Bend, Oregon Podcasts

Podcasts About Bend, Oregon

Six shows in the PlayNext corpus take Bend as their subject, and one of them turns out to be about a different Bend altogether. That leaves five, and two of those carry nearly all the weight: a newspaper interview show and a short daily-style local bulletin. The rest are single-purpose — a business podcast, a guest-interview show, a fly shop's fishing updates, the last of which stopped publishing years ago. There is no Bend history series, no food or music coverage, no long-form reporting. This is a small shelf, and it is worth saying that first.

What Bend is

Bend is a city of roughly 100,000 in Central Oregon, on the Deschutes River at the eastern edge of the Cascades. It is known for skiing at Mount Bachelor, mountain biking, fly fishing, breweries, and for growing fast enough that housing has become the city's standing argument with itself.

The local news core

Bend Don't Break is the largest thing here by a wide margin — 384 episodes produced by The Source, Bend's weekly newspaper, and built almost entirely on interviews with the people who run local institutions. Recent guests include Jason Stein of Opera Bend, Casey Andrews of the Central Oregon Trail Alliance, and Selin Sevinç of the Bend Film Festival. It is filed under TV & Film, which undersells it; what it actually does is community journalism.

Local Frequency - Bend runs alongside it with 261 short episodes covering weather, roadwork and seasonal turnover: Mount Bachelor's final day of the season, fire season safety, new roundabouts, spring snow. It is closer to a bulletin than a conversation, and it is the only show here that publishes on anything like a steady local-news rhythm.

Growth, business and the river

BendBEAT, hosted by Brian Ladd, is the show that takes on the city's direction head-on across 36 episodes — whether smart design can solve Bend's housing crisis, the Central Oregon healthcare system, COCC, the future of Mount Bachelor and outdoor life. TORCOM TALK covers overlapping ground through its guest list, which runs to Bend business founders such as Gary Fish of Deschutes Brewing and Jim Schell of Opportunity Knocks, plus a mayor of Bend; it is filed under marketing, but in practice it is a local interview show. Fly and Field Outfitters is a shop podcast from a Bend fly fishing outfitter — 22 episodes on Cascade Lakes Highway access, camp trips on the Lower Deschutes, and bull trout on Lake Billy Chinook. Its most recent episodes date to 2021, so treat it as an archive rather than a current source.

The other Bend

Born In The Bend, by Emily Scherer and Aimee Frederick, is about Fort Bend County, Texas — Richmond, Lamar CISD, the Fort Bend Junior Service League. It is filed under Texas regional history and it is a genuinely active local show, just not for this Bend. It is listed here because of the name, and it is flagged so nobody arrives expecting Oregon.

Where to start

Bend Don't Break, without much hesitation: it has the depth, the current publishing schedule, and the widest range of local voices. Add Local Frequency - Bend if the interest is week-to-week civic detail, and BendBEAT if it is growth, housing and business. Beyond those three, the Bend shelf runs out quickly.