Over the Transom | 2025 Reflections
Looking back with gratitude and forward with hope
It’s the end of the year and we’re looking back with gratitude. 2025 was an ambitious and successful year for us — we brought back the beloved Traveling Workshop after a few years of hiatus and expanded it to new cities across the U.S. (and Europe!), tried new things like this newsletter and one-on-one help sessions, and continued to publish regular tips, stories, and manifestos.
From California to Michigan and beyond, we helped usher more than forty new storytellers into the wonderful world of audio. Their workshop pieces were aired at live local listening events that brought communities together for evenings of delight. Some were published on local NPR stations. We can’t wait to hear everything our 2026 cohorts make as we bring the traveling workshop to even more places (thanks, Hindenburg for sponsoring!) — including going to Moab, UT, and Bombay Beach, CA, for the first time, and Bloomington, IN, for the first time in a long time.
In 2025, we also kicked off our Science Storytelling Workshops. We started this initiative with the goal of helping to combat misinformation and distrust in science through human-centered storytelling. With the help of collaborators like the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, the Marine Biological Laboratory, the Woodwell Climate Research Center, Schmidt Sciences, and The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, we trained twenty-six incredible research scientists in live storytelling and helped them shape vulnerable, first-person, human stories about themselves and their work. Below are a few pieces from our most recent workshop in Washington, D.C. that are really worth a listen:
We had a successful first summer with residents at Blue Mountain Center in the Adirondacks (and applications are open now if a free month in a beautiful place to work on a project sounds useful to you!).
Transom has deep roots in public media, and 2025 was a dark year for the industry. As sources of funding and infrastructure disappear for us and so many others across the public media ecosystem, we remain steadfast in our commitment to fostering the art of audio storytelling. We believe quite deeply that this sort of storytelling has immense power to help heal our broken world. We’re always looking for new and different avenues to educate, expand access, and connect our communities in the unique way that this craft can. This will continue in 2026, and your continued support and participation makes us feel hopeful for the future, rather than despairing. One way you can join us next year is with The Listeners — a movement to make short, hyperlocal, documentary-style portraits that help us listen to one another again.
In the new year we’ll be back with guides and other training materials to help you learn about this style of documentary. And our inboxes are open — please submit any work you’d like us to consider for publication at the link below:
Thank you so much for being a part of the Transom community. We hope you have a wonderful holiday season, and we can’t wait to continue the work in 2026.