There's no shortage of doomsayers who think the Internet is forcing media into a clickbait-driven race to the bottom.

Reveal, a new investigative reporting podcast and radio show, is the counterpoint to that line of thinking.

A joint effort between the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) and digital audio marketplace Public Radio Exchange (PRX), Reveal is an hour-long podcast that will center around in-depth, untold stories of public importance. An upcoming episodes will include stories about the regulation of day-care centers, online currency trading and the Environmental Protection Agency.

The people behind Reveal understand that it is swimming in the wake of Serial, an investigative podcast centered on a murder near Baltimore. Serial became a cultural phenomenon, breaking into pop media in a way no other podcast had.

Serial, however, was only the boiling of a pot that has been heating up for a while, according to Jake Shapiro, founder and CEO of Public Radio Exchange (PRX). In addition to Serial, he also credits This American Life, Planet Money and Radiolab as helping to build the foundation that has led to the podcasting renaissance.

Now, Shapiro said, podcasts are being looked at in a new light.

"You've got more talent that's seeing this as a pathway toward expression and audience. You've got more partners, including almost all of the music subscriptions services, seeing podcasts and spoken word as a viable category," Shapiro said.

The suddenly high profile of podcasting has proved a tailwind. Reveal is already well funded through donations including a three-year $3 million grant from the Reva and David Logan Foundation along with $500,000 from the Ford Foundation. The show also has an underwriter — spoken-word audio company Audible — which is something nonprofit journalism usually is unable to attract.

Podcasts have historically not been a particularly lucrative medium. Neither has investigative reporting, particularly due to the usually money and time-intensive work that goes into major stories. An investigative reporting podcast, by that measure, might seem like a nonstarter.

But things have changed. After chugging along for years as the weird cousin of digital media, podcasting is enjoying a day in the sun. Larger audiences and digital media are the keys to making this kind of investigative content viable, said Joaquin Alvarado, CEO of the Center for Investigative Reporting.

"We're all trying to figure out the sustainability question, and I think that one of the keys here is we have to create a leapfrog moment. It used to be that we and other nonprofits would compete for the same limited resources and you didn't get economies of scale out of that. You did not get a network effect out of that," Alvarado said.

Reveal is off to a good start. The show has produced a series of pilots, including one on opiate prescriptions from the Veterans Affairs Office that garnered a Peabody Award. The show was picked up in January 2015 on 200 public radio stations, including by WBEZ in Chicago, the station that is home to This American Life, which spun off Serial.

Those shows may have helped pave the path for Reveal, but as expectations and funding has risen, so have the stakes. The technology evolution and the shift in media consumption have made efforts like Reveal more tenable but also brought it into competition with a host of other content.

"We know it has to compete for attention. Part of what Reveal has to be, given that it can be heavy-duty journalism, it has to be engaging," Shapiro said.