History
In the early 1990s, Glass co-hosted, with Gary Covino, a Friday-night show in Chicago called The Wild Room. However, he was looking for new opportunities in radio, and had been sending grant proposals to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for two years when, in 1995, the MacArthur Foundation approached Torey Malatia, general manager of Chicago Public Radio. They offered him US$150,000 to make a show featuring local Chicago writers and performance artists. Malatia approached Glass with the idea, who countered that he wanted to do a weekly program, but with a different premise, a budget of US$300,000, and sights on taking it national. In a 1998 article in the Chicago Reader, Michael Miner quoted Covino as saying, "The show [Glass] proposed was The Wild Room. He just didn't call it The Wild Room." Glass, however, did not include his co-host in his plans and assured him that the deal was unlikely to happen. When the show went on without him, Covino says he felt "betrayed".[11] While Glass admits he wasn't transparent about his plans, in that same article, he explained, "Every week on The Wild Room we came to the show with two independent sensibilities. I love Gary. I loved Gary. But I didn't want to keep doing that show...and the notion that everything I brought to The Wild Room I got from him I find completely infuriating...I didn't want to do free-form radio anymore. I have no interest in improvisation. It might have been possible to design a show with him that he would have felt comfortable with and I would have felt comfortable with. But at that point—I was in my late 30s—I just wanted to do the thing I wanted to do."[11]
The show debuted on WBEZ in Chicago as Your Radio Playhouse on November 17, 1995.[12] Glass conceived a format where each segment of the show would be an "act,"[12] and at the beginning of each episode, would explain that show consisted of "documentaries, monologues, overheard conversations, found tapes, [and] anything we can think of." Glass also served as executive producer. The program's name was changed beginning with the March 21, 1996, episode,[13] and was picked up nationally by PRI the following June.[14] Chicago Public Media (then called the WBEZ Alliance) produced.[15] The program's first year was produced on a budget that was tight even by US public-radio standards. A budget of $243,000 covered an outfitted studio, marketing costs, satellite time, four full-time staffers, and various freelance writers and reporters. The station was located at Chicago's Navy Pier.[16] Early on, Glass commissioned stories from artists, writers, theater people, and journalists. National syndication began in June 1996 when Public Radio International formed a distribution partnership with the program, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting awarded the show a three-year grant for $350,000, double what Glass applied for. As time went on, the staff was drawn more to journalistic stories that were, as Glass puts it, "in a style where there were characters and scenes and plot and funny moments." The show is also carried on Sirius XM Satellite Radio over the Public Radio International block on the XM Public Radio channel. In the early 2010s, the program consistently rated as the first- or second-most downloaded podcast on iTunes for each week.[17]
Early response to the program was largely positive. In 1998, Mother Jones magazine called it "hip – as well as intensely literary and surprisingly irreverent."[18] Glass used a unique strategy to promote the show to stations by giving away pledge drive ads he developed himself.[19] By the end of 1999, TAL aired on 325 public radio stations;[20] also around that time, Rhino Records released a "greatest hits" CD of TAL episodes.[21]
In January 2011, the series was picked up by CBC Radio One in Canada.[22] The program is shortened slightly for the Canadian broadcast to allow for a five-minute newscast at the top of the hour, although this is partly made up for by the removal of mid-program breaks, most of the production credits (apart from that of Malatia), and underwriting announcements (CBC's radio services being fully commercial-free, except when contractually or legally required).
In January 2012, This American Life presented excerpts from a one-man theater show The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs by Mike Daisey as an exposé of conditions at a Foxconn factory in China.[23] The episode was entitled "Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory" and became one of the show's most popular episodes at that time, with 888,000 downloads and 206,000 streams. WBEZ planned to host a live showing and a Q+A of "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs" in Chicago on April 7, 2012.[24] On March 16, 2012, This American Life officially retracted the episode after learning that several events recounted both in the radio story and the monologue were fabrications.[24] WBEZ canceled the planned live performance and refunded all ticket purchases.[24] Airing that day, This American Life devoted the week's show (titled "Retraction") to detailing the inconsistencies in "The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs".[25] The show includes interviews between Rob Schmitz, the reporter who discovered the discrepancies, and Daisey's translator in China, Cathy Lee, as well as an interview between host Glass and Daisey.[25]
Two weeks later, the show also reiterated that they had previously removed three stories by Stephen Glass (no relation to Ira)[26] due to dubious content, namely episode 57, "Delivery", episode 79, "Stuck in the Wrong Decade", and episode 86, "How to Take Money from Strangers." The episodes including the segments had inadvertently resurfaced in episode streams due to a website redesign.[27] Though the segments were cut from podcast streams, the transcript of the contents have been kept accessible on the show's official website.[28]
In 2015, the show retracted a story about canvassers who tried to change people's political opinions. The story was based on an article in Science that was also retracted.[29]
In March 2014, the program announced that PRI would stop distributing the show in July, and that May, Glass announced that the staff would be distributing the show themselves, with Public Radio Exchange doing the technical legwork to deliver the audio to the radio stations.[30]
On October 1, 2014, the show produced a spinoff, Serial, a season-long exploration delivered as a podcast series.[31] In 2015, Glass became the sole owner of This American Life; WBEZ continued as a production partner on the show and on Serial with future shows to be independent.[32] In 2017, This American Life launched the podcast S-Town through the spinoff company Serial Productions. Serial Productions was bought by The New York Times Company in 2020. The Times and Serial jointly produced the podcasts Nice White Parents, hosted by Chana Joffe-Walt, which debuted in July 2020; and The Improvement Association, hosted by Zoe Chace, which debuted in April 2021.[33]
