Last Saturday morning, at this year’s Third Coast International Audio Festival, in Chicago, some eight hundred people looked up from their breakfast in surprise: the theme from “The Daily,” the Times’ weekday news podcast, was playing over the speakers. All weekend, energy buzzed around both “The Daily”—which has made great contributions in 2017 to audio journalism and to our collective sanity—and its gentle, bearded host, Michael Barbaro. After panels and at cookie breaks between workshops, people approached him a bit giddily. (One guy I talked to described him as having the “posture of a superhero.”) That morning, Barbaro took the stage and leaned over the lectern, saying, “Here’s what else you need to know today.” There were appreciative laughs. He described the highlights in store for us that evening: an awards ceremony, an after-party. “There will be an actual red carpet at this event—and there will be dancing,” he said, in careful, sober tones. “Finally, lunch today will be build-your-own tacos. I’m Michael Barbaro.” More jollity. Theme music accompanied him offstage.

Johanna Zorn, Third Coast’s executive director and co-founder, was a producer and director at the public-radio station WBEZ for thirty years. In 2001, she started the conference because she wanted to foster and celebrate great audio documentary work, with the goal of creating a kind of Sundance for radio. The 1993 audio documentary “Ghetto Life 101” was one of her inspirations. In that piece, Dave Isay, now best known as the founder of StoryCorps, collaborated with LeAlan Jones, thirteen, and Lloyd Newman, fourteen, on a sound diary of their lives in housing projects on the South Side of Chicago. (In the beginning, we hear barking. “This is my dog Ferocious,” Jones says, amiably.) “I would never have that opportunity, to inhabit a thirteen-year-old boy’s life,” Zorn told me. “But I just did.” She saw this kind of audio as journalism in the tradition of the Chicagoan Studs Terkel: “interviewing everyday people, staying away from the celebrities and the stars and letting us walk in people’s shoes.”

That impulse coincided with the rise of another force in Chicago journalism and audio: “This American Life,” which Ira Glass began in 1995. By the early aughts, the world of high-quality audio nonfiction “was sort of growing and contracting at the same time,” Zorn said. PRX, the Public Radio Exchange, and Transom came along, connecting people and offering resources and training, and producers were excited about the form and its possibilities. “There was this sensibility out there—a lot of potential,” Zorn said. “But at the same time there was a contraction in terms of outlets and money.” During the first years of Third Coast, Zorn said, “It was a very niche community. And people were sad because in the early days of ‘All Things Considered,’ to get a twenty-three-minute documentary on in the afternoon was becoming harder and harder. There were fewer outlets, and CPB,”—the Corporation for Public Broadcasting—“which had been giving grants to documentary work, wasn’t doing it anymore. There was this feeling of fewer and fewer opportunities, a caving in of the options.”

In those years at Third Coast, she said, “We were doing the best we could to broaden it when there weren’t as many outlets—bringing in international people, more youth reporters, finding any which way.” The conference was held every two years for a while. Gradually, technological and financial shifts changed the climate and began to meet the potential that had been building all along among talented practitioners. “Every step of technology that has happened since Third Coast has been better for audio,” Zorn said. With the Internet and digital recording, she said, “anyone could make work anywhere—you didn’t have to have the keys to the studio.” With iPods, smartphones, and podcasting, “it’s just gotten easier and easier for people to create and people to listen.”

Cars, too. “I call them radio hostage machines,” Maya Goldberg-Safir, Third Coast’s artistic associate, said.

Longtime attendees described Third Coast to me as a “group hug” and a “family reunion,” where independent producers and people from far-flung public-radio stations connected and reconnected over the years. It has produced marriages (Hillary Frank and Jonathan Menjivar), partnerships that led to shows (“Radiolab,” “Invisibilia”), collectives (the Heard), and many other connections. As it has helped shape the industry in the past couple of decades, it’s also reflected it. Julie Shapiro, Third Coast’s co-founder and the executive producer of the Radiotopia podcast network, told me that in 2011, when “Love + Radio” ’s “The Wisdom of Jay Thunderbolt” won the festival’s gold award, people were amazed that a podcast had won. Then, in 2014, podcasts changed everything. That fall, Third Coast had “Serial” fever like everyone else. Goldberg-Safir told me, “Lauren Ober from ‘The Big Listen’ got onstage and said, ‘Who thinks that Adnan did it?’ ” The room went crazy, voting and debating. After “Serial,” when podcasts blew up, Third Coast expanded, too. “More and more people with more and more energy,” Zorn said. “More people coming to discover talent. More sponsors. Everything dialled up.”

“ ‘Serial’ literally created jobs for people,” Goldberg-Safir said.

Before that moment, Zorn said, “People’s name tags would stay the same for ten years. People were kind of stuck.”

“And this year we were getting calls, like, the day of the conference for a title adjustment,” Goldberg-Safir said.

“The mobility is a really good thing,” Zorn said. “We saw it in television and I feel like we’re mimicking it in radio.”

This year, the range of attendees, veterans, heroes, and newbies was broad. We were a massive crowd, milling around the glassy, carpeted conference spaces in a Hyatt by Lake Michigan. We wore lanyards around our necks, printed with our names, our affiliations, and our gender pronouns. To a newcomer, it felt like a cozy, supportive, overstimulating new world. To help foster connections, each name tag, on the back, had a sticker bearing the name of a kind of tree—your small peer group. Sometimes, while trying to scope out a name, you’d encounter a tree instead: ELM, DOUGLAS FIR. When people said critical things, they said them with sly glee. “Being at Third Coast is all about talking shit about people’s mike quality,” a producer said to me, looking pleased with her devilishness.

Hosts and producers from many of the year’s biggest and best podcasts were there, among them Al Letson, of “Reveal,” Nigel Poor, of “Ear Hustle,” Dan Taberski, of “Missing Richard Simmons,” Tally Abecassis, of “First Day Back,” Brian Reed, of “S-Town,” Jonathan Goldstein, of “Heavyweight,” Jad Abumrad and Sean Rameswaram of “More Perfect.” I talked to producers, composers, entrepreneurs, podcast-network executives. I talked to a college student who carried a recorder with her everywhere, making audio stories for her family and friends; a woman who had switched careers, in midlife, from magazine publishing to audio; and a veteran who’d decided to get into broadcasting in the eighties, when he heard an ad similar to ones I remember from my childhood in Connecticut—“Have you ever considered a career in radio?”—and has worked in it ever since. I talked to fellow-members of a fledgling group that the boom has helped foster—people who write about podcasts. Among them: Nick Quah, of the invaluable “Hot Pod,” and members of the Bello Collective. People observed that the world of audio journalism, still booming three years after “Serial” débuted, feels a bit like the Wild West.

Part of this Wild West is a growing canniness about money. The creator of an earnest human-interest show told me about new two projects he’s exploring, both involving a business-minded partner and major brands, which would combine subjects of cultural interest with big names and broad commercial appeal. I spoke to people who made branded podcasts; Gimlet and Pineapple Street make several. The world of celebrity podcasts is expanding, too. With commercialism, and the mixed impulses that accompany it, come concerns. One industry veteran I talked to was troubled by the fact that the host of a popular show reads ads in a style that makes it hard to discern from the show itself; here and there, you’d hear candid criticisms about the possible erosion of journalistic standards, of ethical concerns about true-crime podcasts and armchair-detective podcasts. Several people fretted to me about “Dirty John,” from the L.A. Times and Wondery, whose tone and content, as well as its jarring murder-themed ads, made people uneasy.