Award-winning podcast series ‘The Divided Dial’ grew out of listening to the radio in Minneapolis

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 a media company 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 at the end of May.

“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 in 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 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 the Midwest and wanting to tell stories with complexity.

In telling the story in both seasons of “The Divided Dial,” Thornton and the WNYC team examine 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.

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.

“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.

Thornton knows she 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.”

Thornton has also 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.”