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When I stepped away from daily news, I had more freedom to play with intros. Here’s an example of a sort of hybrid intro, a statement that teases the story without describing it too much, and then morphs into a more traditional news lead. Our team, including myself and reporters Sarah Stuteville and Jessica Partnow, won a 2014 National Murrow Award for this one-hour documentary on young people in the former Soviet Union trying to protest the policies of Vladimir Putin. The protest was pretty unusual by our standards, which you learn quickly as host Brooke Gladstone opens with, “Picture this: A 22-year-old Ukranian woman wearing nothing but safety goggles, a crown of flowers, and a pair of tiny orange shorts. Oh, and she’s holding a chainsaw. She’s using it to cut down a towering wooden cross … “

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What we’re now seeing in the podcast world are intros — if you can even call them that — that totally skip over the descriptive “who, what, where, and when” in favor of something I’m coining here as “puzzle bait.” Puzzle bait is a question or a strange postulation that will hook the listener within 30 seconds or so. Take this example:

In the Strangers podcast episode “Elizabeth and Mary, Part 1,” narrator Lea Thau starts off by saying that she received an email from a woman who said this: “I have been inspired, by your show, to give a kidney to a stranger.” Wait, what? We begin the episode by wanting answers to a whole host of questions: Who on earth would donate a kidney to a stranger? What is the thought process that person went through to reach that decision? Is that person crazy?

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Then we confront a second, deeper, and possibly unconscious level of questions that evoke the tension: Is this person like me? Would I do the same thing? How will society judge me if I decide I would never give one of my kidneys to a stranger? 

The hope and fear I talked about before immediately kick in. The hope is that if, as you suspect, you’re one of probably the majority of humans who wouldn’t give a kidney to a stranger, you can find some justification for that decision from a moral and societal standpoint that will let you off the hook. The fear is that you won’t. So you listen. 

Here’s another example — an episode from the show Reply All, reported by Sruthi Pinnamaneni. It’s one of my favorites for many reasons, not the least of which is the real-world impact this story had, and the access the producers got to the central character. But that’s not what sucked me in at the outset. The puzzle that the hosts of Reply All bait us with from the start is this: “This is a story about destroying someone’s life completely — and making someone’s life better. And it’s the same person.”

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The podcast is supposed to be about the internet, and it is, but these are big, universal questions that have suction power on unsuspecting ears. 

This works with fiction podcasts, too. The first episode of Panoply’s production of The Message begins with the words, “Now, who wants to one hear one of the most highly classified — I’m talking top-secret — radio transmissions ever recorded?” 

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OK, who wouldn’t? And they don’t let you hear that transmission until well into the podcast. Puzzle bait.

Of course, there are a lot of other things that go into the making a great podcast besides creating hope and fear, “puzzle bait,” and universal questions. In nonfiction, the voices have to be authentic, the information credible and solid, and the editing tight so you don’t waste the listeners’ time. In fiction, the writing and editing have to be flawless, the acting superb, and the plot well wrought. It is very hard to do all of these things.