-scenes glimpses into journalism and core storytelling elements that serve at least two important purposes: projecting the journalistic culture (e.g., norms, values, and practices) to the public or projecting it inwardly, to the journalists themselves, as a transparency mechanism that serves to elevate journalistic authority (Perdomo & Rodrigues-Rouleau, 2021).

Podcast journalists now routinely include editorial discussions, ethical dilemmas, and process revelations as integral narrative components rather than peripheral additions (Lindgren, 2022, 2023; Perdomo & Rodrigues-Rouleau, 2021). This approach repositions traditionally hidden aspects of journalistic work as valuable content that can enhance rather than undermine professional credibility and, ultimately, authority. Dowling’s emerging theory of what makes podcast journalism journalism precisely echoes these kinds of studies by naming reflexivity as one of three key components of podcast journalism (Dowling, 2026).

Current literature lacks insights into the personal and professional values and standards shaping news podcasters themselves. Based on surveys with news podcasters in three Western European countries, Katzenberger et al. (2023) found them to be mostly male, middle-aged, and academically educated, often with no previous work experience as news reporters. They aspire to provide factual, informative content to their audiences and adhere to liberal values like education, diversity, and culture, but they appear to be less inclined to pursue “watchdog” functions (Katzenberger et al., 2023).

2.2. Podcast Journalism as Remediation

Podcast journalism is being produced amidst a phenomenon of deliberate news avoidance, which has emerged as a critical challenge facing contemporary journalism. Systematic tracking by the Reuters Institute reveals concerning trends in audience engagement. The phenomenon extends beyond simple disinterest, reflecting deeper structural challenges, including time poverty and deliberate mental health protection strategies among audiences (Toff et al., 2023).

The 2025 Digital News Report shows that trust in news remained stable at 40% for the third consecutive year across 48 markets, representing a significant decline from pre-pandemic levels. It also reveals that traditional news media struggle to connect with much of the public, with declining engagement, low trust, and stagnating digital subscriptions. These trends reflect journalism’s broader crisis of relevance in an increasingly saturated and fragmented media ecosystem, where traditional news organizations compete not only with each other but also with entertainment, social media, algorithmic content-curation systems, and, more recently, content generated by AI. Added to these challenges, the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence technologies in audio production, spearheaded by companies such as Inception Point AI, the producer of thousands of AI podcasts, risks diluting the value of podcasting as a whole. In this context, podcast journalism can be seen as an antidote, or a “remedy,” for journalism’s ailments. Mehendale and Jaggi (2023) make the argument for news podcasting as remediation in their study based in India, where they conceptualize news podcasting as a form of “slow journalism” whose fundamental function and greatest promise lie in addressing systemic failures of journalism.

Several recent studies on listeners of news podcasts also position podcasting as potentially remedial to dwindling trust in journalism. Bird (2023) notes that listeners in Australia are “discerning” media consumers who value and intentionally seek news podcasts for both convenience and content—and not simply as a distraction or entertainment. Similarly, Chan-Olmsted and Wang (2022) found that American podcast journalism listeners tend to seek superior content value based on their desire for trustworthy information and are also led to it by platform logics. Whittle (2024), also looking at US podcast consumers, notes that the high production values of daily news podcasts are a key driver of listenership. These studies all suggest that podcast journalism audiences appreciate professionally produced programming with high production values featuring experienced journalists, which appears to increase trust in journalism.

The short history of daily news podcasts itself reveals an origin story based on a desire to remediate a downward path for journalism. It is no coincidence that a leading format of daily news podcasts today, the daily deep dive, is largely the product of a traditional newspaper (The New York Times). The Times’ podcast The Daily became an ideal product through which journalists could build new claims to credibility and authority for the newspaper’s legacy brand, and now the format has been widely adopted by major newspaper brands the world over. Recent studies from the US (Miller et al., 2022) and Spain (Legorburu et al., 2026; García de Torres et al., 2025), to name only a few, have looked more closely at this newspaper-to-audio production evolution, showing that podcasting is having a significant impact on daily news production. Miller and colleagues note, for example, that immersive discussions in daily deep dive podcasts have opened the door for empathy and intimacy, but the format still holds on to “journalistic ethics and aesthetics” (Miller et al., 2022, p. 131). Lindgren (2023), for her part, found that award-winning, newspaper-led podcasts in the UK tend to feature “aspects of reporters building in metacommentary about the journalistic production process,” which demonstrates an “emerging genre convention of self-reflexivity in journalistic podcasts” that helps audiences become better acquainted with—and by extension more trusting of—journalism as a whole (p. 713).

2.3. Intimacy, Parasocial Relationships, and Conversation

Podcast journalism’s inclination towards transparency and authenticity has been supercharged by the intimate nature of podcasting, with narrative strategies that have capitalized on the emotionality of listening (Lindgren, 2022). As an intimate form of journalism, podcasting continues to reach new audiences by experimenting with storytelling approaches and journalistic formats (Bird & Lindgren, 2024). Meanwhile, much has been said on podcasting as a natural conduit for parasocial relationships. Schlütz and Hedder (2021) argue that listeners expect the podcast host to share personal aspects of themselves and that the host can be considered an acquaintance or even a friend. Heiselberg and Have (2023) go a step further by arguing that the “ability to invite listeners into a parasocial relationship is a key quality of podcast hosts” (p. 635). Zuraikat (2020) highlights podcasting’s ability to generate parasocial relations, characterized by a deep sense of intimacy and authenticity between hosts and listeners.

This power of intimate connection is now allowing news podcasters to invite audiences into a sense-making process, especially when it comes to conversation-based podcasts, as found in our recent analysis of news podcasts from Canada and Australia, where we noted:

The co-creation of news understanding, which has always been part of radio’s relationship with the listener (who brings their own understanding to a story), appears to have entered a new dimension with podcasting, as the freer format invites the listener to “earwitness” the very processes of journalism, including the process of sense-making, happening through conversation (Perdomo & Lindgren, 2025, p. 41).

In this analysis, we identified the act of “earwitnessing,” or bearing witness to a soundscape that the listener has willingly entered into (Rae et al., 2019), as a particularly powerful affordance of podcasting—that is, creating space for audiences to develop their own interpretation of both journalism and news stories in the intimacy of their listening experience (Perdomo & Lindgren, 2025).

In 2011, This American Life’s radio host Ira Glass called for journalists to “sound like human beings on the air” rather than “news robots speaking their stentorian news-speak” (Glass, 2011, online). Glass argued that adopting more human narrators would help fact-based journalism compete with opinion-driven content, a prediction that has proven remarkably prescient in the podcast era’s privileging of intimate, subjective storytelling approaches. The popularity of narrative and conversational news podcasts, such as the extended chat format (Newman & Gallo, 2020), suggests that Glass was right that audiences would appreciate a different type of audio journalism. As we have recently argued, conversational styles in particular are becoming a central element of podcast journalism (Perdomo & Lindgren, 2025).

In his emerging theory of podcast journalism, Dowling (2026) connects the concepts of intimacy, parasocial relationships, and conversation to make sense of how they work together:

Perhaps more than any other feature of the podcast medium, intimacy is understood as its signature convention by scholars and practitioners alike. This foundational characteristic is immediately apparent in the informal delivery and candor of hosts, who routinely leverage it to foster parasocial audience bonds, especially through metajournalistic discourse. Transparency is virtually inseparable from intimacy insofar as it is integral to self-reflexivity (Dowling, 2026, p. 4).

What the literature on podcast journalism has not examined yet, and what this paper intends to examine, is how intimacy, parasocial relationships, and conversation—all affordances of podcasting as a medium—can be and are being leveraged to strengthen claims to journalistic authority and legitimacy in the daily deep dive podcast, in particular through the figure of the JAG.

3. Methodology

This study examines eight news podcasts, four from Canada and four from Australia, in the deep dive/explanatory category according to the Reuters Digital News Report’s typology of news podcasts (Newman, 2023). The sample was kept intentionally small to allow for deep and rich analysis. It was also selected to see how popular podcasts in this category from two media markets that share similarities but remain distinct might compare to one another, though the scope of this analysis was not necessarily to create a comparative framework. There is an emergent body of work examining daily news podcasts in single-country studies, often focused on the US but also in large media markets such as Spain and India. This sample adds Canada and Australia to this growing literature. Both Canada and Australia have strong public broadcasters—the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, respectively—that are active participants in the podcasting market. The sample of podcasts was selected intentionally by both researchers as representative examples of the popular daily deep dive format, and they were available through Spotify and Apple. The resulting sample showed that popular podcasts in this category in Canada tended to be produced by legacy broadcasters and newspaper-brand publishers, while the sample from Australia showed more offerings from independent and digital-native producers.

In total, we selected 24 podcast episodes—three episodes for each podcast—dated August 2024 (with the exception of Canada’s This Matters, which had no episodes in August; in this case, the sample is from July 2024). The podcasts have various types of producers behind them, including national broadcasters (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and Australian Broadcasting Corporation), digital media publishers/newspapers (Toronto Star and Guardian Australia), podcast networks such as the Frequency Network, and independents such as The Daily Aus. All of these podcasts self-identify as offering journalistic content.

The study honors the aurality of the medium, positioning listening as a core analytical method for examining how sonic elements interact to produce podcasting’s characteristic intimacy and parasocial listener bonds. There is an increasing number of studies adopting this analytical approach (Bird & Lindgren, 2024; Lindgren, 2016, 2023; McHugh, 2022; Perdomo & Rodrigues-Rouleau, 2021), heralded by Spinelli and Dann (2019). They employed close analytical listening to podcasts as a key method of textual analysis to understand how podcast episodes are constructed and consumed, how literary devices are used, and why podcasts are made. Like Spinelli and Dann, we employed a close listening process to critically dissect podcast samples in order to understand the role of language (who was speaking, with whom and what were they saying), audio components (on-location recordings, studio conversations, music, and stings), narrative development (editing and story structure), and, importantly, listener/researcher responses and to examine how audio elements were “deployed to invite ways of listening meanings” (Spinelli & Dann, 2019, p. 5). This approach allows researchers to hear, or to earwitness, the elements of the aural artifact—the volume, sounds, silences, cadences, and rhythms that make the whole soundscape—something that would be completely absent from a text-based analysis.

The method consisted of one initial round of individual listening to the audio samples, with both researchers taking notes, journaling through a shared memo function, and creating codes organically as they emerged. Transcripts were only introduced in a second round, with both researchers using the transcripts to apply codes while listening to the episodes. We emphasize here that the coding always occurred while listening, as the researchers intentionally sought to code based on the aural experience rather than the textual product.

The two authors first listened individually and then compared notes to manage inherent subjectivity in a close analytical listening method. Both authors are experienced podcast listeners and researchers, thereby bringing a comprehensive understanding of podcast content and production practices. This process produced a considered, critical, and systematic form of listening, with findings documented at each stage to ensure rigor and transparency.

This also meant that the researchers engaged in some co-listening sessions to discuss findings.

This intentional listening as an embodied experience allowed the researchers to experience the unique elements of news delivery that podcasting affords to audiences, such as vocal expressions, tone, laughter, music merging with the script, and other sounds that have significance in the podcast output but are not captured in transcripts, thus making a tangible difference in the analysis. As an emerging analytical framework in podcast studies, reflexive close analytical listening offers researchers a method of analysis that also parallels the experience that audiences have when listening to podcasts—that is, embodying the earwitnessing experience.

After an iterative process of listening and discussions, the researchers established a list of codes generated from the close analytical listening. These codes are related to items such as audio components—music, stings, and SFX (sound effects)—scripting, presentation styles, hosts, etc. The coding process identified the need to hone in on a new significant term for a journalistic role common in podcast journalism, which we defined as JAG, Journalism-as-Guest (Perdomo & Lindgren, 2025). The coding process led by listening could yield codes that became significant findings, such as the number of times a podcast host or the JAG used self-referential speech as journalists or how many times the interactions between the host and JAG allowed for a natural conversation to feel unscripted. They also show the use of self-aggrandizing language or instances where journalists are elevating each other’s credentials and reiterating their personas as journalists by using industry lingo—observations that would prove important in the study’s findings.

Table 1. Podcasts and episodes selected for the sample.

	Daily Deep Dive Podcast	Producer	Episode and Sample Date (2024)	Short Episode Name
CAN	The Decibel	The Globe and Mail	August 16—Why aren’t there more public toilets?	The Decibel, Ep. 1
			August 19—Why the condo slump matters for the housing crisis	The Decibel, Ep. 2
			August 22—The killing of a multimillion-dollar fraudster	The Decibel, Ep. 3
	Frontburner	CBC	August 16—Cracks in Canada’s temporary worker program	Frontburner, Ep. 1
			August 19—Will Ukraine’s attacks inside Russia pay off?	Frontburner, Ep. 2
			August 22—Drugs, abortion, taxes: Where Canadians stand in divisive issues	Frontburner, Ep. 3
	This Matters	Toronto Star	July 17—After the Trump assassination attempt	This Matters, Ep. 1
			July 18—Moments after the attempted assassination of Trump, conspiracy theories went viral…	This Matters, Ep. 2
			July 19—Trump’s Triumphant Convention (and tedious speech)	This Matters, Ep. 3
	The Big Story	Frequency Network	August 26—Cracking the mystery of long COVID	The Big Story, Ep. 1
			August 27—When a DIY approach to safe supply ends in arrests	The Big Story, Ep. 2
			August 28—How health officials solved a deadly year-long listeria outbreak	The Big Story, Ep. 3
AUS	The Full Story	The Guardian Australia	August 16—How Bangladesh’s longest-serving leader was toppled by student protests	The Full Story, Ep. 1
			August 19—Wieambilla inquest: what motivated the Trains?	The Full Story, Ep. 2
			August 22—Newsroom edition: Peter Dutton is ‘flooding the zone’ with distractions	The Full Story, Ep. 3
	The Daily Aus	(Independent)	August 16—The push to ban gambling ads	The Daily Aus, Ep. 1
			August 19—Ever missed a deadline? So have the Liberals	The Daily Aus, Ep. 2
			August 22—What’s ahead in the U.S election?	The Daily Aus, Ep. 3
	The Morning Edition	Nine Entertainment	August 16—Inside politics: Dutton goes hard on visas for Palestinians	The Morning Edition, Ep. 1
			August 19—What life in Gaza is like while Australia debates visas	The Morning Edition, Ep. 2
			August 22—Trump and Harris finally reveal their economic policies	The Morning Edition, Ep. 3
	ABC News Daily	ABC	August 16—How Harris has Trump rattled	ABC News Daily, Ep. 1
			August 19—Alan Kohler on helping the ‘forever’ renters	ABC News Daily, Ep. 2
			August 22—The astronauts stuck in space	ABC News Daily, Ep. 3

below summarizes our sample.

4. Findings

Following the now-common daily deep dive format, all the episodes in our sample featured conversations on a single news item between the host and an expert. The vast majority of the episodes included a JAG as the expert, someone either from the same newsroom as the host or from another news organization. In all, 19 of the 24 episodes featured a JAG, and one featured a subject-matter expert who was also a newspaper columnist.

Ranging from 15 to 49 min in length, all episodes featuring a JAG revolve entirely around an amicable colleague-to-colleague conversation that aims to provide comprehensive context on a news story and to leave listeners with a deep understanding of the issue discussed. In our analysis, we heard a conversational tone that is professional but cordial, friendly but not overly informal, informative but not overwhelming, and factual but not too technical. It is neither the “chumcast” of other popular podcast formats, such as the extended chats often relying on celebrity hosts, nor the dry, just-the-facts affair that defines daily news round-up podcasts (Perdomo & Lindgren, 2025). The setup is intentionally journalistic, with both host and JAG appearing to sit comfortably within the confines of a newsroom audio booth—invariably, all these episodes are recorded in a studio. Journalistic jargon flows freely amongst them—but always with the intention of keeping the door ajar for the audience to listen in.

Our analysis shows that the JAG format is built on at least three significant components. First, recurring self-referential speech, where the host and JAG reinforce their belonging in journalistic culture by talking about themselves as journalists. Second, intentionally and reflexively unpacking the journalistic process, revealing the behind-the-scenes of how the JAG produced their reporting. And third, a careful construction of the JAG as an expert, which allows the JAG to reinforce both their journalistic and subject-matter expertise, guided by the host’s questioning. These three components of the JAG format amount to a clever capitalization of the affordances of the podcast medium, in particular its capacity for intimacy, parasocial connections and conversation, to build claims to journalistic legitimacy and authority. The conversation amounts to a performance that helps build a relatable form of intimate authority.

Below, we offer precise examples of these three components of the JAG conversation. In the discussion, we expand on the implications this device has for our understanding of how journalists are building authority and legitimacy claims in podcasting.

4.1. Self-Reference

In JAG-based episodes, both guest and host often refer to their belonging amongst journalists, as their conversations evoke a camaraderie that highlights comfortable and intimate knowledge of the journalistic milieu. The listener is invited to earwitness how these two people relate to one another as members of the same professional culture as they converse in a common language. The following examples illustrate what we hear at play.

JAG David Bergman notes about his experience reporting in Bangladesh in one episode of the Australian podcast The Guardian Full Story, “when you began to write about corruption or human rights violations (…) it was very difficult to be a journalist who wanted to conflict with the government or be dissenting from the official narrative.” (Full Story, Ep. 1).

The Daily Aus, a social-first Australian news outlet that specifically targets a young audience aged 18 – 35, is the only independent podcast in the study sample. The two hosts are journalists who take turns playing the roles of host and guest. In one episode, Zara Seidler connects personally with a story about a local political party that missed a crucial deadline. “This is such a funny story because, as a journalist, I can definitely relate to the stress of deadlines,” she says (The Daily Aus, Ep. 2).

In an episode of This Matters, the daily podcast by the Canadian newspaper the Toronto Star, both host and JAG make references to their standing as journalists. Richard Warnica, the JAG, discusses reporting on the 2024 Republican presidential convention in Milwaukee—“I was in the media center ‘cause it was pretty early in the night, watching it on TV and filing a piece. (…) I think there certainly was a feeling among reporters here in Milwaukee that he [Joe Biden] was going to quit; that this had become untenable. I talked to a bunch of American reporters” (This Matters, Ep. 3).

Host Edward Keenan, a former Washington bureau chief, also speaks of his own credentials—“I’ll just say the first time I ever was in the same room with Joe Biden, the first time I met him in person, was in New Hampshire. Everybody then was as sure as they could be, including me and I, I wrote it at the time, that Joe Biden’s political career appeared to be over.” (This Matters, Ep. 3).

Self-references like these appear throughout the episode, reinforcing the journalists’ credentials through their past experiences. Their conversation also stresses the fact that both have been bearing witness and imparting first-hand accounts of significant historical events, an important marker of belonging to the journalistic culture that serves to legitimize their work (Perdomo & Rodrigues-Rouleau, 2021).

This device, noting the JAG bearing witness, is a recurrent element in the podcast episodes. In one episode of ABC News Daily, a production by the Australian national broadcaster, the JAG is senior political correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, Molly Ball, who highlights her experience covering Trump. “I have now been watching Donald Trump as a political candidate for the better part of a decade,” she says (ABC News Daily, Ep. 1).

Reporter Mariya Postelnyak, the JAG in an episode of The Decibel by the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail, unspools a long investigation into the killing of an alleged criminal as she brings the audience to where it all began.

“I arrived at this large suburban plaza. There was a gym, a daycare, there were churches on almost every corner, um, and some office buildings. And the first person I immediately saw was a daycare worker.”

(The Decibel, Ep. 3)

Examples like these abound in the podcasts sampled. “When I was on the Downtown East Side and I was interviewing drug users…” says JAG Omar Mouallem, a filmmaker and contributing editor at Maclean’s magazine, during one episode of The Big Story (Canada, Ep. 2). In Frontburner, by the Canadian national broadcaster, host Stephanie Skenderis introduces the JAG as “Tim Mak. He’s based in Kyiv, where he covers the war in his newsletter” (Frontburner, Ep. 2).

Skenderis and Mak engage in another form of journalistic self-reference by discussing the names of other publications and playing news clips from different news outlets throughout their conversation.

[JAG] Yeah. I mean, The Counteroffensive—the publication I run—and Politico did a poll trying to understand the effects of American military aid on interest and willingness and support for conscription in Ukraine.

(Frontburner, Ep. 2)

The mention of other publications or news programming happens often, including in the episode of This Matters (Canada) where Warnica, the JAG, mentions several journalists and news organizations, including “an Atlantic article I was reading,” the journalist Mark Halperin reporting that Joe Biden was “definitely dropping out,” and “The [New York] Times,” which “has been much more cautious in its reporting” of the same news” (This Matters, Ep. 3).

Overall, the format allows the JAG to reinforce their own journalistic credentials and signal their own relevance while also reinforcing the relevance of the news organization they belong to and, by extension, of journalism itself.

In one episode of This Matters (Canada) featuring JAG Alex Boyd, a politics reporter, the conversation revolves around conspiracy theories surrounding the assassination attempt against then-candidate Donald Trump. Boyd defends journalism while asserting her own place in the culture.

“The most popular belief was that the mainstream media is manipulating the information it puts out. And again, that’s something that I would—we’re not perfect, we make mistakes, but you know, the fact that we’re manipulating things, that’s something that I would push back against.”

(This Matters, Ep. 2)

In all, opportunities for self-reference appear as a clear affordance of the podcasting medium, allowing journalists to present themselves as members in good standing of the journalistic culture by reminding audiences of their credentials, access to the frontlines of news events, and even their power of influence. This is the case when senior finance reporter Alan Kohler is introduced in one episode of ABC News Daily (Australia) as an expert to present his “ideas to save renters” during what’s described as the country’s rental crisis (ABC News Daily, Ep. 2). Kohler, a veteran journalist, mentions how he has asked government officials why they do not use 30-year fixed mortgage rates like those available in the United States.

When I’ve raised it with the government as to why you don’t do it, they say, “Oh, well the Reserve Bank would hate it because they wouldn’t be able to control the economy as well by moving interest rates.” (ABC News Daily, Ep. 2).

The fact that Kohler, as a journalist, speaks with the government reinforces his credentials as someone of influence, another valuable strategy to signal his own journalistic legitimacy.

Overall, these examples demonstrate the intentional use of self-reference as a mechanism to reiterate the position of both the host and JAG as members of the journalistic culture, thus supporting the claim to journalistic authority, as noted in Perdomo and Rodrigues-Rouleau (2021): “The idea is that audiences’ understanding of the journalistic culture will translate into greater respect for their work and will to concede epistemic authority” (p. 5).

4.2. Revealing the Journalistic Process

In his emerging theory of podcast journalism, Dowling notes that “podcast self-reflexivity is arguably the most recognizable and central of its practices. Broadly conceived, podcast reflexivity calls attention to the process of its own production and invites the listener to ruminate on reportorial dilemmas with the host” (Dowling, 2026, p. 9). Our findings reveal that host-JAG exchanges facilitate this form of self-reflexivity, though not necessarily about the production of the podcast episode. Rather, the conversation allows the JAG to reveal details about the reporting process behind the news story. While Section 4.1 highlighted instances of self-reference in our analysis, here we highlight examples of podcast self-reflexivity that help make visible the journalistic process, with the guest journalists often speaking about their own reporting activities, investigative methods, or how and who they reached out to while working on their news story.

These kinds of revelations include phrases uttered by various JAGs about who they talked to for their stories:

“I’ve spoken to experienced condo developers”—Rachelle Younglai, real estate reporter.

(The Decibel, Canada, Ep. 2)

“The director of the Public Health Agency of Canada’s outbreak management has said to me that they got lucky in this case”—Hannah Alberga, health reporter.

(The Big Story, Canada, Ep. 3)

“This is something that when I talk to voters, they’re very worried about. They’re very concerned that the system feels so hot and so volatile”—Molly Ball, senior political correspondent.

(ABC News Daily, Australia, Ep. 1)

In The Morning Edition, a podcast by the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age (Australia), host Samantha Selinger-Morris starts a conversation with Oxfam policy lead Bushwa Khalidi, speaking from the West Bank, by providing some transparency about the source she has invited as a guest: “Bushwa, you are based in the West Bank, you are there right now, but you do have family in Gaza. So can you please tell us a bit about your family? Who is there?” (Ep. 2, 19 August 2024).

Sometimes, the JAGs talk about the reporting software they use. “One of the tools that I use as a reporter, it’s called CrowdTangle,” says Alex Boyd, the JAG in one episode of This Matters (Canada, Ep. 2). Other times, they may explain how they came to report the story they are discussing, as reporter Richard Warnica does here.

“I had not initially planned to come until Wednesday. I was gonna come and write about who the vice president was and write about Trump’s speech. But then obviously the assassination attempt changed that, and then we rescheduled everything.”

(This Matters, Ep. 3)

In The Guardian Australia’s podcast The Full Story, the then editor-in-chief, Lenore Taylor, invites the audience to peek into what journalists call the daily news conference or editorial meeting. Taylor reveals her own skepticism about a news story idea proposed by the rural and regional editor, who wanted to write a column about her war against pigeons.

(Lenore Taylor, JAG) And I thought this sounded like not a particularly Guardian idea and I wasn’t hugely enthused. However, then she wrote the column and it was, actually, a really great column, and I now have much more sympathy problems with pigeons.

(Full Story, Ep. 3)

These are only some of the several examples of instances where we heard the host-JAG dynamic revealing aspects of the reporting process. These instances of transparency and self-reflexivity can be understood as strategically deployed tools to build claims to journalistic authority and are common in podcast journalism (Dowling, 2026; Perdomo & Rodrigues-Rouleau, 2021). By taking the time to reveal parts of the reporting process, the JAG format performs the crucial role of bringing audiences into the behind-the-scenes of journalism in a way that celebrates the journalists’ own perspicacity, skill, access to sources, and so on. This serves as both an effective narrative tool and a legitimizing mechanism that elevates the reporters’ individual work and credentials. Moreover, making journalism part of the podcast episode serves to elevate legitimacy and authority claims for the newsrooms the journalists represent and for journalism more broadly. Ostensibly, these instances of transparency seem to say to the listening ear, “Look at all the work that happens behind the scenes of making a news story; not everyone can do it”.

4.3. The Journalist as Expert

In the dominant Anglo-American model, the figure of the “expert source” remains an important element in contemporary notions of trustworthy journalism, understanding that journalists, insofar as they are generalists, rely on recognizable experts (e.g., doctors, pollsters, economists, etc.) to build comprehensive and credible news stories (Albæk, 2011).

In our analysis, we found that the JAG format in daily deep dive podcasts is affording a platform for specialized reporters to reignite their prestige and significance. The host-JAG emerges here as an ideal vehicle to celebrate the specialized reporter, with the JAG elevated to the figure of the expert who is brought in to share their knowledge and help others, including the journalist-host, make sense of complex news stories.

In the youth-focused podcast The Daily Aus, host/guest Zara Seidler provides policy analysis and a historical overview of the Australian television industry in one of the episodes.

“I do think it’s interesting exploring the media industry’s perspective a little bit more because a lot of free to air channels, so think of your [channel] Nines and your Sevens, a lot of people are saying that they are really quite reliant on the advertising money coming from gambling companies and we know that it’s not controversial to say that TV is a dying industry.”

(The Daily Aus, Ep. 1)

Episode after episode, we hear how, championed as an expert-in-residence, the JAG is put in a position where their credentials are celebrated, the importance of their reporting work is amplified, and their role as sense-makers is elevated. The way in which hosts frame their questions to the JAGs, for example, gives them a wide berth to provide explanatory, expert responses. The following interchange between host Samantha Selinger-Morris and international and political editor Peter Hartcher discussing the US election on the Australian podcast The Morning Edition provides a case in point:

(Samantha) So can you walk me through that?

(Peter) Oh, yes. Well, the way I’ve put it, Samantha, is that the two candidates, Harris and Trump, both have entered a magical kingdom where nobody has to pay for anything. And governments can just borrow as much as they want on the national credit card.

(The Morning Edition, Ep. 3)

The “can you walk me through that” question hands over the reins to Hartcher to showcase his expertise on US national debt, which he details in numbers over the next minute of the conversation.

Later in that episode, Hartcher continues to showcase his US expertise by detailing the expected impacts of then-candidate Trump’s proposed trade tariffs.

“You’re getting to 90 to 100 percent, a doubling of prices from everything from China. This is revolutionary, Samantha, and would create an immediate price hike in the price of products offered in the U.S.”

Financial expert and journalist Alan Kohler also provides expert economic analysis as a JAG on the ABC News Daily.

“25 years ago, before the year 2000, the house price to income ratio was between three and four times [the] incomes. From the year 2000, house prices started rising at twice the rate that they had been going up. So, house prices and incomes had been rising at roughly the same rate…”

(ABC News Daily Ep. 2)

Indeed, the host plays a crucial role in constructing this expert persona for the JAG, highlighting the importance of conversation to this authority-building dynamic. Their exchanges veer into the performative, with their tone remaining cordial—sometimes they insert jokes—but still above the freewheeling or unstructured chat that is displayed in other podcast formats. One conversation about drug recovery programs in an episode of The Big Story (Canada) shows how a prompt by the host can elicit an expert response from the JAG.

(Jordan Heath Rawlings—Host) I wanna ask a question that I, I think a lot of people have when we talk about safe supply, which is, is ‘safe’ the right term? Are there really safe versions of things like heroin and fentanyl and that kind of stuff?

(Omar Mouallem—filmmaker and journalist—JAG) This term itself, like so many terms in the addictions recovery treatment world, they can be loaded, charged. You can often tell where people are ideologically by the terms that they use. You know, some people prefer safer supply. You will often hear people in government will prefer this term because it alludes to the sense that like drugs are inherently toxic and therefore there is no such thing as a safe supply. It can only be safer. The BC government has, because of the diminishing popularity of safe supply programs, they’ve moved entirely to the original term, which was ‘pharmaceutical alternatives.’

(The Big Story, Ep. 2)

Other JAGs mix their subject-matter expertise with their own opinions, like in the episode of This Matters (Canada), where political correspondent Richard Warnica discusses the Republican National Convention:

I have a theory that part of what is happening is that Joe Biden became president when Covid was still going on, right? You know, the acute phase, the worst part of that 2020 pandemic was still happening, but the pandemic era lasted well into his presidency. And I think a lot of the nostalgia for Trump is actually nostalgia for the world before Covid.

(This Matters, Ep. 3)

Similarly, towards the end of an episode of The Decibel (Canada), host Menaka Raman-Wilms seeks the JAG’s opinion on the story they have just discussed. “I guess I’m just wondering, after all the work you’ve done untangling all of the details here, what do you make of this whole situation and everything that’s happened?” (The Decibel, Ep. 3). This question grants Postelnyak the last word on the story—what it all means.

(…) There were so many opportunities along the way to stop this guy. But he was able to get away time and time again. There were the courts, there were regulators like the Law Society. All of them had an opportunity to make an impact in preventing him from perpetrating his fraud. I think it’s incredibly sad that what brought his alleged criminal career to light was this tragic shooting that happened.

(The Decibel, Ep. 3)

These examples illustrate how, by centering the journalist as the guest expert, the JAG format affords space for the journalist to speak of themselves and of their work. Different from the extended chat formats of podcasting, where round-table-type discussions lacking much of a hierarchical structure are the norm, here the interview format helps shine light on the guest as the ultimate expert, therefore signaling to the audience who is in possession of epistemic authority (Carlson, 2017). Notably, we hear language in some of these episodes that can veer into the self-celebratory and self-aggrandizing, a performance that serves only to underline the strategic use of the JAG conduit towards building authority and legitimacy.

5. Discussion—Building Authority Through Intimacy, Parasociality, and Conversation

Inviting a journalist to discuss the news of the day is hardly a novelty. Journalists have been featured as guests on television and radio news for decades, with cable news and current affairs radio relying on reporters coming into the studio to provide updates. Yet our analysis found the JAG approach is a particularly compelling element of podcast journalism, specifically given that the format is based on situating the journalist-guest as an expert in a conversational interview, which differs from the free-flowing extended chat format. In the daily deep dive, the peculiarity of elevating the status of a journalist as an expert guest is significant because it provides the conduit to metajournalistic conversation. The listener enters a colleague-to-colleague dialogic dance that informs, entertains, and illuminates not only a news story but also the journalistic craft. The listener is invited to confirm that these two people have the credentials and authority to relay the news story. The JAG conduit to building these authority claims is only possible thanks to podcasting’s unique affordances. As Dowling notes, the “foundational characteristic” of intimacy in podcasting is “immediately apparent in the informal delivery and candor of hosts, who routinely leverage it to foster parasocial audience bonds, especially through metajournalistic discourse” (Dowling, 2026, p. 4).

Each of the elements of the JAG format discussed in our findings—self-referential speech, instances where the journalistic process is revealed, and elevating the journalist as the expert—is rendered possible by the affordances of podcasting as a medium.

Self-referential exchanges are aided by intimacy, expressed here in the intimate space that both host and JAG create in speaking of their own world; parasocial relationships, developed here by directly addressing the listeners, inviting them into that particular world of journalism; and conversation, carefully constructed as the medium through which these strategies are delivered. The same occurs with the second element, revealing the journalistic process. This strategy is made possible by the intimacy of the moment in which the audience is led into the behind-the-scenes of reporting a story through metajournalistic conversation. The parasocial bond continues to strengthen through this invitation to see behind the curtain, and it is all possible thanks to the well-calibrated conversation between hosts directed at listeners, especially guided by the host’s prompts—how did you do this? What did you have to do to obtain this information? Finally, it is only through intimacy and the securing of that parasocial bond that the JAG can finally be reified as the expert, to complete the strategy of authority building. It is indeed a moment of intimate authority, because its basis relies on the strength of that parasocial bond forged during each episode.

Conversation-based news delivery formats can certainly be found in radio and television offerings—from conversations between hosts in the newsroom and correspondents out in the field to the now overused round table setups with journalists and pundits in cable news formats—but the particularly personal experience of podcast consumption brings this engagement to a much deeper level, especially because the conversation is rooted in a metajournalistic disposition, thus building that intimate-authority experience.

As the literature on parasocial relationships shows, listeners expect the host to share personal aspects of themselves, and audiences can see hosts as acquaintances or even friends (Schlütz & Hedder, 2021). Hosts and journalists sharing experiences of doing journalism offers an invitation for audiences to feel more at ease as they better understand the making of the story while also building a connection with the reporters. It is useful here to note the difference between private and personal, with all analyzed news podcast hosts and journalists adopting a degree of personability while maintaining a highly professional persona. This is, for example, illustrated by a conversation in The Full Story podcast between the host and The Guardian Australia’s then editor-in-chief, Lenore Taylor, about proposed structural reforms to aged care in Australia. Taylor, as JAG, notes how the topic is relevant to her personally by using the inclusive word ”us” here: “I mean, that’s close to home for a lot of us who are dealing with aging relatives” (The Full Story Ep. 3). Yet, she does not elaborate or go too far into the personal.

An important effect of using a listening-first methodology for this study was reflecting on how, gradually, as host and JAG maintain their well-performed conversations, the listener witnesses an intimate-sounding chat while at the same time being invited into a process of meaning- and sense-making that eventually persuades them that these authoritative figures know what they are talking about. It is thanks to the intimate nature of podcasts and that power to forge parasocial bonds that daily deep dive podcasts allow audiences to enter a safe space where they can form their own thoughts about a particular news story without the pressure of discussing it out loud or having to contribute to it. The experience evokes the power of learning through listening—the power of “passive” listening—which is not passive at all because the audience is being afforded an invisible space to co-create the sense-making with the hosts. And while parasocial relationships between podcast hosts and audiences can provide persuasive powers, which make the podcasts a “powerful tool to inform and educate” (Schlütz & Hedder, 2021, p. 467), the fact that so much of these host/JAG conversations is about journalism itself is what makes the authority-building claims most intriguing in these podcasts.

The format’s ability to make authority claims feel intimate suggests that podcasting’s greatest contribution to journalism may be unlocking the power of conversation to rebuild—even remediate—audience relationships through transparency and intimacy while maintaining professional standards.

It is important to note, however, that while the format invites those parasocial relationships, there remains a level of control and gatekeeping on the part of the producers. It is worth mentioning that the daily deep dive is offered against the backdrop of millions of other similar conversation-based podcasts that may have nothing to do with journalism at all, and therefore the illusion of that parasocial relationship—that invitation for audiences to earwitness the conversation—finds its limits in the need for journalists to build their authority claims. The JAG has provided a conduit for this, as shown in our study.

Certainly, there is a performative dimension to these self-serving colleague-to-colleague conversations. As is always the case in radio or television, conversations occur for the purpose of sounding like a conversation between two people for the benefit of the audience—the third person “present” in the exchange. That person, however, remains on the other side of an invisible boundary. Whether the daily deep dive podcasts transcend this performative act or not remains open for discussion. On the one hand, as we have argued, the intimate act of listening means the audience is invited into the conversation and given space to co-create the meaning of that conversation while at the same time given a door into the meta-level of journalistic procedures. On the other hand, one could argue that the calculated construction of these conversations means the journalists retain their traditional boundaries and engage in sense-making not with, but only for their audiences.

6. Conclusions

The growing popularity of daily deep dive news podcasts presents an opportunity to better understand how journalists may be exploring new ways of building claims to authority and legitimacy. Our research suggests the JAG format may be emerging as one of the most effective ways to build such claims by exploring the power of reflexive metajournalistic conversations. Indeed, our analysis suggests the JAG is now a staple of daily deep dive podcasts, with 19 of the 24 episodes in our own sample including a JAG, which merits further study. In a medium with low barriers to entry and massive amounts of content, the daily deep dive format, in general, appears as an intentionally linear, calculated, and well-performed conversation that allows creators to lead an argument and create the image of professional journalism. It is no coincidence that most podcasts, including a JAG, are produced by well-established news outlets with deep pockets and producers who have something to gain from featuring their in-house “talent”.

Our paper describes at least three ways in which the JAG format permits journalists to elevate their standing using self-referential speech, revealing the behind-the-scenes of journalistic work, and constructing the persona of journalists as experts. Indeed, as others have found, daily news podcasting is now part of remediation efforts to restore trust in journalism, and we propose that the JAG format may be a key component of this strategy. Whether this amounts to success with audiences would require testing through audience-focused research.

Our findings suggest that the metajournalistic conversation has become not only possible but valuable in the fluid moment in which podcast journalism finds itself now—attempting to cement core conventions to stand out in a polluted media environment while remaining open to innovation as a still-flexible medium.

The emergence and undeniable popularity of the JAG format remains a fertile area for further research into how journalism is adapting to digital media environments while seeking to maintain its core cultural and professional values amidst existential threats to journalism and a widely polluted media environment. The metajournalistic conversation, which appears to thrive in the podcast medium in particular, given the affordances for intimacy and deep listening, as well as the potential for parasocial bonds, emerges from this study as a potentially powerful tool for building authority and legitimacy claims in this difficult environment. All future research will have to contend with the sudden irruption of AI technology in the field—something that was not yet fully realized at the time of our research.

It is worth noting that the performative nature of these conversations could mean the format has its pitfalls. It is possible that audiences become tired of the ubiquitous deep dive and can also be put off. There can be a drawback to the conversation-based process of knowledge sharing because it can be perceived as journalists doling out more opinion than fact and more condescension than knowledge. There is also the real threat of causing fatigue, as even automatically generated podcasts following the deep dive template can now be obtained through the click of a button, thanks to artificial intelligence tools, posing a further threat of pollution against which journalists will have to continuously and creatively fight to build their authority and legitimacy claims.

Moreover, non-journalistic actors and even disinformation actors have access to the same affordances of podcasting and can bend the technology for their self-interest, making it more important to understand how journalists are also leveraging legacy-brand authority and other traditional and non-traditional markers of credibility to stand out in this now crowded field.