Stories worth staying up for.
An independent narrative podcast studio. Reported for a year, scored like a film, mixed for the pair of headphones you already own.
What makes it a Nightjar story
We are not a news show and we are not in a hurry. A Nightjar episode is one story, told properly, by the people it actually happened to.
Reported, not summarised
Every episode starts with months in the field and ends with a fact-check we can defend line by line.
Forty to sixty minutes
Long enough to earn the ending, short enough for one commute or one very long walk.
Scored by hand
Original music written per episode. Nothing in our show comes off a production-library shelf.
Voices, not narrators
We keep tape from the people who lived it, in their own language, and subtitle rather than dub.
Every other Thursday
A schedule we have not missed since 2019, including the year we recorded from three continents.
The Dispatch
A short letter after each episode: what we cut, what we got wrong, and what to read next.
Latest episodes
Three recent stories. The full run lives in the archive.
Ep. 14 — The Two-Minute Silence
16 Jul 2026 · 51 min
A broadcast engineer in Reykjavík spent eleven years chasing a gap in a 1978 reel-to-reel tape. What he eventually found was not what he had been listening for.
Listen →Ep. 13 — Salt Season
02 Jul 2026 · 44 min
Every August a fishing town on the Portuguese coast rebuilds a sea wall that the winter will take again by March. We spent a season asking why they keep doing it.
Listen →Ep. 12 — Nobody's Frequency
18 Jun 2026 · 58 min
A pirate radio station broadcast from a caravan on the Yorkshire moors for six years without a single listener ever writing in. Then, one Tuesday, somebody did.
Listen →“Nightjar have quietly become the studio other producers steal from. They take the year that everyone else says the budget will not allow, and it is audible in every episode.”
New episode every other Thursday.
Join 90,000 people who get The Dispatch — our short letter about what went into the episode, and what we left out.