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The Truth is a fiction podcast that seeks to re-imagine what audio drama is and can be. The podcast is released every two weeks. The tagline for the organization is "Movie for your ears". Stories are developed as a collective where frequently the dialogue is completely improvised. Additionally, recordings are made on location and then taken into the studio to be edited. Work by The Truth has been heard on many nationally syndicated public radio programs, including This American Life, Studio 360, Snap Judgment, and The Story (see Links below). The show is part of podcast network Radiotopia.
The Truth stories, while fictional, are often topical and possible. The pilot episode was inspired by the real speech "In Event of Moon Disaster" written for President Richard Nixon in case the Apollo 11 mission failed.
History
In 2009 Jonathan Mitchell started The Truth with Hillary Frank. Frank had been Mitchell's editor on a story for a show produced by American Public Media (APM) called Weekend America, titled "Eat Cake." The piece was intended to air on Valentine's Day weekend, but Weekend America was cancelled while the story was in production and the last episode was January 29, 2009. Weekend America decided to air the story anyway, on that last broadcast. Peter Clowney, the executive producer at Weekend America, was then moved into a development position at American Public Media. Mitchell and Frank pitched him the idea of doing a regular drama series along the lines of "Eat Cake". The title "The Truth" comes from a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson, that goes, "fiction reveals truth that reality obscures."
In the Fall of 2009, Mitchell and Frank received funding from American Public Media to produce some pilot stories to demonstrate their idea. One of those stories was "Moon Graffiti", which was completed in January 2010. That story was finally released to the public in July of that year, it was posted on PRX, and was featured on the Very Short List in August 2010. That led to it being the most listened-to piece on PRX that year. Moon Graffiti was later featured on The Guardian podcast, and won the 2010 Gold Mark Time Award. In mid-2010, Hillary had a newborn child and decided to go her own way to produce a podcast about Motherhood, called The Longest Shortest Time.
Mitchell then tapped Kerrie Hillman to co-produce The Truth. Hillman and Mitchell have a long history of collaboration. She created and was the executive producer of PRI's Fair Game with Faith Salie, and the Senior Producer for Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen, both programs for which Mitchell had worked as a producer. Jonathan Mitchell then pitched the story that would become "Tape Delay" to Ira Glass at This American Life, which Glass aired under the name "The Conversation" for the episode "My Own Worst Enemy." Mitchell enlisted Ed Herbstman to help with the story, after having worked with him on "Moon Graffiti".
In December 2011, Ed Herbstman and Mitchell formed a group of improvisors, many from the Magnet Theater which Herbtsman cofounded, who would write stories together, with the goal of doing a story in one month. The first piece was "Interruptible" (completed in March 2012), and continued producing a story a month, with the goal of eventually making two a month. In April, 2012, "Tape Delay" finally aired on This American Life, and the podcast had an audience in the tens of thousands. The Truth was invited by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation to give a workshop about their production process at the 2012 Radio Beyond Radio conference in Sydney Australia, where Jonathan Mitchell and Ed Herbstman led a weeklong seminar in which collectively the group created a story from scratch called "Domestic Violins". Around the same time, the show became a 2012 SoundCloud Fellow, to create a series of election-themed horror stories. In October 2012, The Truth released its first one-hour special, called "The Devil You Know," which was a co-production with the Public Radio Exchange (PRX). This was a collection of three of the stories produced under the SoundCloud Fellowship, and aired on 14 public radio stations, including WBEZ Chicago, and KUOW Seattle.
The Truth was named by iTunes to be the Best New Arts podcast of 2012 and the #1 new podcast of 2012 by The Daily Dot.