Art Bell will forever hold a special place in my heart. Coast to Coast was a mainstay as I drove late at night to fill in 3AM slots at my college radio station. The show opened up the true potential of late night radio for my sleep addled brain, strange night dwellers relaying stories of encounters with werewolf spirits and unidentified flying objects.In its own way, Welcome to Night Vale captures that mystery of the Land of Nye, through bi-weekly stories from a fictional town in the Southwestern desert, where paranormal is the status quo. The series, co-created in Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor, clearly struck a nerve with the podcast listening public, quickly skyrocketing to a number one position atop the iTunes charts, beating out mainstays like This American Life and Radiolab with its scripted idiosyncratic tales of a small desert community, exploring the possibilities of of a longform episodic podcast well before Serial took the nation by storm. Cranor and I sat down at a teahouse in Manhattan to discuss the roots of the show, the seemingly endless dark mysteries of the Nevada desert and how we’re only beginning to explore the breadth of possibilities the podcasting medium has to offer.
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