Reminds me of an old wireless headphone project I saw in Radio Electronics back in the mid-60s. There was a project where a long length of wire was routed around a room in a loop and connected to the speaker terminals of an audio amp. The receiver was a simple battery-powered audio amp and earpiece connected to an old telephone recording pickup coil (the kind with a suction cup that connected to a telephone handset). One could hear the audio loudly as long as one was "in the loop" - literally!
That's an example of a purely inductive reception of an audio signal. The system in the magazine creates a very large audio transformer - no RF involved, strictly near-field induction.
The lightning signal we receive is a true EM RF signal which behaves very differently in terms of propagation, antenna behavior, etc. I didn't understand the difference between that system and an RF receiver until I studied field theory much later in my career. I remember it confusing me at the time, until I actually wrote the author of the article. He tried to explain the difference, but my 12-year old brain couldn't quite grasp it!
Don
WD9DMP