In early May 2022, Meta announced that it was abruptly ending Facebook’s podcast integration less a year after it launched. Facebook had offered podcasters the ability to upload their shows to the social media site. Meanwhile, Spotify’s own expensive gamble on podcast integration within its music streaming service hasn’t resulted in the surge of new listeners that it had hoped.

And what about the emergence of social audio platforms like Clubhouse that promised to re-imagine podcasting as live audio chatrooms hosted by celebrities and public figures?

After its meteoric rise in 2021 during the height of the global pandemic, Clubhouse has seen major declines in app installs, in part because of the rise in competing services like Twitter Spaces and Spotify Live.

Amid all this corporate turmoil, it’s tempting to conclude that online tech companies are moving on from podcasting in search of higher profit margins elsewhere.

But these realignments belie a bigger truth: Platforms have already reshaped podcasting in fundamental ways, and they will play an outsized role in its future.

An open medium collides with Big Tech

Podcasting, which has been around for only two decades, has a unique, decentralized infrastructure.

Podcasting’s audio files are accessible via a simple 2000-era technology known as RSS, short for “Really Simple Syndication.” Thanks to the openness of RSS — it is a nonproprietary distribution mechanism that cannot be controlled by anyone — podcasting has remained a thriving creative ecosystem. Once you upload an audio file and connect it to an RSS feed, any podcatching software or app can find it and download it.

The first decade of podcasting’s existence was characterized by steady, if laconic, growth. In 2006, for example, only 22% of U.S. listeners had even heard of podcasting. That percentage sits at 79% today.

After 2014, however, this slow and steady rise has been turbocharged by a staggering wave of corporate takeovers.

In 2019 I argued in the academic journal Social Media & Society that podcasting was undergoing the process of “platformization,” thanks to the increasingly central role of digital platforms like Spotify, Google and Amazon in the medium’s development. Spotify alone has spent over US$1 billion on podcast acquisitions. Other big radio and tech companies have also made significant acquisitions in the past three years, reshaping the industry in the process.

Openness, however, is anathema to digital platforms, which are intentionally structured as walled gardens that restrict access. They make money when users pay for access to content and services — and that, of course, works only when the content isn’t available elsewhere.

One of the recent shifts in podcasting has been the introduction of paywalls and exclusive content. It has since become a standard feature of the medium.

Most notably, in May 2020 Spotify signed an exclusive deal with Joe Rogan, the most popular podcaster, one that was reportedly valued at $200 million. All of Rogan’s new episodes — and even his entire back catalog — are now available only on Spotify, leading RSS and podcasting pioneer Dave Winer to argue that his show is in fact no longer a podcast.

Other eye-popping exclusivity deals have included Spotify’s 2021 $60 million deal for “Call Her Daddy,” the popular advice and comedy podcast created by Alexandra Cooper and Sofia Franklyn in 2018. Even podcast pioneer Roman Mars sold the exclusive rights to produce and distribute his longtime show “99% Invisible” to radio giant SiriusXM, though the podcast will remain freely available on all platforms for the time being.

The importance of podcast IP

For Spotify, securing popular podcasts to exclusive distribution deals is all about increasing the number of users on its platform. But podcasts with dedicated followings are also emerging as coveted forms of intellectual property.

Podcast production studio Wondery, for example, aggressively pursued cross-licensing deals for its original audio dramas, which include “Dr. Death,” “Dirty John” and “Gladiator.” All have or will appear as television series.

The value of these creative properties made Wondery an attractive acquisition target for Amazon, which paid $300 million for it in late 2020.

The content pipeline from podcasting to television and feature films is now well established, thanks in large part to the emerging centrality of traditional entertainment talent agencies into podcasting.

New podcasts with bankable Hollywood talent now launch as part of multimedia deals that include books, made-for-TV dramas or documentaries. Meanwhile, podcast networks are shifting their production strategies, aiming to land celebrities with built-in audiences for exclusive content licensing deals.

This is a marked shift from the DIY grassroots content that has been a hallmark of podcasting.

Ad tech is coming for podcasting

Platforms are also changing the way podcast audiences are measured. RSS was designed to efficiently and anonymously distribute audio files, but not to track who was downloading those files or if they were actually being listened to.

Digital platforms, on the other hand, function as sophisticated surveillance machines. They know who is listening to a podcast — which allows for specific demographic and psychographic targeting — and how much of that podcast is being consumed. Companies can also track their consumption of other media on the platform. Advertisers are coming to increasingly expect that their podcast ad buys will allow for accountability and attribution.

While it didn’t get that much media attention, Spotify’s recent acquisition of Chartable and PodSights — two important podcast analytics firms —are indicative of this arms race for user data.

There are broader issues at stake here, and not just the concentration of advertising revenue into the hands of the big platforms. The commodification of podcast listener data has privacy implications as well, which is something that the industry itself is beginning to acknowledge.

A tale of two media

What do these shifts portend for the podcasting’s third decade?

The story of podcasting has become really a story of two divergent media.

On the one hand, the traditional, scrappy, upstart version of podcasting will survive thanks to the open architecture of RSS. Podcasting still has relatively low barriers to entry compared with other media, and this will continue to encourage independent producers and amateurs to create new shows, often with hyperniche content. Crowdfunding sites like Patreon and Buy Me a Coffee allow creators to make money off their content on their own terms.

But grassroots podcasting will find itself competing with the professionalized, platform-dominated version of the medium that’s hit-driven and slickly produced, with cross-media tie-ins and big budgets.

As companies like Spotify, Amazon, NPR, SiriusXM and iHeartMedia aggressively monetize and market exclusive podcast content on their platforms, they’ve positioned themselves as the new gatekeepers with the keys to an ever-expanding global audience.

Independent podcasting isn’t going away. But with the promotional power concentrated in the hands of the very biggest tech firms, it will be increasingly challenging for those smaller players to find listeners.

For Manríquez, the D.C. correspondent for Latino Rebels, the story was personal. His father was a night shift janitor at a hospital in Saint Louis, Missouri, when he was a kid. His father told him about how difficult the job was, on top of the harassment and discrimination he faced for being Latino.

Manríquez told me he noticed that many of the night shift workers at the Capitol were people of color and that there was little coverage of the issue when the report was first published in 2019. He started asking prominent politicians about in 2021 and many said they hadn’t seen it. Manríquez published his first story about the issue on April 21 and by April 28, he had responses from nearly 30 senators about the report.

At the time, Manríquez was the only credentialed reporter on the hill for a standalone, Latino-focused news outlet. It’s the kind of work that Latino Rebels’ parent company Futuro Media, an 11-year-old Harlem-based nonprofit, is founded on.

Then Manríquez’s Periodical Press Gallery credential — a pass that’s renewed on a monthly basis — wasn’t renewed.

He explained:

In essence, the temporary credential was a compromise between Futuro and the gallery that allowed Latino Rebels to report from within the Capitol complex while Futuro’s application for a permanent press pass was reviewed by the gallery’s executive committee.

Four days before the press pass expired, a gallery staffer told Latino Rebels founder Julio Ricardo Varela that the Futuro press pass would not be renewed because other gallery members had complained that the reporter (me, Pablo Manríquez) was “too visible” as Latino Rebels correspondent in the Capitol, but refused to elaborate on any details of the complaint or name who complained.

Periodical Press Gallery executive committee chair Leo Shane III rolled back the gallery staffer’s remarks, telling Ericka Connant of Al Día News that my temporary press pass was not renewed because “the committee determined it was unlikely [Futuro] would qualify for permanent credentials.”

In a May episode of In The Thick, a Futuro Media politics podcast hosted by founder Maria Hinojosa (the 2020 winner of the Nieman Foundation’s 2020 I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence) and interim co-executive director Varela, Varela said that he was told that, according to the press gallery’s rules, Futuro Media wouldn’t qualify for the credential because it doesn’t get 51% of its revenue from advertising or subscriptions.

“That’s so Mad Men,” Hinojosa said on the podcast.

“We are already in sort of this incredible disadvantage,” Varela said of the fact that so few dollars go to Latino-focused or owned organizations. “And what’s interesting about this is that this rule was established in the 1970s when media was even whiter, even more male, but how much has really changed? … This is straight up what white supremacy in journalism looks like when you have journalists of color and independent news organizations not being given access to cover this country’s government, the halls of Congress every day. That’s the issue here. And that’s anti-democratic.”

It took about six weeks, but Manríquez got credentialed again, this time for three months from the Daily Press Gallery, another of the four credentialing bodies. But in that time, he was shut out from talking to Congress about one of the most important stories on his beat: Vice President Kamala Harris’ visit to Guatemala, where she told migrants not to come to the U.S. border with Mexico.

Futuro Media’s origin story begins, of course, much earlier than this, but the hiccup is emblematic of both why Hinojosa founded the organization 11 years ago and the obstacles that outlets focusing on marginalized communities face.

It starts with Latino USA.

In 1992, Dr. Gil Cardenas at the Center for Mexican-American Studies at the University of Texas, Austin, worked with the founding executive producer, Maria Emilia Martin, to help develop English-language programming about Latinos for public radio. They later partnered with KUT in Austin to air the show. Martin brought in Hinojosa to host the show.

Latino USA started as a half-hour news magazine show and has changed hands a few times before Futuro Media took it over in 2010 and then switched from syndicating with NPR to PRX in 2020. The constant, though, has always been Hinojosa as the anchor.

While Hinojosa and Futuro Media are pioneers in the media landscape, Hinojosa said the company wasn’t founded out of a place of excitement, exactly, but from a place of necessity.

“The truth is that there was a certain amount of darkness,” Hinojosa said. “As a journalist, the path was not clear at all. I was like, ‘Do I really want to do this thing where I’m continuing to convince, in particular, white men of privilege that how I see the world, what matters to me as a journalist, needs to matter to them?'”

11 yrs ago I created @futuromedia bc I did not want to have to cont to explain myself & my story ideas to predominantly white men who held all the power at the MSM networks where I worked. Doing things on our own terms is terrifying. But jumping thru their hoops is exhausting.

— Maria Hinojosa (@Maria_Hinojosa) July 9, 2021

“We [as journalists] are based in the factual and so for us to take a leap into creating something that doesn’t exist — the alchemy of that is hard for many journalists,” Hinojosa said. “It’s like, I know how to produce a story, but how do you launch a company?”

What helped the company’s growth, though, was being able to take ownership of the show (and its following) that Hinojosa had built.

“I think the smartest thing that Futuro did was realize that [the show] Latino USA is a cultural institution in the media space and has been ahead of the game in reflecting on what it is to be Latino in the United States in the 21st century,” Varela, who joined Futuro in 2014, said. “So it was super smart of the company to realize that that was the Cadillac. If we make this better, this will make us better.”

Varela originally came to Futuro to work on the digital side of America by the Numbers with Maria Hinojosa, a two-season show on PBS that explored the underreported stories behind the changing demographics in the United States. Varela credited that show with making PBS’s audience “browner, blacker, and younger” than the regular PBS primetime audience, which in turn led people back to Futuro Media and Latino USA.

VP of content development Marlon Bishop joined Futuro Media as a producer for Latino USA in 2014. He ultimately became the show’s senior editor and helped turn it into an hour-long storytelling show.

“We had the idea to make this not a news magazine show, but something much more storytelling-focused and deep,” Bishop said. “This American Life was doing shows like 24 hours at a diner. We were like, ‘Let’s do 24 hours in a bodega.’ We’re telling all kinds of stories but really wanted to make sure there was a place for rich, detailed storytelling by Latino creators.”

Today, Futuro Media, which has 33 full-time employees, consists of four wings: Latino USA, In The Thick, Latino Rebels, and Futuro Studios, a creative division that produces original podcasts and programming (you might remember my story from February about La Brega, that was them!). In June, Futuro announced that it will create a new investigative journalism unit that Hinojosa will lead.

Futuro’s funding comes mainly from foundation philanthropy, individual donors, and corporate sponsorship. It’s always been a challenge to fund journalism, and even more so for entrepreneurs of color, but sticking to Futuro’s mission of telling stories authentically has helped the company find the right partners.

Waiting for the Fast Company article about how Futuro independently grew from a one-show network to a podcast studio that sold its entire first slate, produced like four reported shows through a pandemic, and has been a launchpad for some of the best audio talent in the country.

— Benjamin Riskin (@BenjaminRiskin) March 7, 2021

“We’ve been able to grow funding over the years from these organizations by delivering what we said we were going to deliver, which is quality journalism with integrity that addresses a lot of the issues that otherwise are not being addressed,” Erika Dilday, Futuro’s former chief executive officer, executive director, and a 2020 visiting Nieman fellow, said. “One of the reasons we created Studios is that we knew that we also needed earned income revenue. To rely strictly on foundations is not the best model.”

Futuro Studios has so far produced eight original shows, partnering up with WNYC, WBUR, The Los Angeles Times, and Netflix. They touch on a diverse ranges of Latino experiences. La Brega was produced with WNYC to showcase different facets of life in Puerto Rico in both English and Spanish. The Battle Of 187 explored anti-immigrant ballot initiatives that spurred several changes in the state of California, and was hosted by Gustavo Arellano, who’s now the host of the LA Times’ daily news podcast. Con Todo: Brown Love was produced with Netflix as an interview-style show with famous Latinos in Hollywood.

That, for Futuro, is where the innovation really is. It’s less about fancy tools and new platforms, and more about telling the stories that are long overdue to be told.

“The question, like, ‘Why does this story matter to the random white woman in Minnesota?'” Bishop said. “That’s a question we never really asked at Futuro. It was always like, tell the story without the explanatory commas, as if you’re telling to the person you want to be telling the story to: your friends, your family, your community.”

That approach has also made Futuro a launching pad for careers in audio. Not only does it invest in young producers and new ideas, but it also makes audio storytelling accessible to people of color who might not otherwise be able to access those resources. Futuro runs community podcast labs in Boston; Akron, Ohio; and Hartford, Conn. The podcast labs get storytellers in each city to produce pieces about the stories that matter to them.

“For creative people to feel like they have the backing of the company in trying something innovative is really important,” Hinojosa said. “I would say the same thing in terms of audio — it’s very much a culture of openness and trying things. It’s scary to be vulnerable and to be pitching, but that is what we’re trying to create as a company.”

Now: Can it do the same for podcasts?

Spotify is reportedly considering a subscription service just for its podcasts, a segment it’s invested in heavily the past couple of years. It was originally spotted by Variety’s Andrew Wallenstein

Looks like the premium podcast plan would be ad-free and some mix of exclusive extra content at price points somewhere between $3-$8. pic.twitter.com/ArK8xYg0CM

— Andrew Wallenstein (@awallenstein) November 6, 2020

The various options being subjected to Qualtricsification range from $2.99 to $7.99 a month. They all involve access to some variety of exclusive content — with or without ads, with or without early access.

Will it work? It’s hard to bet against Spotify, which has played the game very well in its growth from Stockholm startup to 144 million paying subscribers in 92 countries. But there are a number of things that make a podcast subscription service a significantly tougher sell than music was.

You’re competing with free and easy.

Music has been for sale for more than a century, dating back to sheet music and player piano rolls. When Napster & Co. came along, free music was thrilling, but also confusing and unreliable to many. More importantly, music companies were highly motivated to sue P2P file-sharing services into the ground, which they accomplished with Napster and most of its peers. A few high-profile, high-dollar lawsuits against random schmoes who downloaded a samizdat copy of The Bodyguard: Original Soundtrack Album went a long way toward discouraging P2P. So when Steve Jobs and Apple came along with 99-cent downloads — straightforward, legal, tied to the explosive growth of the iPod — the market was ready for it.

Podcasts are different. Podcasts have been free by default for as long as they’ve existed. There are plenty of apps that make the acts of subscribing, downloading, and listening to podcasts straightforward. That’s hard to compete with. Imagine if, when Spotify first launched, there was already a free product that gave you access to all the world’s music — but Spotify said that, for $9.99 a month, you could also get this super-good tier of premium, exclusive music. If the choices are “98% of the world’s music for free” and “100% of the world’s music for $9.99/month,” most people are going to be happy with the free option.

You know who else thought they had content that was awesome enough to get subscribers, despite an endless sea of free competition? Quibi.

Previous attempts haven’t gone too well.

The poster child for paid podcasting is Luminary, which launched to much excitement (and then much annoyance) last spring. It hasn’t taken off: Despite raising at least $130 million from investors, Luminary had only 80,000 paying subscribers one year in, Bloomberg reported.

But others have tried, too. Audible Channels, launched in 2016 and backed by both the might of Amazon and Audible’s audiobook dominance, never got very far. Stitcher Premium has been around for nearly four years and hasn’t set the world on fire. (It was recently bought by SiriusXM, which has its own established paid model.)

Things can change, of course. There wasn’t much of a market for paid digital news until The New York Times put up a paywall, after all, and it took the better part of a decade to really get that business whirring. But at this point, there’s been very little evidence of a market that’s just itching to pay for podcasts.

Podcasts don’t play well with each other in a subscription.

People need to be at least somewhat passionate about a podcast to want to pay for it. They need to think that its absence from their lives would be bad enough to merit 2 or 5 or 10 bucks a month. But those passions are hard to stretch across a broad-based subscription. If Spotify’s premium package includes, say, 40 shows, what share of them is any individual user going to be passionate about? HBO had to establish a reputation for quality and exclusivity — the idea that an “HBO show” was a thing — to get subscribers. Netflix had to have a huge library of existing TV shows and movies that weren’t easily available elsewhere, and then its own catalog of exclusives. A package of premium podcasts is likely to be less coherent editorially than, say, the package of premium stories you get with a subscription to The New York Times.

The subscription model is less congruent with the ad model than in other media formats.

In the digital news business, most smart publishers know not to be too reliant on a single revenue type. If you’re all about advertising, you’re subject to the vagaries of the ad market and constantly worried about attracting new audience. If you’re all about subscriptions, you risk dropping out of the public conversation and making it harder for people to sample your wares.

But news sites can generally pull this off because the two types of revenue come from two different audiences. At most, the majority of pageviews they get — and thus the majority of ad impressions they serve — come from users who click on one or two stories a month. They’re unlikely to be candidates for a subscription, but you can monetize them in this other way. Your subscribers, meanwhile, are your superfans — the 2% or 3% of your uniques who come back all the time and consume dozens or hundreds of stories a month.

What lets these two models coexist? The metered paywall. If you don’t put up a “Subscribe Now!” until someone’s fifth article, you’re letting the grazers be while serving them ads. And you’re identifying your potential superfans — those who hit 5 or 10 or however many articles.

It’s not clear how well that sort of model can work with podcasts. Limiting someone to, say, two premium episodes a month is a higher bar, technologically and in terms of marketing, that a clear free/paid split. And podcast audiences tend to be more loyal than news site readers: They subscribe to individual shows and listen to a large share of the episodes that get delivered to them, which is a level of commitment far greater than clicking a random link on Twitter.

All of that means, I think, that a podcast subscription model would make it very hard to successfully monetize those shows with advertising — which is the way nearly all podcasts are monetized. News sites could work both angles; podcasts will find that tougher.

Spotify, of course, would enter this business with a ton of advantages. It has a massive existing userbase to market to. It already charges more than 100 million credit cards every month. It’s spent a ton of money buying up high-value content, whether that’s The Ringer, Gimlet, or its exclusive distribution deal with The Joe Rogan Show.

Those are all advantages, and betting against Spotify has not typically been a good call over the past decade. But it’s still not clear the market’s there — whether at Spotify’s scale or even something smaller.

It’s something of a cheeky statement, given the tumultuous circumstances that led Simmons to exit ESPN in 2015, but it’s also an indication of the specific opportunity governing the thinking behind the acquisition: In addition to picking up Simmons, one of the more concretely valuable talents in the podcast space, and a prolific podcast operation that’s already generating considerable revenue ($15 million in 2018, according to a Wall Street Journal report a year ago), Spotify is establishing a strong presence in the sports category — a media genre that’s incredibly valuable.

More on that in a bit, but first some detail. Rumors of this acquisition starting bubbling up a few weeks ago, with the Journal picking up word of “early talks.” The official announcement went out this morning in time for Spotify’s earnings call. On Twitter, Recode’s Peter Kafka put out some additional detail: “Deal has been kicking around for months, moved into high gear in last few weeks. Teams negotiated through Super Bowl weekend, and did two overnight sessions; finalized after Spotify released its earnings this am.” It’s expected to close by the end of the Q1.

(Meanwhile, Spotify posted a largely good quarter — monthly active users, premium subscriber numbers, and revenue are all up — with positive gains on the podcast front. They claim to see “exponential growth” in podcast consumption, with more than 16 percent of its monthly active users engaging with podcast content and actual consumption hours in Q4 up nearly 200 percent from the year-ago quarter.)

The terms and size of the deal weren’t disclosed. Two things: First, we’ll find out soon enough, given that Spotify is publicly traded and will have to file the hard number at some point. And second, a likely reference point would be the price discussed during what were reportedly earlier talks between Simmons and AT&T’s WarnerMedia, which was thought to be around $100 million. Again, here’s a report from the dude Peter Kafka with that detail.

But we do know that the deal involves the entirety of The Ringer — that is, both its podcast operation and the broader digital media operation, which includes, among other things, a website and a YouTube-focused video operation. (Protect NBA Desktop.) All of that will be brought into Spotify, with Ek talking on the earnings call about the value that the audio and non-audio portions of The Ringer gives each other. This means that the Swedish streaming audio platform now owns a broader digital media operation, and it also means that all existing Ringer employees would have the opportunity to join Spotify. No layoffs are expected, broadly consistent with what we saw from the Gimlet Media acquisition a year ago.

Sticking to the labor front, there were some frustrations when word of the early talks hit the press last month. The Ringer’s workforce, which had unionized with WGA East, had issued a statement expressing dissatisfaction over having learned about the potential acquisition from news reports as opposed to management — a state of affairs that stretched out for weeks. This morning, the Ringer Union issued another statement in response to the official sale: “We anticipate a productive relationship with new management for all Ringer staff members…After weeks of public reports about a potential sale circulating without comment from our senior managers, we look forward to hearing from them about how this transaction will affect our day-to-day work.”

On Wednesday morning, the Ringer Union and the Writers Guild of America East learned that Spotify has purchased ​The Ringer. pic.twitter.com/dvNvpKnPMa

— Ringer Union (@RingerUnion) February 5, 2020

We are already in good faith negotiations at Gimlet, another Spotify owned entity, and look forward to continuing good faith negotiations at The Ringer. https://t.co/5gT2HDd8NH

— Writers Guild of America, East (@WGAEast) February 5, 2020

There will be questions over exclusivity — first in terms of the Ringer podcasts now available on platforms outside of Spotify. For what it’s worth, I imagine things won’t be much different from what we already see; remember that The Ringer had already experimented with Spotify exclusives via The Hottest Take, though the bulk of their audio output lives everywhere. (Also, Gimlet’s output hasn’t been completely dragged behind a Spotify wall.) Besides, there’s a good amount of value to be had — for now — from these Spotify-owned podcast publishers having their shows exist out in the open, where they can function as marketing assets that also generate ad revenue. Right now, I don’t think there’s much incentive to go fully exclusive. But it nonetheless seems like a strong card to hold onto in anticipation of, say, a bad growth year or some retaliatory action from a competing platform.

The second question of exclusivity pertains to Simmons as a key talent in front of and behind the mic. No solid word on that, but much like the Alex Blumberg-Matt Lieber situation, I imagine there’s some expectation that Simmons would be locked into Spotify for at least a few years. (Ek told Kafka he “wouldn’t have done the deal if I didn’t feel that Bill was in it for the right reasons, and didn’t want to build something much bigger.”)

Okay, back to sports. My original thinking about the value in this deal (laid out in an earlier column) mostly saw this as a Howard Stern-type situation — bringing in a blue-chip property in order to instantly increase a platform’s value in the eyes of potential audio consumers. That of course requires some amount of exclusivity — betting that the acquired asset is powerful enough to convert those previously happy doing their consuming on another platforms.

But today’s announcement positioned the acquisition as a means to drive a global expansion into sports, which opens up that thinking quite a bit. (The key lines, from Spotify’s chief content officer Dawn Ostroff: “We look forward to putting the full power of Spotify behind The Ringer as they drive our global sports strategy. As we set out to expand our sports and entertainment offerings, we wanted a best-in-class editorial team.” And this one from Simmons: “We couldn’t be more excited to unlock Spotify’s power of scale and discovery, introduce The Ringer to a new global audience and build the world’s flagship sports audio network.”)

There is indeed a lot of value to be mined from the sports category, which has been an audience and revenue driver across a wide spectrum of media — newspapers, radio, TV, websites, social media, and so on — but which still has major room to grow in podcasting. We do have some established operations working in the category — Barstool Sports and, yes, ESPN come to mind — but the prospect of a sports podcast operation that’s combined with the distributive reach of a streaming audio platform feels unparalleled. That’s especially true when that effort is globally oriented from the start; most of the money in sports media is still driven at the local and national level, so Spotify’s ability to build across its 79 markets is a huge potential advantage.

All of which is to say: There’s a good deal of growing that can be done from here, and I don’t think we’ve quite seen the shape of what this can or will be just yet.

That said, The Ringer isn’t just a sports media company; it traffics in a good deal of other areas, most notably pop culture. Spotify hasn’t owned a major digital media operation with a significant focus outside of audio before. So we should probably expect a fair amount of strange in this acquisition and the subsequent integration. There’s a general strategic direction that makes a ton of sense, but the details can get messy. And it’s the details that makes things work.

It’s being called Streaming Ad Insertion (SAI) — a conspicuous echo of Dynamic Ad Insertion — and at the outset, the ad technology will only be applied to Spotify’s original programming and shows that are exclusive to the platform.

Here’s how the tech is described in the company blog post:

With a direct connection to millions of podcast listeners, best-in-class content, and a robust monetization platform, Spotify is uniquely positioned to make podcasts addressable for digital advertisers. Spotify Podcast Ads are powered by Streaming Ad Insertion (SAI), which leverages streaming to deliver Spotify’s full digital suite of planning, reporting, and measurement capabilities. Spotify Podcast Ads offer the intimacy and quality of traditional podcast ads with the precision and transparency of modern-day digital marketing…

In 2016, the IAB unified measurement of “ad delivery” across the industry, but due to the distributed, downloaded nature of podcasting, the new guidelines could not tell advertisers whether listeners actually heard their ads. Spotify Podcast Ads measure real impressions as they occur, reporting on the age, gender, device type, and listening behavior of the audience reached.

The company says this is the first time this granularity of listening data is being made available for advertisers (and creators) within the podcast context. “With the launch of SAI, Spotify is the only place where podcasts are getting reach at scale that’s supported by advertising,” said Joel Withrow, senior product manager of podcast monetization at Spotify (and formerly of Megaphone).

Puma was among the first to try out the offering, with the global footwear brand running host-read ads into Jemele Hill is Unbothered. The blog post noted that the campaign “drove ad recall lift of 18 points.”

Spotify’s push into podcast ad tech should surprise practically nobody. You can trace this thread at least as far back to a TechCrunch report from January 2019, which reported that Spotify had been selling ads on its own podcasts since mid-2018 and was then deciding how to approach ad tech. In June, the company announced that brands can now target ads to the platform’s free-tier listeners based on podcasts they consume, an expression of how podcasting inventory can be further relevant to its broader advertising infrastructure.

That the technology will initially be limited to the platform’s original and exclusive shows is also unsurprising, since any application to third-party podcasts would probably require Spotify to strike deals with those creators and publishers. I imagine the longer-term goal is to open SAI up to everybody, though the company chose to be vague on this point for now. When I raised the question, they emphasized that SAI is currently in a test phase.

In accordance with that, it should be noted that key execution details are still being worked out, like the standards of the ad unit format and how ad creative production ends up being handled at the end of the day. The host-read ad is expected to be the major format, of course, but the team also discussed alternative producer-created advertising experiences that “feel like it comes from the world of the show” (à la the narrative-ish pseudo-docu-style ads you get in some Gimlet shows). That design pursuit would involve considerable attention around volume level, ad loads, production quality, and so on for listeners not to feel much difference from the podcast advertising experiences they’ve been getting — other than the fact that they’re being served ads (theoretically) more relevant to them.

“We’re bringing podcast advertising up to par with what marketers expect from digital advertising in general, and we’re working to do that while preserving what’s unique and good and effective about podcast advertising,” said Matt Lieber, Gimlet co-founder and now Spotify’s head of podcast operations. “We’re not trying to facilitate a radio advertising-style world.”

For now, Spotify will be handling the creation of advertising experiences that will be funneled to the SAI product. Not to be that guy, but this has the approximate — if not completely matching — shape of a tinfoil-hat theory I was kicking around back when I was writing about the Gimlet acquisition:

[Spotify has] been trying to become the monetization layer for musicians straight-up. I imagine they would want to do the same for podcasts.

But of course, podcast advertising is a completely different animal from digital audio advertising as they would know it. (For now, anyway.) Which brings me to my tinfoil-hat theory: One possible future sees the Gimlet Creative team being diverted to focus on developing new-age advertising experiences for Spotify to inject into its original programs and to supply its future podcast monetization tools.

Anyway, when I asked whether we would eventually see outside ad agencies — like, I don’t know, Wieden+Kennedy or something — supplying ad creatives for SAI in the future, Lieber acknowledged the possibility. “But what we’re saying at this point is that we’re not going to accept just any kind of advertising,” he added. “Whatever comes from out-of-house would still have to go through our standards.”

Okay — so, with all the details laid out: What does all of this mean?

The fact that Spotify is focused on building its own proprietary podcast ad tech — and meeting the needs of brands still wary about the relative bespoke/classical nature of podcast advertising re: targeting, audience segmentation, and so on — means it’s motivated to realize a significant leap in podcast ad dollars. To close the gap (as Lieber has consistently framed the problem in the past) between podcast listening and podcast monetization.

“We still think the industry as a whole is vastly under-monetized — year over year, the level of podcast creation and consumption continues to outpace monetization,” Withrow said. “We believe that SAI will pull more revenue into the industry, which will allow more people to make more content, which in turn will lead to more revenue. It’s a virtuous cycle.”

But one risk is that Spotify becomes a dominant facilitator of all podcast advertising dollars — eventually assuming a YouTube-like position and incurring all the associated complications for creator power and autonomy that come with that configuration. Another possible concern is blurring the conceptual lines between podcasts and streaming music — two very different kinds of experiences and engagement — from the perspective of brands buying ads on Spotify. That could lead to some sort of warping in podcast advertising value.

Spotify, of course, believes this won’t happen, and that any value created for podcasting on Spotify will trickle outward into the broader ecosystem — rising tides, all boats, that kind of thing. “What we’re hoping is that SAI will help more advertisers become more comfortable with podcasts,” Withrow said. “And we hope they’ll like the results to the point where more brands will want to come into the medium and even drive their investment outside of Spotify and within the industry as a whole.”

We shall see. For now, SAI is in a test phase, as they say, and we’ll be paying very close attention to what happens within and without.

The announcement is careful to note that this new category is “for the 2020 prize cycle,” and administrator Dana Canedy calls it “an experimental category.” In other words, audio folks should hope this cycle goes smoothly so it becomes a permanent part of the mix. It’ll be interesting to see how jurors and the board compare the different kinds of audio work they’ll be seeing: special limited-run series, individual episodes from long-running shows, radio segments, and so on.

(There’ve been plenty of changes to Pulitzer categories in the past. They killed off the Correspondence prize in 1947. The prize in Newspaper History was only given once, in 1918. To a couple grad students! And they don’t bother to call the National and International Reporting prizes “Telegraphic” any more. Journalism Pulitzer categories added since 1970: Commentary, Criticism, Feature Writing, and Explanatory Reporting.)

Audio Reporting will be the 15th journalism Pulitzer category; the last significant change was for the prize year 2007, when a “Local Reporting” category replaced “Beat Reporting.” That year, submissions also opened up to online journalism in most categories.

A variety of other changes in the years since have further broadened the work eligible for entry, leading to Pulitzer wins or finalist spots for online-first outlets (ProPublica, Center for Investigative Reporting, BuzzFeed News, InsideClimate News, The Marshall Project) and magazines (The Atlantic, The New Yorker, GQ, National Geographic). Now, shows like This American Life, Caliphate, In the Dark, 1619, Bundyville, Slow Burn, or Trump Inc. might have the chance to join them.

Some radio people weren’t too excited about the new category being associated with the podcast boom, given that audio journalism was not invented by Serial in 2014.

So…yay, an audio Pulitzer.

But this, from Pulitzer administrator Dana Canedy…

"The renaissance of audio journalism in recent years…"

Puh.

Leeze.

We've been here the whole damn time. https://t.co/BDYQVumbLq

— Kai Ryssdal (@kairyssdal) December 5, 2019

Nonetheless, here we are. Pulitzer submissions, by the way, open December 16 and close on January 24. The winners will be announced in April. Also: “Audio entries must be submitted without preroll advertising.”

A bummer this came too late things like Caliphate for @InTheDarkAPM’s amazing last season but glad that kind of work will be eligible in the future. https://t.co/F4nf0GtPre

— Lydia Polgreen (@lpolgreen) December 5, 2019

A better way to modernize the Pulitzers would be to make the categories platform agnostic. Give a prize to an Instagram Story if it's good enough https://t.co/IyDXFaaila

— David Uberti (@DavidUberti) December 5, 2019

Pulitzer entries will for the first time be accepted “via weblink.” Kinda says it all. https://t.co/070HKsBpCA

— Zach Seward (@zseward) December 6, 2019

A note from Nick. Five years ago on this day — literally, November 5, 2014 — I published the first issue of this newsletter. (Lord, it hurts just to look at it.) And for one reason or another, I haven’t stopped publishing the damn thing since, through major life changes and tragedies, professional disasters and upswings, days where I have a spring in my step and the many more days where it’s painful to simply get out of bed.

Unexpectedly, this newsletter has become the anchor of my professional and creative life. To honor the half-decade of that fact, I’d like to take this opportunity to express my immense gratitude for the extended Hot Pod family (in addition to my actual family, which goes without saying): the folks at Nieman Lab for their long-standing syndication and friendly support; Caroline Crampton for her excellent work since joining the team last summer; Aude White, our most recent addition, for her glorious illustrations; absolutely everybody who’s offered me advice, mentorship, and sharp criticism over the past five years; and, of course, you, the reader. There have been hard days and bad mistakes, but on the whole, it’s been a fun ride.

This is usually the point in one of these things where the reflecting writer, in this case me, makes some positive and hopeful gesture about the days to come. “It’s been a great five years, here’s to five more,” or some pablum like that. But I’m afraid I lack the disposition to say that with any conviction. I mean, I hope I’ll still be here working on this space in one form or another; after all, despite and because of everything, I still really love this shit. But you can never really know about tomorrow, you know? The media business — along with just about everything around it — has never felt more precarious, and I’m deeply cognizant that the fate of this publication can turn on a dime, perhaps even less.

Whatever happens, though, I hope you know this: It’s been a privilege to serve this community, and for what it’s worth, I’ve tried my best.

Anyway, as you can probably guess by now, I’m not the sort of person who would use one of these anniversary issues to run some hazy retrospective highlighting all the stuff this newsletter has done over the past five years. I’d rather look forward, and down at the mud. So, for the occasion, I’m running with something much closer to my DNA: a special package featuring your gripes and frustrations.

Festivus, for the rest of us. Over the past month, we’ve been running a call for opinions built around a fairly straightforward question: “What are you most frustrated by?” (With respect to the podcast industry, of course.) To put it mildly, folks obliged.

Let me start by establishing what I tried to do this with this piece. Editorially, the goal was to lay out various clusters of frustrations being felt by a cross-section of the Hot Pod readership — at least, to the best that I could with the format I’ve chosen. Creatively, the idea of the format is to communicate what it feels like to live with my inbox and various messaging accounts. That’s pretentiously phrased, but you’ll see what I mean soon enough.

Some reading notes:

• Different chunks represent different people, in case it isn’t clear.
• The sections marked as “Deep Dives” represent entries from a single contributor who took the time to lay out an extensive, effectively written submission.
• For practical reasons, I’m not publishing every response — so don’t take it personally if you don’t see yours.
• In adherence to the retweets ≠ endorsements principle, I don’t necessarily agree with what’s being printed. The point is to illustrate that person’s truth.
• Almost everybody requested anonymity. So for simplicity’s sake, I decided to implement blanket anonymity for all responses, including from those who listed their names.
• There were a handful of very specific frustrations, which I’m setting aside for now to vet as leads for future columns.

All right, enough windup. To the question: What are you most frustrated by?

Part One

The rise of big money podcast companies and their treatment of content creators. It harkens back to they way major labels took advantage of young artists in the ’70s. Bad contracts explicitly designed to take advantage of podcast creators who don’t have the resources or knowledge to fully understand every detail of the contract. No aspect of the industry is immune.

The saturation of the market by VC-funded companies that never need to make a profit, squeezing out anyone who is trying to run a normal business. You know, like every industry now.

That podcasting has gone Hollywood. There is such an opportunity to stay true and fresh, unique and genuine, without requirements and how-to’s along with celebrity endorsements.

It’s 98 percent fucking boring, and even worse, most of the industry is built on the mindset of tech entrepreneurship, which is quick-buck speculative capitalism based on potential and not real value. This means the industry is inherently geared towards overwork and shitty treatment of people. There’s so much disjunct between working conditions and the general public-facing “golden age” vibe.

The emphasis on SCALE. Not everything is scalable, nor should it be! This is maybe a broader issue in media, or the entire economy, but it does feel like we’re heading toward a place where there’s a stark line between the haves and the have-nots, where you can only survive if you have a huge audience and the ability to execute a diversified monetization strategy. Idk, maybe we’re already in that place?

I’m frustrated that an increasing number of creators are choosing to take the (relatively) easy cash and putting so much of their content behind paywalls and on specific platforms. Of course, I understand the appeal and concede that it’s hard to get mad about individual people and teams getting paid for their hard work and lending their voices and good names to the medium, but I can’t help but feel that each otherwise-appealing show I learn about whose access is restricted in some way moves us further away from the broad accessibility I’ve long found such an appealing aspect of the podcast ecosystem.

Lots of focus (in terms of news and infrastructure) on large and well-funded podcasts and podcasting entities, and a bit on the just-starting-out and hobbyist end of the spectrum, but very, very little on the mid-range offerings that are not part of established networks.

Not getting paid on time.

The podcast advice world is chaotic, at best. Everyone’s an expert.

The difficulty of reaching larger audiences (while many mediocre podcasts have huge listener numbers).

It is so hard to get people to know my show exists. I’ve tried everything to boost my numbers…it’s so hard to promote yourself above the sea of podcasts, especially if you’re not a new buzzy show. I have about 60,000 listeners, which was a great number to have in 2016 or 2017 when I was considered a mid-sized show that could reliably get ads. But my numbers have stagnated for years as new shows are cropping up every day with celebrity hosts or major networks promoting them.

I find that the advertisers are consolidating their ad spend with fewer and fewer agencies and fewer and fewer networks, leaving mid-sized networks in a really tough spot.

Weak-ass ad sales across the board.

The ads! So many pods have ads that are so, so bad. Even pods that should know better. Too many ads in too short a time, fakey FM-radio-sounding ad reads, ads for extremely evil companies in that are in direct conflict with the mission of the pod, even sped-up audio sometimes. LOOKING AT YOU, THE DAILY.

CPM being the standard for advertising rates.

Lack of ways to monetize expensive shows to produce (and by the way traditional CPM model doesn’t take into consideration the quality of the content or cost to make).

Part Two

Classism and snobbery when it comes to storytelling. The producer/creator community can sometimes overlook the importance of a story because the sound quality or design isn’t to their standard. Making audio documentaries and being able to attend HearSay is a privilege not many people can afford, and this often makes being within podcasting hostile and unwelcoming.

It has always been frustrating that my ideas are not accepted and welcomed even though they are very compelling and I have been given interviews and chosen as finalists. Lack of connections has always been frustrating too. What about people that don’t know important people in the industry.

We sorely lack an avenue/forum for indie pods to break into. Kinda seems like the main gates into the medium have been closed for this type of content by major podcast production firms.

Easy listener discovery of new, potentially great podcasts that are being made outside the big networks and creators is still non existent.

Anonymous one-star Apple Podcasts ratings having such outsized importance on visibility. And I guess Apple’s rating system more generally. And Apple’s app. Okay, maybe my answer is just Apple.

No exposure for independent shows! Like, literally none whatsoever. I’ve sent out dozens of press release kits for a new, highly produced documentary I made and received nothing but silence.

I’m frustrated that everyone is talking about diversity in podcasting but there is no pipeline to bring in candidates from other fields. It feels like we can train to get into podcasting, but even from there to an internship seems like a leap when the industry has so much talent.

It’s still an old boys’ club — and yes, women are represented at events and on panels, but it’s still a one-off representation, and it isn’t the default nor is it the commonality. Women are represented as the workhorses for the content creation and as amazing producers, but they are not shown as running the major ad tech companies, the major public radio networks, nor the major independent content-creation organizations…Women working to advance podcasting isn’t a trend, nor is it just about stay-at-home moms and wellness shows. Treat us like the real tech-savvy business colleagues we are.

The inaccessibility of it all!!! It’s so easy to use a transcription service for your audio and then edit for cultural competence. It would really show your awareness and commitment to offering the most accessible podcast you can. The industry cultivates millions of dollars and still disabled people of color are overlooked every time.

It’s overwhelmingly New York City-centered. It’s sad that we aren’t seeing more efforts to build and nurture existing communities in Atlanta and Minneapolis and hell, even Chicago and L.A. and Colorado and elsewhere. Local stations and independent creators are doing great work all over but you wouldn’t know it based on where all the companies and major folks are based and centered. The magazine industry is a bad example to follow, and it won’t grow if it keeps up (especially given the costs of real estate and housing and other barriers for young people in NYC).

That there’s still such a relentless focus on New York and being in New York. We could do so much more if we broadened our ideas of both how to work and whose work is relevant.

The assumption by podcast folks that everyone in podcasting agrees with them politically and socially. For an industry as diverse and widespread as podcasting, there is a lack of understanding that diverse viewpoints exist. This comes off as smug and alienates half of the industry/audiences. Hot Pod is an offender here as well.

I’m frustrated by the lack of ambition in the U.K. in particular.

Why focus this project on frustrations, and not on what people are the most hopeful about? I don’t really need more downers in my day. I’d be more curious to hear what industry experts envision for the future.

Lack of analytics for us poor researchers.

I just want a job.

Part Three

It feels like this crazy new boom of investor interest in money hasn’t actually led to a boom in great new content.

Ultimately, I don’t even care if good stuff gets made en masse any more; like everyone keeps saying, it’s like TV or books or whatever now, just a medium. What frustrates me is having to have stupid conversations every time someone says “podcast” — worse still at a conference. It’s like being in a bad church.

Too much crime.

Popularity of irresponsible true crime.

Everybody doing true crime.

I’m frustrated that I constantly hear ex-radio hosts/people talking about how they’ve “essentially” been podcasting for decades or whatever. Experience in radio doesn’t necessarily make you a great podcaster.

People aren’t sure exactly what they want, but they know they want to make a podcast. They tend to get so wrapped up in metrics without ever bothering to promote their show. Guess what? You only have a dozen or so listeners because you haven’t bothered to tell anyone your show exists!

In larger corporations that have decided to add a podcasting arm, or attempted to get into the industry, most people being put into positions of power are people with little to no experience actually producing podcasts — or even audio of any kind. This means that often you end up working for people who have no idea how labor-intensive it is to produce a podcast, how much it costs, how to market or promote a podcast, how to monetize a podcast. This means constantly having to educate people who are above you in the hierarchy, and wasting a lot of time trying things that you know will not work, or producing less-than-ideal-quality work, or making bad business deals or overpromising clients.

Money for nothing [by Caroline Crampton]. Podcoin, an app that promised to “pay you to listen to podcasts,” shuts down today. It began operation in December 2018 and claimed to hit 10,000 active daily users in April before being added to The Meet Group’s network of mobile apps. (Albeit seemingly without money changing hands — perhaps not surprising since the CEO of Podcoin and the CEO of The Meet Group are brothers.) Now, because it “just failed to sustain momentum,” it is going offline less than a year later.

The mechanism behind Podcoin was questioned by users right from the get-go (as in this Reddit thread, for instance), but here’s how it was supposed to work: For every 10 minutes of podcasts that you listened to via the app, you earned one “podcoin,” which could then be redeemed against rewards such as Bose headphones and Amazon gift cards. In its FAQs, the company referred to the act of listening as “podcoin mining,” positioning their product as a kind of hybrid podcatcher and cryptocurrency, I suppose. On that page, they also detail various checks and balances meant to ensure the listens were genuine, rather than generated by bots.

I’ve been ambiently interested in Podcoin since the first time I saw someone post about it in a podcasting Facebook group that I belong to. It seemed a perfect distillation of some of the more questionable ventures that crop up now and then in the podcasting space. It was created by Geoff and David Cook, siblings from the family who made myyearbook.com and then sold it in 2011 for $100 million. The more I looked into this venture, the more intrigued I became. For instance, this passage — part of the answer to the not-unreasonable question “How is it possible to pay me to listen?” — is wild:

What is wrong with the larger app ecosystem that the idea of rewarding you for your time is so strange. Why is that some corporate overlord should aggregate all your time and leave you even unhappier than you were before while they resell your information to the highest bidder?

From what I could see, Podcoin had no visible means of generating revenue, although there was a long-term plan to charge podcasters to have their shows featured. And although there were various streak incentives that would deliver more “podcoin,” it would still take hours of listening every day for years to earn enough for most of the rewards, a fact quickly picked up by most of the people I’ve seen discussing whether to bother with the app.

That said, some people were obviously engaging with the app, at least if the user figures were to be believed. I went in search of these Podcoin users and ended up speaking to three different people who’d experimented with the app, to find out how a system like this looks from the inside.

Suzy Buttress, who makes The Casual Birder Podcast, told me she was “thrilled” when she first heard about the app since it sounded like a way for her to spread the word of her show to more listeners without having to spend money. (She’s an independent podcaster with a self-described “very limited” marketing budget.) “It felt like a win-win situation. Here were people who already listened to podcasts, being encouraged to listen to more,” she told me over email. Podcoin offered a free two-week promotion after a podcaster “claimed” their show on the app, and Suzy had seen others posting about “incredible uplifts in listeners, of thousands at a time,” she said.

However, her own experience was somewhat different. “During my two-week promotion I received 76 listens and 20 subscribers — far fewer than I was receiving via my other efforts (as evidenced through the podcast destination listening stats that my host provides).” After that initial fortnight, to continue to be featured, a show needed to insert ads for Podcoin, and based on the poor showing Suzy decided against promoting the app and instead chose to stick to the “traditional ways” of raising the profile of her show.

David Couto, who makes Sleepy Time Tales, said he became intrigued by the app both when he initially saw it ranking fourth in the user-agents for his show (he used Chartable to see this) and when, like Suzy, he saw other independent podcasters posting on social media about their Podcoin successes. He similarly saw little return from claiming his show on the app but told me over email that he was intrigued by one aspect of the analytics offered, which allowed him to see what other shows his listeners were listening to.

Scott Ertz, editor-in-chief of Plughitz Live and host of F5 Live: Refreshing Technology, told me that he also initially heard of Podcoin via an online podcasting community, when another member was asking for the group’s opinion of whether an invitation he’d received from the app was “a scam.” Scott decided to look into it in more detail and reached out to CEO David Cook for answers.

“After talking to him via email, I no longer believed that it was a scam (though I also didn’t believe it was a good idea), and decided to give the platform a shot as a podcaster and claimed my shows,” Scott said. However, the promised two-week featured periods for all of the 11 shows he runs never materialized, and he feels like the app had little to offer. “The idea of ‘paying’ listeners is a cute way to get media coverage, but it never had any real-world value for either listeners or podcasters,” he added.

I sent out a lot of inquiries, but I couldn’t find any dedicated user of Podcoin as a listener to tell me about what rewards they might have earned in the nine months or so the app was active. Although based on some rough calculations and the fact that there was a six-hour-per-day “mining” limit, I’d be surprised if many of those Bose headphones actually shipped.

And now, Podcoin shuts down, its superficially attractive promise of payment for podcast listening revealed to be untenable, just as everyone who looked closely at it thought it was. (Although it might not be gone forever; the company’s post about the closure says “We did learn A LOT, and we’ll be applying it to a future app.”) However, before I wrap up this small dispatch from the venture-funded fringes of the podcasting tech scene, I must just share with you this quote from the company’s FAQ page:

We think it’s odd that nearly every venture-backed app today burns money hand over fist and gives nothing back to their audience, and yet, our model is the strange one.

Make of that what you will.

[Nick’s note to the kicker above: ]

Existing players in this space include Slate’s Supporting Cast (which I wrote about in February), a new startup called Supercast (which Caroline wrote about last week), and emerging initiatives from companies primarily focused on other media formats, like Patreon and Substack.

These efforts appear to be fueled by twin observations: first, that the number of podcasters (and therefore potential customers) has ballooned to astronomical levels over the past couple of years, and second, that conventional podcast advertising, long the industry’s default economic engine, feels increasingly constrained within a layer of established publishers and similarly established newcomers (i.e. legacy brands, celebrities, and so on). As such, there’s a potent opportunity to create better tools, systems, and pathways for the wide universe of everyone else to access alternative means of monetization. The question is what those tools will be — and who’ll be able to effectively build them for the masses.

One recent addition to this cadre of note is RedCircle, a San Francisco-based startup founded by Mike Kadin and Jeremy Lermitte, a pair of tech-industry operatives who, as they’re quick to tell you, hail from Uber, the often-controversial ride-sharing giant. “When we looked at the [podcast] industry, we made the observation that there just wasn’t a lot of sophisticated technology in place,” said Lermitte when we spoke over the phone last week. “A lot of the tools we built for Uber were around providing marketers and operations people with tools to run and grow their cities, and so we felt like we could actually apply a lot of what we’ve done for and learned from Uber to create value for a lot of people.”

When the startup made its first press push back in April, much of the emphasis was on a cross-promotion-oriented audience development tool. Since then, RedCircle has expanded its value proposition to offer a broader suite of solutions, including free hosting, standard analytics, and most importantly, infrastructure to help podcast creators directly monetize their shows through channels like donations and premium subscriptions. The website does a pretty good job showing you how the backend of its platform works right off the bat, so I won’t get into the technicals here.

RedCircle’s plan, it seems, is to develop an ever-iterating platform that will be a lot of things for a lot of podcast creators. Which is also to say: RedCircle will very likely continue to expand the toolset it’s offering, up to and including eventually building out an alternative on-platform advertising marketplace. (I’m told that the company has already gotten a few brands on board with that program.) In our phone call, Kadin and Lermitte emphasized a focus on independent publishers, which they seem to define broadly; their current client list includes YouTubers (Approachables), reality TV figures (Dear Albie), and sports radio talent (Tony Bruno).

At the moment, the startup claims to be gaining some steam. Kadin and Lermitte say that they’re growing 38 percent month-over-month; when pressed, they said that number refers to growth in downloads of podcast episodes hosted on the platform. Personally, I’d be more interested to see growth metrics tethered to direct revenue volume transacted on the platform, but I suppose we all have to start somewhere.

Speaking of which, we should talk about RedCircle’s business model. In its current iteration, the startup’s revenue engines are primarily attached to its direct monetization tools: Podcasters using its donation service will be charged 4.5 percent of their received donations (plus Stripe fees), while podcasters using its premium subscription service will be charged 12 percent (plus Stripe fees). Again, RedCircle is likely to expand its services, which means that its revenue channels will also expand along with it.

Given the current business model, I asked Kadin and Lermitte if people should think about RedCircle as, say, Substack or Memberful, but for podcasts. The duo prefers a different reference point: Shopify, the Canadian e-commerce platform giant that offers a suite of services (payments, marketing, customer engagement, shipping, and so on) to a wide range of online merchants. It’s an appealing model, given that Shopify, which is publicly traded, brought in over $1 billion in revenues last year. And you can probably derive the startup’s endgame from this metaphor: If RedCircle is successful, it can become an entire layer of the growing podcast ecosystem.

Of course, the metaphor has its limits. It’s fairly reasonable to conceptualize the growth potential of the online merchant category as theoretically infinite. After all, as long as people need goods and services, there will always be an ever-growing, ever-iterating, and ever-evolving pool of online merchants to meet those needs. But is it appropriate to think of media companies (and podcast publishers specifically) along similar lines? Or are the boundaries of that pool significantly smaller and much more defined?

Lofty questions, these. They’re worth mulling over, I think, not just in the context of the ambition of upstarts like RedCircle, but also in terms of how we should think about the broader trends informing the creation of these ventures. To reframe the questions in the prior paragraph: We know the number of podcasts has ballooned. To what extent is that volume sustainable? In other words, is there enough listening (and subsequent direct revenue engagement) to keep most of those podcasts around?

But those are broader considerations, and I’d understand if you think it to be navel-gazing. For now, and for whatever proportion of those new small-to-midsize podcasts will persist, there exists a definite need for an alternative economy along with tools to support it. Whether RedCircle — or Supporting Cast, Patreon, and so on — ends up being the main solution over the long term remains to be seen. But the opportunity is nonetheless very much there.

Shout-out to Gastropod, the indie podcast about the history and science food by Cynthia Graber and Nicola Twilley, which turns five this week. Five! In podcast years, that’s old enough to be buying your first house but still be riding on your family’s phone plan. Graber and Twilley have built something wonderful, independent, and free. Here’s to five more.

Thirst Aid Kit returns on Thursday. Reminder: The podcast is now with Slate.

Gimlet’s StartUp will return for a mini-season in October, where the marketing vehicle-turned-autobiographical documentary-turned-hybrid of the two will cover the company’s acquisition by Spotify. Once that’s over, I’d love to hear about the experience of the mini-season from the perspective of Spotify’s comms department. I can’t even begin to imagine.

PodFund has announced three more creator investments, including a podcast studio. They are DIVE Studios, Domino Sound, and Osiris Podcasts. Here’s the blog post.

Adventures in music licensing: a case study. So there’s this upcoming independent project that I’ve been tracking pretty closely. It’s called Moonface (stylized as MOONFACE), it’s a six-part fiction podcast by a team led by KPCC alum James Kim, and it’s set to be a bilingual production, carrying out its story in both English and Korean.

MOONFACE is an incredibly personal show. It was inspired by many things, but mainly my experiences with:

Wanting to be white
Fear of being a stereotype
My parents

The trailer is out now. The show debuts on October 9. pic.twitter.com/YwMdnDPKIX

— James Kim (@TooManyJames_s) September 16, 2019

Also, it’s going to feature a good deal of licensed music (including tracks from Clairo, Big Thief, and Peggy Gou), which is something I’ve long wanted to see done more widely in podcast production. Getting the rights to use music is a pretty costly transaction, though, often prohibitively so for independent productions made on a shoestring budget. So I thought I’d check in and talk with Kim about his (admittedly atypical) experience getting labels on board with his project. The chat ended up touching on a broader series of topics around the idea of music and podcasting. A lot of it could be useful to you.

I decided to run this as an “as told by” piece, for readability’s sake. Here’s Kim:

Moonface will drop in its entirety on October 9.

Three things I find interesting

• A new project tracking public media mergers, appropriately called the Public Media Merger Project. Shoutout to Elizabeth Hansen, friend of the newsletter and the person who’s leading the project.
• From Quartz: “How Neil Young’s failed anti-streaming business helped the music industry.” Neil Young, catalyst of dialectics.
• Google says it’s making adjustments to how it is storing audio recordings off its Google Assistant-powered products, seemingly as a response to backlash over privacy issues. Here’s the official blog post, and I found the Wired writeup most comprehensive if you’re starting out with this thread.

PodPass is a simple, open protocol that uses RSS and HTML to enable both existing and new authenticated interactions for podcasts across platforms.

As podcasting develops new services that require direct relationships with listeners — such as exclusive content, membership, and private feeds — we believe there’s a need for a new protocol that provides a better listener experience, more control for podcasters, and a standardized method for apps to offer access to their users.

Imagine a listener wants to hear bonus content from her favorite show as a benefit of being a supporter. The podcaster’s hosting provider offers access to extended versions of episodes, appearing in the same podcast feed for logged-in members.

Today, this scenario requires separate feeds, copying and pasting URLs, logging into separate websites, and losing your listening history when membership lapses. But it’s possible in a PodPass future. Podpass is an open protocol that enables listener identity management to support publishers’ diverse business needs.

There is an industry trend toward more direct listener monetization and engagement. This includes crowdfunding, membership, tipping, and donations, as well as exclusive and premium content.

This is a healthy development — expanding the range of touch points with listeners beyond the ad impression and helping publishers diversify their revenue and business models. The trend speaks to the depth of experience that spoken-word audio elicits, and it encompasses other podcast engagement strategies such as live shows, email newsletters, fan clubs, surveys, and experiments with personalization and interactivity.

A common need across all of these developments is to authenticate or change permissions based on the listener’s level of access. The listener usually needs to sign in to participate, and often the podcaster seeks more of the listener’s information to develop a more valuable relationship.

To clarify: When we talk about “identity,” we are not necessarily talking about personally identifiable information. In the world of access control, the responsibilities are broken into authentication, identification, and authorization.

Authentication is the job of ensuring someone is who they say they are. Authorization is the job of determining what a given person (or pseudo-anonymous user id) should and should not have access to. Identification is like the glue between these steps, allowing an authenticated person to make a request which requires authorization.

PodPass offers a way for apps to trigger both the authentication and authorization steps — controlled by the podcast host — with the apps offering the identity “glue” over time.

This crucial authentication step introduces obstacles and opportunities for the industry. There’s a risk that podcast listening apps become the default brokers of identity verification and authenticated access in podcasting. In other words, as a listener you may find yourself having to install five different apps to get all your favorite shows exclusive to a platform, and copying/pasting private feed URLs to access others.

More problematic, podcasters may find themselves locked out of a direct relationship with their truest fans, relegated to the role of a content supplier to platforms that control their experience. Ultimately, listeners are being asked to trade control and privacy for access and participation.

This can be an intentional strategy for apps to gain adoption — most visibly playing out at Luminary. Some podcasters are clearly comfortable making this tradeoff. Others, not so much.

Meanwhile, more podcasters are turning to third-party hosting and payment solutions that help support bonus, exclusive, or private content, such as Patreon, Supporting Cast, Acast Access, Glow.fm, RedCircle, Substack, and Memberful. But these services are constrained by available user experiences (primarily, providing a link to a fan who then has to copy and paste it into their listening app) and can face significant friction pursuing app-by-app integrations.

Apple, Google, Spotify, and perhaps other new entrants could “solve” this at scale by driving a dominant platform-based identity layer and monetization approach of their own, as they have done in other markets (alongside Facebook, Amazon, and Netflix). Even in that scenario, there may still be room to sustain a handful of smaller vertical or community-focused paywalled apps.

But at the logical extreme, app-based identity results in either winner-take-all platform hegemony or further fragmentation of podcast distribution, discovery, and monetization. At a moment when podcasting is still reaching new audiences and diversifying its business models, that kind of bundling comes at a cost to growth in podcasting.

Right now, it’s important to recognize that these choices and tradeoffs are still in play, and podcast publishers retain significant leverage in shaping the outcomes.

To recap: Authenticated podcasting is coming, and current approaches face a set of problems.

• Listeners need to manage multiple feeds for the same show, such as “free” and “paid.”
• Listeners don’t have a way to keep track of heard episodes as they transition from unauthenticated (public) feeds to authenticated (private) ones.
• Publishers need to initiate authentication and have no standard methodology, while interested listeners want to provide authentication wherever they already listen to podcasts.
• Publishers have to maintain multiple feeds.
• Publishers can’t monetize exclusive content cross-platform.
• Podcasts can’t be easily personalized in their production or distribution (for example, a personal fitness podcast tailored to your specific goals).
• Apps and platforms can’t offer simple access to exclusive/member content from multiple publishers without negotiating separate deals/integrations or building and offering their own vertical solution.

To be clear, we are not suggesting that, short of PodPass adoption, podcasting is in imminent danger. The vast majority of current listening and monetization via advertising remains untouched by these new needs and opportunities. But the trend towards authenticated podcasting is unstoppable and PodPass can help ensure it leads to more shared value and growth and avoids a tragedy of the commons.

PodPass is a simple protocol that uses RSS and HTML to enable both existing and new identity-based interactions for podcasting across platforms. It provides two main elements:

1. A simple set of rules to manage user identity implemented by podcast hosts and listening apps. This entails a method of indicating support, a one-way message-passing API allowing web pages to send (and client apps to receive) updates to a podcast subscription, and a standard way for client apps to request feeds and enclosures with a bearer token. (Here’s the tech spec for more detail.)
2. A consistent user experience framework for listeners to interact with in any client app. (Here’s an example of a possible listener experience.)

The introduction of a lightweight, web-like identity layer to podcast subscriptions on an opt-in basis can support new and better options where identity can enhance the experience for listeners and align with publishers’ business needs.

Imagine:

• A loyal listener opens her podcast app and sees a new member-only show from her favorite network. She listens to the free pilot episode, and is prompted to activate her account to hear the rest of the season. She logs in and keeps listening.
• A podcaster decides to offer an ad-free version of her show to paying fans. Her hosting company offers special access without ads injected for logged-in backers.
• A new podcast app wants to provide a universal catalog of podcasts, including private, member-only, and premium feeds from podcasters.
• An organization decides to offer a staff-only podcast. After a quick verification, the employee gains access to the private feed.

PodPass makes these and many other scenarios possible. You have probably encountered something similar already: PodPass is akin to activating your cable or HBO account on Hulu or Amazon Video — or storing your credentials in your web browser for sites you sign into frequently.

Here’s how it works:

There is understandable confusion about the evolution of standards in podcasting and the competing efforts to advance the medium. It is important to clarify what PodPass is not.

• PodPass is not a new product from any one company.
• PodPass is not a replacement for existing third-party membership/payment services like Patreon.
• PodPass is not a CRM or payment system.
• PodPass is not limited to paid-access use cases.

What’s next?

PodPass emerged from a series of conversations that the RadioPublic team has been having with stakeholders in podcasting across publishers, hosting providers, and platforms, and apps. (Chris Quamme Rhoden, RadioPublic’s cofounder and CTO, is responsible for the core PodPass idea and the technical insights behind it.) There is widespread agreement that the concept is compelling, along with the caveats and hesitation that comes with any bold idea at a moment of change.

We believe that the PodPass concept can spur industry dialogue, lead to immediate prototyping and testing, and that the protocol has the potential to gain adoption as the gains of managing listener relationships in a more effective and decentralized way becomes clear.

We have posted an open draft technical specification, and we welcome comments and feedback. We also welcome direct communication about PodPass through email: Jake Shapiro (jake.shapiro@radiopublic.com), Matt MacDonald (matt.macdonald@radiopublic.com), and Chris Quamme Rhoden (chris.rhoden@radiopublic.com).

Ultimately, we hope that a critical mass of podcasters, hosting providers, and apps/platforms will help shape and adopt PodPass as a generative strategy to expand podcasting — creating more value for listeners and creators alike.

Spotify to acquire Parcast, and a Gimlet union update. There are two Spotify stories worth noting:

(1) Spotify announced this morning that it’s moving to acquire Parcast, the Los Angeles-based company, founded in 2016 by Max Cutler, that trades in a genre-oriented, high-volume portfolio with broad titles like Serial Killers, Cults, and Unsolved Murders. (My dude Jonah Bromwich at The New York Times has described the company’s fare as “pulp nonfiction” whose “lurid storylines play out like snackable television,” which is a fair assessment, I think.) The terms of the deal were not disclosed, and it’s expected to close in the second quarter of this year. This will be Spotify’s third podcast acquisition, having picked up Gimlet and Anchor for a combined $340 million earlier this year, and it presumably eats into what Spotify has described as the $500 million budget it has set aside for acquisitions this year.

Parcast currently has 18 shows on the market, with apparent plans to roll out 20 more this year. The company currently has 20 employees, and its audience is said to be 75 percent female (which is consistent with more general findings about true crime). You should probably take note of this quote from Spotify chief content officer Dawn Ostroff, who joined the company last summer, in the associated press release: “The addition of Parcast to our growing roster of podcast content will advance our goal of becoming the world’s leading audio platform. Crime and mystery podcasts are a top genre for our users and Parcast has had significant success creating hit series while building a loyal and growing fan base. We’re excited to welcome the Parcast team to Spotify and we look forward to supercharging their growth.”

So between Anchor, Gimlet, and Parcast, you could say that Spotify now has a technology platform for third-party podcasts, a production company built on a prestigious brand, and a production company that works in sheer volume. Interesting.

One more thing to note: Parcast was previously associated with Endeavor Audio, the new audio division of the media conglomerate Endeavor. At Endeavor Audio’s launch announcement last September, the Parcast network was said to be delivering 9 million downloads a month. It’s unclear if that’s raw downloads or unique monthlies.

(2) So, as we reported in Thursday’s Insider, Gimlet Media’s management declined to formally recognize the union last Tuesday. The union’s organizing committee took to Twitter yesterday to ramp up public pressure, laying out the situation from their perspective: “Last week, Gimlet effectively declined voluntary recognition. Instead, Gimlet’s lawyer came back with a surprisingly aggressive counter-proposal. The company is trying to unilaterally cut 30 people from our proposed unit. Additionally, @Gimletmedia’s leadership is demanding a revote, but the 30 people who were cut would not be able to vote.”

You can see the full Twitter thread here.

We asked @Gimletmedia for voluntary recognition two weeks ago. Last week, Gimlet effectively declined voluntary recognition. Instead, Gimlet’s lawyer came back with a surprisingly aggressive counter-proposal.

— Gimlet Union (@GimletUnion) March 25, 2019

I’ll be monitoring the situation. In the meantime, some questions to keep in mind: How will broader Spotify management approach the situation? How strong is the coalition that the organizing committee has built among the workers? Also: what’s the argumentation around the aforementioned 30 people?

All right, moving on for now.

Acast’s French expansion [by Caroline Crampton]. The Swedish podcast company, which launched back in April 2014, is officially pushing into France. CEO Ross Adams hinted at the move when I spoke to him back in December, around the time of their $35 million Series C funding round, and said expansion into non-English-language markets was a big part of the strategy for the next two years. Adams, who helped to launch Spotify in the U.K. back in 2008, has brought on another exec from the (also Swedish) music streaming giant to spearhead this expansion: Yann Thébault, former managing director of Continental Europe for Spotify, joins to lead operations there.

“Last year was a tipping point for podcast consumption,” Thébault told me. “Right now in France, there are about 4 million people listening on a monthly basis. It’s not a fully developed market yet, but it’s growing very quickly…there have been a lot of new show launches in the past year.” That data point, by the way, comes from Médiamétrie’s Écoute des Podcasts report from April 2018, which francophones should check out.

France has traditionally had a strong radio sector, which is very much reflected in the podcast output there. “About 85 percent of the market is dominated by [radio] replays, which means that about 15 percent is [podcast] native and growing quickly.” That’s the market segment Acast is banking on — they’re hoping that by entering early, they’ll be the monetization platform of choice once the space has expanded and matured. This approach has certainly worked for them in the U.K., a comparison that Thébault referenced in our discussion too: “I see the French market — I mean, in so far as we can compare market to market — as like the U.K. two years ago.”

One of the biggest trends in original French podcasting, he said, was feminism, and there are also several new and influential women-run podcast production houses in France. We profiled one of them, Louie Media, last summer, and they, along with House of Podcasts, were also recently written up by the Bello Collective. Beyond women and LGBTQ-centred shows like La Poudre, Thébault said that “food,” “crime,” and “social justice” were also content areas rapidly growing in popularity.

Acast France seems to be starting small. The branch just finalized the contract with their third employee, a director of sales, who starts work in April, and Thébault notes that he already has a director of content working on staff. They plan to increase their headcount more rapidly “once we secure our first publisher agreement to sell and monetize their content.” The goal for now, Thébault explained, is to get podcasts on their platform, both from established media houses and independent producers. The aim is to spot “tomorrow’s talents,” he said, with the hope of monetizing these smaller shows once they grow in the future.

Thebault says French advertisers are already fairly well informed as to the benefits of advertising on podcasts — the logic being they’re used to commercial internet radio stations and streaming platforms like Spotify and Deezer. (Whether you buy into this logic is your call.) “In France, the digital audio market represents around 12 million euros,” he said. “That’s not a huge market, but it’s growing very fast.” The strong representation of feminist and women-centric podcasts works well with commercial deals too, with luxury good, fashion, and beauty all interested in that segment of the podcast audience.

A small start for Thébault and Acast France, but they’re betting hard on seeing a similar podcast growth trajectory there as in the U.K. and elsewhere. It’s long been reported that Acast is looking at eventually going public on the Swedish stock market; going into new markets like France (and possibly Germany and Spain next, I’d imagine) is likely a move to lay down a substantial European division which could give them a growth narrative with some runway.

Platform neutral [by Caroline Crampton]. Well, that’s interesting: The BBC has pulled its podcasts from parts of the Google Podcasts ecosystem, meaning that the People’s Programming is no longer accessible via Google Assistant on Google smart speakers and devices. In a blog post published this morning, Kieran Clifton, the BBC’s director of distribution and business development, explained the move thusly:

Last year, Google launched its own podcast app for Android users — they’ve also said they will launch a browser version for computers soon. Google has since begun to direct people who search for a BBC podcast into its own podcast service, rather than BBC Sounds or other third party services, which reduces people’s choice — an approach that the BBC is not comfortable with and has consistently expressed strong concerns about. We asked them to exclude the BBC from this specific feature but they have refused.

This refers to the integration of the Google Podcasts app with Google search and the rest of the Google ecosystem. Since Google’s much-publicized re-entry into podcasting last year, it’s been the case that when you search for a show using Google, you get a “recent episodes” component to your search results with play buttons beside each one that uses the architecture of the Google Podcasts app. As Podnews noted in its early reporting on this story, the BBC is now using robots.txt on its podcast server to prevent Google indexing any episodes published after March 19 in this way. You could read this as a classic publisher-platform dispute: The BBC now considers Google a competing distributor, one that uses its search dominance to push users towards their own podcast product. (I mean, welcome to the internet, I guess?).

For background on this, we should look at the rules that govern how the BBC distributes its content. Clifton references the BBC’s Distribution Policy, which doesn’t address this topic directly but sets out the conditions under which the BBC allows its output to be made available on other companies’ platforms. The broad headings are: prominence, editorial control, branding/attribution, quality, data, free access, and value for money. This policy appears to agree with the BBC’s regulator, Ofcom, the body which scrutinises the BBC’s operations to make sure all is as it should be.

Given that the BBC is funded by the public through the license fee — read my explainer on how that works here — how the corporation creates and distributes content is constantly monitored to make sure that it’s providing value for money while being as accessible and representative a broadcasting service as possible. In light of this public remit, it’s a big deal for the organization to pull a substantial part of its audio output from a platform as huge and widely used as Google.

But just how big a deal is it, though? Smart speakers (and audio distributed via Google Podcasts) are a small segment of the audio market so far, but Google Podcasts is now preinstalled on many Android phones, giving the platform vast theoretical reach. Ofcom will no doubt be looking into this decision in detail, and for what it’s worth, its guidelines do allow for the BBC to stop working with a third-party platform in cases where there is “an objective justification” for doing so. “Objective justification,” of course, is where the rub lies.

Meanwhile, there’s another strand to this: the BBC Sounds strategy. As I’ve covered extensively over the past few months, the BBC’s bespoke audio app — their biggest product launch in a decade — has had a somewhat rocky start since its launch in autumn 2018, with mixed reviews and experiments with show exclusivity that proved unpopular with some listeners. But the BBC has consistently doubled down on the app’s benefits, putting out statements about how “the response to BBC Sounds has been overwhelmingly positive.” Essentially, the BBC seems to believe it’s worth more to try to move podcast listeners into its own app than to reach them on whatever platform they currently use. For what it’s worth, Chris Kimber, a BBC product manager working on BBC Sounds, tweeted that the removal of BBC shows from Google was “unrelated to any exclusivity trial,” which makes sense — this is a more fundamental issue of how the BBC interacts with third parties over its own app.

Just to clear up some inaccuracies in that article: (1) Google are not merely linking out to content (2) licence fee income was 3.8b not 5b (3) Sounds is available outside the UK via web (4) this is unrelated to any exclusivity trial

— Chris Kimber (@chriskimber) March 25, 2019

The part I think is particularly relevant to this matter with Google first emerged in an interview that BBC Sounds launch director Charlotte Lock gave about the negative audience reaction to the Fortunately… with Fi and Jane podcast going temporarily Sounds-exclusive back in January. Lock made the point that when listeners consume BBC audio content through the BBC Sounds app, rather than via RSS feed on a third-party platform, the BBC is able to capture more audience data. She spun this as a positive for listeners, because it enables the BBC to offer better “tailored recommendations,” although at the time I was a bit skeptical that “a corporation wants more data about you” was going to be a strong motivator for listeners to use the app.

This line of argument has now been applied to this Google dispute. The key section:

We also want to make our programmes and services as good as they can possibly be — this means us getting hold of meaningful audience data. This helps us do a number of things; make more types of programmes we know people like, make our services even more personalised and relevant to people using them, and equally importantly, identify gaps in our commissioning to ensure we’re making something for all audiences.

My reading of this situation is therefore as follows: The BBC wants Google to direct listeners straight to BBC Sounds (which has a web version which is accessible internationally; the app is U.K.-only), rather than prioritizing the fact that they can play the shows through Google search or on other Google platforms. Google, unsurprisingly, refused to make this substantial exception to its own business model. As a result, the BBC deployed robots.txt and is now presenting this move as a beneficial one for listeners, who will give the BBC more data by using Sounds instead, thus influencing the long-term direction of BBC audio content. Clifton’s blog even describes the BBC’s actions as having been taken “for the good of listeners.” “For the good of BBC Sounds, internally thought to be good for listeners” might be more accurate.

Unfortunately, I don’t think this reasoning quite stacks up. It’s logical enough for the BBC, which is desperate to make BBC Sounds work after all the resources and effort that’s been poured into it. But I think the benefits are more on its side than on listeners’, who now have fewer outlets where they can access BBC material. The BBC’s gamble is that listeners love their content enough to follow it to the Sounds app, but I’d guess that a reasonable proportion — especially those who do the bulk of their listening on a Google Home for accessibility reasons, say, or through Android Auto while driving — will just switch to other podcasts that are available on their platform of choice.

As a strategy, this would be fine if the BBC was a profit-making private company: You sacrifice some listeners in order to get greater value from the really loyal ones willing to use your app. But the BBC has this obligation to be as open and accessible as possible, and so far I’m not convinced that “we can do better recommendations if everyone uses BBC Sounds” trumps the necessity of distributing their audio as widely as possible — although ultimately that will be for Ofcom to adjudicate. It’s worth remembering, too, that BBC Sounds has been cited by BBC execs as a way of re-engaging younger audiences turning away from BBC radio in favor of other streaming platforms. I’ll await the regulator’s view on that with great interest too, especially since that the corporation’s failure to reach young people was a major part of Ofcom’s latest performance report for the BBC.

This wrangle between the BBC and Google is by no means over, though, and this could all still change. Clifton notes in his post that “we are in discussions with Google to try and resolve the situation and will continue to work with them to try and come to a solution that’s in the best interests of all listeners.” I can’t help feeling that this is just an early skirmish in the chess game: The BBC called a bluff and pulled their shows. Your move, Google.

On accessibility [by Caroline Crampton]. Podcasts and the question of accessibility is a vital, important topic. This recent article by the writer Robert W. Kingett — about how he experiences podcast websites via his screen reader and how poorly many are set up for visually impaired people — really grabbed my attention. I got in touch with Kingett to find out more about his thoughts on accessibility and the podcast industry, and what changes he believes need to be made to improve matters. (This interview has been edited and condensed.)

You can support Robert W. Kingett’s writing on Patreon or visit his website.

Tracking

• Shoutout to all the political and daily news podcast producers out there who worked overtime this weekend. Your contributions will be downloaded.
• Stitcher announced its spring slate last week, which includes a new season of Headlong, LeVar Burton Reads, and Bad With Money, among others. A second season of the company’s podcast collaboration with Marvel, Wolverine: The Lost Trail, is also forthcoming. (First episode here.) Additionally, Stitcher is continuing its Stitcher Premium exclusives pipeline; one upcoming project is The Wokest, from comedian-writer-director Edgar Momplaisir. Full release here.
• From Digiday, reporting on Advertising Week Europe: “Podcast, rather than voice opportunities, sparked the most interest from advertisers at the event…but podcast advertising is still a new enough medium to encourage advertiser investment without much proof of a return on investment.”
• From the U.K.’s Press Gazette: “Regional publishers team up to develop local news podcasts backed by Google money.”
• Over at the Inside Podcasting newsletter, Skye Pillsbury got her hands on a demographic breakdown of Luminary’s upcoming portfolio. On a related note: If you listen closely, you can start hearing Luminary host-read ads on certain podcasts. Keep an ear out.
• Meanwhile, Slate has published a deep, deep dive into The Joe Rogan Experience, courtesy of Justin Peters: “Joe Rogan’s Galaxy Brain: How the former Fear Factor host’s podcast became an essential platform for ‘freethinkers’ who hate the left.”
• On a related note, Westwood One has picked up The Jordan Peterson Podcast.
• Sarah Larson’s latest at The New Yorker: “‘Case Closed,’ Reviewed: Do We Really Want a True-Crime Podcast with Answers?”

Last year, Google launched its own podcast app for Android users — they’ve also said they will launch a browser version for computers soon. Google has since begun to direct people who search for a BBC podcast into its own podcast service, rather than BBC Sounds or other third party services, which reduces people’s choice — an approach that the BBC is not comfortable with and has consistently expressed strong concerns about. We asked them to exclude the BBC from this specific feature but they have refused.

This refers to the integration of the Google Podcasts app with Google search and the rest of the Google ecosystem. Since Google’s much-publicized re-entry into podcasting last year, it’s been the case that when you search for a show using Google, you get a “recent episodes” component to your search results with play buttons beside each one that uses the architecture of the Google Podcasts app. As Podnews noted in its early reporting on this story, the BBC is now using robots.txt on its podcast server to prevent Google indexing any episodes published after March 19 in this way. You could read this as a classic publisher-platform dispute: The BBC now considers Google a competing distributor, one that uses its search dominance to push users towards their own podcast product. (I mean, welcome to the internet, I guess?).

For background on this, we should look at the rules that govern how the BBC distributes its content. Clifton references the BBC’s Distribution Policy, which doesn’t address this topic directly but sets out the conditions under which the BBC allows its output to be made available on other companies’ platforms. The broad headings are: prominence, editorial control, branding/attribution, quality, data, free access, and value for money. This policy appears to agree with the BBC’s regulator, Ofcom, the body which scrutinises the BBC’s operations to make sure all is as it should be.

Given that the BBC is funded by the public through the license fee — read my explainer on how that works here — how the corporation creates and distributes content is constantly monitored to make sure that it’s providing value for money while being as accessible and representative a broadcasting service as possible. In light of this public remit, it’s a big deal for the organization to pull a substantial part of its audio output from a platform as huge and widely used as Google.

But just how big a deal is it, though? Smart speakers (and audio distributed via Google Podcasts) are a small segment of the audio market so far, but Google Podcasts is now preinstalled on many Android phones, giving the platform vast theoretical reach. Ofcom will no doubt be looking into this decision in detail, and for what it’s worth, its guidelines do allow for the BBC to stop working with a third-party platform in cases where there is “an objective justification” for doing so. “Objective justification,” of course, is where the rub lies.

Meanwhile, there’s another strand to this: the BBC Sounds strategy. As I’ve covered extensively over the past few months, the BBC’s bespoke audio app — their biggest product launch in a decade — has had a somewhat rocky start since its launch in autumn 2018, with mixed reviews and experiments with show exclusivity that proved unpopular with some listeners. But the BBC has consistently doubled down on the app’s benefits, putting out statements about how “the response to BBC Sounds has been overwhelmingly positive.” Essentially, the BBC seems to believe it’s worth more to try to move podcast listeners into its own app than to reach them on whatever platform they currently use. For what it’s worth, Chris Kimber, a BBC product manager working on BBC Sounds, tweeted that the removal of BBC shows from Google was “unrelated to any exclusivity trial,” which makes sense — this is a more fundamental issue of how the BBC interacts with third parties over its own app.

Just to clear up some inaccuracies in that article: (1) Google are not merely linking out to content (2) licence fee income was 3.8b not 5b (3) Sounds is available outside the UK via web (4) this is unrelated to any exclusivity trial

— Chris Kimber (@chriskimber) March 25, 2019

The part I think is particularly relevant to this matter with Google first emerged in an interview that BBC Sounds launch director Charlotte Lock gave about the negative audience reaction to the Fortunately… with Fi and Jane podcast going temporarily Sounds-exclusive back in January. Lock made the point that when listeners consume BBC audio content through the BBC Sounds app, rather than via RSS feed on a third-party platform, the BBC is able to capture more audience data. She spun this as a positive for listeners, because it enables the BBC to offer better “tailored recommendations,” although at the time I was a bit skeptical that “a corporation wants more data about you” was going to be a strong motivator for listeners to use the app.

This line of argument has now been applied to this Google dispute. The key section:

We also want to make our programmes and services as good as they can possibly be — this means us getting hold of meaningful audience data. This helps us do a number of things; make more types of programmes we know people like, make our services even more personalised and relevant to people using them, and equally importantly, identify gaps in our commissioning to ensure we’re making something for all audiences.

My reading of this situation is therefore as follows: The BBC wants Google to direct listeners straight to BBC Sounds (which has a web version which is accessible internationally; the app is U.K.-only), rather than prioritizing the fact that they can play the shows through Google search or on other Google platforms. Google, unsurprisingly, refused to make this substantial exception to its own business model. As a result, the BBC deployed robots.txt and is now presenting this move as a beneficial one for listeners, who will give the BBC more data by using Sounds instead, thus influencing the long-term direction of BBC audio content. Clifton’s blog even describes the BBC’s actions as having been taken “for the good of listeners.” “For the good of BBC Sounds, internally thought to be good for listeners” might be more accurate.

Unfortunately, I don’t think this reasoning quite stacks up. It’s logical enough for the BBC, which is desperate to make BBC Sounds work after all the resources and effort that’s been poured into it. But I think the benefits are more on its side than on listeners’, who now have fewer outlets where they can access BBC material. The BBC’s gamble is that listeners love their content enough to follow it to the Sounds app, but I’d guess that a reasonable proportion — especially those who do the bulk of their listening on a Google Home for accessibility reasons, say, or through Android Auto while driving — will just switch to other podcasts that are available on their platform of choice.

As a strategy, this would be fine if the BBC was a profit-making private company: You sacrifice some listeners in order to get greater value from the really loyal ones willing to use your app. But the BBC has this obligation to be as open and accessible as possible, and so far I’m not convinced that “we can do better recommendations if everyone uses BBC Sounds” trumps the necessity of distributing their audio as widely as possible — although ultimately that will be for Ofcom to adjudicate. It’s worth remembering, too, that BBC Sounds has been cited by BBC execs as a way of re-engaging younger audiences turning away from BBC radio in favor of other streaming platforms. I’ll await the regulator’s view on that with great interest too, especially since that the corporation’s failure to reach young people was a major part of Ofcom’s latest performance report for the BBC.

This wrangle between the BBC and Google is by no means over, though, and this could all still change. Clifton notes in his post that “we are in discussions with Google to try and resolve the situation and will continue to work with them to try and come to a solution that’s in the best interests of all listeners.” I can’t help feeling that this is just an early skirmish in the chess game: The BBC called a bluff and pulled their shows. Your move, Google.

This morning, the Swedish streaming company announced that it has closed its acquisition of Gimlet Media and that it had also acquired another podcast company: Anchor, the podcast hosting-and-monetization platform founded by Michael Mignano and Nir Zicherman. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Here’s the press release, and here’s the particularly relevant chunk:

With these acquisitions, Spotify is positioned to become both the premier producer of podcasts and the leading platform for podcast creators. Gimlet will bring to Spotify its best-in-class podcast studio with dedicated IP development, production and advertising capabilities. Anchor will bring its platform of tools for podcast creators and its established and rapidly growing creator base.

To quickly repeat myself from yesterday’s piece on the subject of Spotify’s podcast angle:

• Spotify is looking to diversify away from purely focusing on music, where it’s been long locked into bruising rivalries with other streaming platforms (Pandora, Apple Music) and traditional music industry Powers That Be (labels). Podcasts, or talk content more broadly, offers the Swedish tech giant two things: first, a completely new growth channel for investors to get excited about, and second, the opportunity to differentiate its product, deepen its value to the user, and increase the friction of shifting away to another service.
• As I also mentioned: We should relatedly pay close attention to Spotify’s adventures in building direct relationships with musicians — first by striking deals with independent artists and then by rolling out a feature that allows artists to upload music directly and automatically receive royalty payouts. In other words, they’ve been trying to become the monetization layer for musicians straight-up. I imagine they would want to do the same for podcasts.

These two acquisitions directly speak to these pieces: Gimlet for the first strategic target, Anchor for the second.

Founded in 2015, Anchor initially started life as a social audio app — think Twitter, but for audio, which is kind of a throwback to Twitter’s original incarnation, Odeo — that caught some buzz at SXSW the following year. It received venture backing from a pool of investors that includes Betaworks (which also backed Gimlet), Homebrew, GV, The Chernin Group, and Accel, among others. The social-audio thesis didn’t quite go anywhere, and the company eventually pivoted towards what would eventually turn out to be some sort of end-to-end podcasting platform, encouraging new podcast creators to host on their platform (thus functioning as a competitor to Libsyn and Art19) and later launching something called Anchor Sponsorships, an in-platform advertising marketplace for shows hosted on the platform.

With the acquisition of both Gimlet and Anchor, Spotify appears to be angling towards a situation in which it can both function as a publisher and a platform. (Add your Medium platisher jokes here.)1 All the questions I raised in my Spotify analysis column still very much apply, perhaps even more so now. But the biggest one now, in my mind, is: Can you effectively be both at the same time? Can you have your cake and eat it too? As always, it will come down to the execution.

Also: I’d like to double down on my tinfoil-hat Gimlet Creative theory. Only, slap Anchor’s Sponsorship marketplace into the mix too.

Spotify has made a huge statement about its intentions with podcasts. They had my interest. But now they have my attention. (Not that I matter in this situation, of course.)

A few closing thoughts:

• Again, for those keeping track: I reported that the Gimlet acquisition went for around $230 million. The press release didn’t confirm it, and who knows what the final number turned out to be by the end of the negotiations.
• As for Anchor’s deal, I don’t have any information on that, but let me know if you do.
• Honestly, I thought I’d be spending the first quarter of 2019 talking about Luminary. Guess, uh, that’s going to be tough now.
• Since yesterday’s piece, several readers pointed two personnel-related matters to me: (1) Spotify’s CFO is Barry McCarthy, the former CFO of Netflix, and (2) Spotify has a Chief Content Officer, Dawn Ostroff, who used to be the president of The CW (and hence, was/is a Hollywood insider). Those pieces might be relevant for your own analyses.

1. Editor’s note: The word “platisher” — meaning a combination platform/publisher — turns five years old tomorrow.

Apple’s analytics: One year later. Seventeen months ago, at its annual developer conference WWDC, Apple announced that it would finally be launching something many in the podcast industry had desired for a long time: better podcast analytics. Or, more accurately, better audience analytics from the historically impartial steward of the podcast ecosystem that’s still believed to facilitate the majority of all podcast listening. (For now, anyway.)

“It may look obscure,” tweeted Gimlet’s Matt Lieber at the time, “But this is the biggest thing to happen to the podcast business since Serial first went nuclear.”

Apple’s new in-episode analytics rolled out that December, six months after the initial announcement. At multiple points during those opening months, I tried to report on how the new data was impacting the podcast business. But those early inquiries were premature and produced nothing particularly useful. A really smart person would later advise me that these things, like culture shifts, take time, and I’d be better off waiting a year.

So. It’s been almost 12 full months. Did Apple’s new analytics fundamentally change anything for publishers and the podcast business? After checking in with over a dozen sources throughout various corners of the podcast ecosystem, there seems to be a general consensus around the answer: No, not really. But it has brought some positives.

Let’s pause and recall why we’re here for a second. The narrative of the podcast business has long been defined by its crude analytics, relative to other digital media channels. Podcast advertising campaigns are still bought and sold on the basis of the download, a rudimentary metric that more effectively conveys whether an episode has been shipped off to a consumer’s listening app rather than whether that consumer actually heard the episode — and therefore the ad. Compared to the broader digital media environment — where audience behavior is measurable to the nanosecond and where close user targeting is table stakes for advertisers — the podcast analytics universe is virtually prehistoric. (Nevermind, of course, the prevalence of ad fraud, the Google–Facebook–Amazon digital advertising oligopoly, and the undermining of user privacy that afflicts the broader modern digital media environment. Modernity remains desired, with all its attendant tumors.)

That prehistoric perception is a precarious problem, because the industry (broadly speaking) covets brand advertising dollars, which promise greater growth (bigger amounts), stability (longer campaigns), and, in theory, power. (Growth + stability = more capacity to impose will, probably?)

Nowadays, brand advertisers are thought to be accustomed to the taste of granular analytics to measure campaign effectiveness, and conventional wisdom argues that they probably won’t fully commit advertising dollars to podcasting unless publishers can provide them similar levels of measurement granularity — or, at the very least, something markedly better than the rudimentary analytics universe they have now.

The premise and promise of Apple Podcasts’ upgraded analytics, therefore, was a straightforward one: It could take the podcast ecosystem a step closer towards an analytics universe that can engender the same kind of advertiser confidence as any other digital media channel — thus increasing the possibility of brand advertisers meaningfully committing more podcasting dollars.

Of course, there were concerns. Some worried the new analytics would reveal podcast consumption to be less engaged than previously thought, or that it would trigger an apocalyptic, CPM-cratering scenario. Others thought the new data’s revelations would cause considerable shakeups or resizing in the podcast industry, as some publishers learned they weren’t as big and healthy as they thought they were. Others still, like Edison’s Tom Webster, posited that Apple’s new podcast analytics could create a feedback loop in which publishers are more motivated to play towards Apple’s platform, thus further narrowing the community’s focus on the finite world of Apple users — what he called “the optimization trap.” Meanwhile, direct-response advertisers, whose dollars have historically helped grown the podcast ecosystem without granular analytics, began expressing concerns about having to compete with brand advertising dollars in the future. (A totally understandable position.)

When the new analytics layer finally rolled out last December, the feature was described as in beta. And what it offered seemed incremental but nonetheless helpful: Publishers could now see aggregate in-episode listening analytics, which meant that they could now know whether anybody made it to that third midroll or the late-game twist in the narrative. Put it another way: The podcast episode, as distributed through Apple Podcasts, was no longer a “black box.” (User data was kept anonymized, true to Apple’s practices.) During those early months, the general response seemed largely hopeful.

As the months rolled on, those initial concerns…didn’t come to pass. Podcast consumption turned out to be as engaged as everyone thought they would be. CPM rates didn’t crater, suggesting that this particular version of the apocalypse isn’t nigh (for now, at least). There were eye-catching shakeups in various corners of the community, but the impacts felt localized, and while the new analytics may have played some direct role in those shifts, they were more likely the results of broader trends. It remains unclear if Webster’s optimization trap ensnared any significant chunk of publishers, but whatever the case, the Apple Podcasts platform continues to be gamed in other ways. Meanwhile, direct-response advertisers are still expressing concerns about having to compete with brand dollars, most recently at the last IAB Podcast Upfronts, according to this Digiday writeup.

But 12 months in, the legacy and impact of Apple’s new analytics is still very much a work in progress: trending positive, but complicated. The data has certainly proved useful, helping some publishers to better understand things like unlistened downloads, ad skipping, and episode retention rates. But based on the exchanges I’ve had, the general feeling seems to be that the data hasn’t fundamentally changed podcasting’s prehistoric perception among advertisers. Many argued that as long as the podcast business remains pegged to the download, trouble is afoot.

This isn’t to say that publishers weren’t able to secure more brand advertisers over the past year. (As many were quick to assure me.) Rather, some sources argue that until measurement actually shifts away from the download, the podcast ecosystem will never structurally unlock brand advertising dollars. One argued the nature of the problem has only worsened over the past year, given the increase in participation from competing platforms — Google, Pandora, iHeart, Spotify, and so on — that could, with their respective user bases and expertise in data and targeting, potentially end up assuming gatekeeper control between brand advertisers and podcast publishers, should any of them gain real traction against Apple.

Some argued that things can only really change if the industry is able to successfully shift its analytics paradigm towards a “true” listening metric — that is, a universe in which publishers can sell advertising based on actual consumption, not episode delivery. And while there is some optimism around NPR’s Remote Audio Data (RAD) initiative (which, I’m told, might finally be widely deployed in the coming months), the prevailing suspicion is the publisher-led shift won’t come quickly enough. “We’re still pretty far from where we need to be,” one podcasting executive told me.

We remain in the universe of downloads, though, and while we’re here: Most people I spoke with believe that the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s podcast measurement standards were a lot more influential over the past year than the new Apple analytics. “IAB V2 created a more even playing field,” National Public Media’s Bryan Moffett told me. “There’s a common definition of a download, and we can all speak the same language.” There continues to be some debate over the nuances of the standards, but the podcast industry appears to have broadly aligned with the IAB on download measurements, so at least that hurdle seems to have been cleared. (Previously, the concern was the lack of apples-to-apples comparison between how different companies counted downloads.)

Still, as mentioned, there were some concrete ways in which Apple’s in-episode analytics have helped publishers. For one thing, the new data allowed teams to better capture, understand, and convey listener engagement, and that contribution shouldn’t be downplayed. “I think the greatest benefit is knowing that the vast majority of people aren’t skipping the ads on our shows — especially when the hosts do a really engaging job with their reads,” said Alyssa Martino, Macmillan’s associate director of podcasts. “It’s hard to connect that specifically to spends, since our shows sell well, but it’s great to have the data now to back up what we’ve known and said anecdotally for years.”

The new data also helped some publishers to build and improve new advertising products. Dave Shaw, the executive producer of podcasts at Politico, told me that they’ve successfully sold postroll ad slots on the Politico Playbook Audio Briefing after being able to show that listeners stick around to the end. Anna Phelan, the editorial program manager at TED, said the new analytics have helped them evaluate some longer ad experiences that they’ve been integrating into WorkLife with Adam Grant. “We didn’t know how listeners would respond to the length or content, but we felt confident enough in the appeal of the content to take the risk,” Phelan said. “The high consumption rates that we saw, with almost no drop-off during the ad break, reassured us that the approach resonates with our audience and gives us permission to continue to develop other formats in this style.”

There is another way in which Apple’s in-episode analytics unambiguously proved useful — as editorial data. Almost every publisher I contacted talked about how they’ve been able to learn about episodes and experiments that worked (and didn’t), and how the data has helped them feel more confident when shifting around resources or making structural adjustments to shows (cutting or expanding publishing schedules, shortening or lengthening episodes).

Those editorial benefits are important, but ultimately, they’re secondary to our advertising concerns here. And on that front, a good deal (though not all) of the sources I spoke with generally want more from Apple. Some expressed frustration over what feels like slow product iteration on the part of Apple’s new analytics dashboard. “I know it’s still supposed to be a beta, but let’s go already!” one executive told me. Several want Apple to make more data available through an API, so publishers can more effectively integrate listening data — which, despite Apple’s dominance, only represent one chunk of a show’s overall audience at the end of the day — into their central measurement dashboards, thus helping them paint better pictures of their audiences for advertisers to peruse.

There is still, it seems, a long way to go. One year after being rolled out, its impacts seem to be somewhat muted — or, at least, nowhere near as revolutionary as many had hoped. As such, there’s a certain sameness between the way this year is ending and the way it began. Maybe these things take longer than a year — or maybe those changes need to take different shapes. In any case, if there is to be some revolution, it isn’t quite here yet.

In the meantime, the podcast industry will continue to grow in the way that it’s always been growing.

BBC podcasting in 2018 [by Caroline Crampton]. I think of the BBC as a huge, old-fashioned ocean liner. The analogy works a few ways. The ship is beautifully made, and it makes going somewhere really worthwhile — but the journey itself can get a bit rough sometimes. Across the sprawling structure, there are so many different teams on different decks doing different things that they don’t always necessarily know what everyone else above and below is doing. It’s big, and as such, it can be a violent force of momentum and inertia. Even after a decision to change course has been made, the ship will travel quite a lot further in the prior direction before it turns.

It’s this last aspect that I’ve been most conscious of in 2018. Until the spring of last year, the corporation’s involvement in podcasting was largely hands-off, with radio shows repackaged for download and a very small number of original podcast-first commissions that were tied closely to existing formats. Then a shift began, with some new shows appearing that attempted to do something different compared to its existing radio output, such as the drama box set Tracks and the pop culture deep dive series Unpopped.

Part of this shift came from an increasing recognition internally that younger U.K. listeners were choosing to go elsewhere for their audio content — to Apple Music and Spotify, and to the feeds of independent podcasts like My Dad Wrote a Porno and The Receipts. The regulator Ofcom ruled this year in its annual report that the BBC must do “more and more quickly” to reach these audiences if the corporation is to keep up its remit as a national public service broadcaster. The ship was turning, slowly.

Then, all of a sudden, everything seemed to speed up. In March, it was announced that the BBC had appointed its first commissioner for podcasts, Jason Phipps. He started work in May, and over the next few months, we saw more evidence of this internal shift towards more original podcasting. I’ve written a lot about it since I started with Hot Pod in September; from the youth-focused Xtrachat showcase feed to this new political podcast from Scotland, there’s been a lot to say.

The biggest moment for the BBC in 2018 was the launch of the BBC Sounds app at the end of  October. It had been in beta since late June, with mixed reviews from those trying to use it and reports of internal confusion over its mission. Was it an attempt to make an alternative podcatcher, which indexed non-BBC podcasts as a way of luring listeners away from their current tech, or a walled garden of purely BBC content, trying to offer a premium content experience like Spotify or Audible? In a move that felt inevitable for those of us who have been observing the BBC for a while now, they did something that looks a bit like both options — sort of. BBC Sounds consists almost entirely of BBC podcasts, radio shows, playlists, and archive material, with a very small number of independent shows in there too (I could find six, let me know if you can see more). I’m unclear of the long-term rationale behind this hybrid model, but execs seem bullish about the numbers so far, which of course they would.

In one sense, BBC Sounds has been a success already, because it’s given the BBC a way to properly talk about podcasting. A consistent message has been rolled out across all stations and programmes: Presenters who never used to refer to online downloads are now routinely saying “if you want to hear more like this, try X podcast on BBC Sounds.” I remain unconvinced that it will be a silver bullet for the younger audience problem, but I do think it could help to convert some radio listeners who have never tried digital audio before into podcast listeners, which can only be a good thing.

The app itself still has a few glaring omissions to my eyes, chief among them a sharing functionality, although I’m sure that’ll be on the way at some point. I still find it difficult to find shows I know must be there, and the algorithmic recommendations are a bit…hit or miss. The same goes for the first slate of original programming. There are some really interesting and innovative ideas in there, such as the spinoff audio dramas for the TV soap Eastenders, the podcast-spoofing scripted horror serial I wrote about last week, and music documentary series Live Lounge Uncovered, which takes a popular radio session slot and goes deeper on it. Then there’s also some other stuff that I’m less convinced is worth the BBC’s time, such as the supposedly youth-orientated daily news podcast Beyond Today (that I’m still skipping in favor of the old-fashioned news bulletins on the radio), the Duvet Days interview show (which sounds a lot like the many, many other interview shows that already exist), and The Disrupters (yet another interview show focused around entrepreneurship that has yet to wow me with either its guests or approach).

Although on the surface it looks as if it’s full steam ahead for the BBC and podcasts, I’m still picking up some internal confusions. There is now a full-time podcast commissioner up at the top in Phipps, but new podcasts are also being made by existing radio stations as well as by journalists in the local and regional divisions. The messaging about where podcasts come from doesn’t always feel cohesive, and I sense the heat of internal politics and wrangling about who is getting the credit for which podcasts, rather than everyone pulling in the same direction under the same structure and focusing on the external competition instead. There are still unanswered questions about analytics, as well — I understand from various sources that producers don’t get very regular updates about how many people are actually listening to their episodes, and those they do get are on a long lag. There’s also no external verification or publication schedule for these numbers, so when an exec chooses to announce a “record month”, we have nothing to benchmark that against.

At the end of the year, it’s still no clearer to me than at the start what the BBC’s responsibilities are to the rest of the U.K. podcast market. Obviously, their entry into original programming puts them into direct competition with shows made by commercial and independent outlets, but it’s even less obvious if there should be any controls on what they can and can’t make in order to prevent their state-funded advantage cutting others out of the market. I also haven’t seen the BBC use its new podcast commissions to make much meaningful headway on the issue of diversity, which was another problem point in the Ofcom annual report. The vast majority of the new shows we’ve had so far are written and/or hosted by existing BBC talent or suppliers, with all of the existing structural problems around pay and inclusion that brings.

In conclusion: The BBC is fully on board with podcasting now, which is not a phrase I thought I’d be writing back in January. This new direction is likely going to have some really positive outcomes, and a few negative ones too if the corporation doesn’t actively guard against them. There’s a lot we still don’t know.

Tracking:

• Serial’s third season was its biggest ever. The season surpassed 50 million downloads after just two months to become the show’s biggest to date — and all three seasons have brought in 420 million downloads collectively. I dug into the numbers for Vulture.
• Malcolm Gladwell and Jacob Weisberg’s Pushkin Industries has signed an exclusive representation partnership with Cadence13. According to the press release, the deal was brokered by WME, and it seems that the upcoming Michael Lewis podcast, previously developed at Slate, have followed Gladwell and Weisberg to their new company.
• Voxnest, the parent organization of the hosting platform Spreaker, struck up a distribution partnership with Deezer. The move is being pitched as part of the latter’s international efforts, particularly in Latin America.
• ICYMI: Anchor launched an in-platform advertising marketplace called Anchor Sponsorships, finally giving itself a business model. I gave my analysis in last Thursday’s Insider.
• The Verge published a look at the Apple Podcast charts scam story, and there’s an incremental finding in the mix: The tech giant “monitors its international and domestic charts and relies on a combination of humans and software to detect signs of fraud. It bans shows after they’re caught attempting fraud multiple times, Apple confirmed to The Verge.”
• Just a reminder: The Washington Post’s daily news podcast, Post Reports, debuted yesterday.
• If you, like me, have been keeping an eye on the issue of podcasting and platform bans on hate speech, the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard’s Cyberlaw Clinic published a nifty memo on content regulation policy for the podcasting community last week.
• On a related note: “Rep. Steve King appeared on podcast frequented by white nationalists.” (CNN)
• Exactly Right, the new podcast imprint cultivated by My Favorite Murder’s Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark in partnership with Stitcher, officially launched last week with four shows in the starting portfolio.
• Meanwhile, iHeartRadio and Funny or Die are co-producing a podcast featuring Ron Burgundy, Will Ferrell’s fictional anchorman from the wildly popular (and meme-generating) 2004 comedy known as, well, Anchorman. The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but you know I’d love to find out how much iHeartRadio paid for the project. One assumes it’s quite a bit.
• Fun fact: Love+Radio has a cameo in Steve McQueen and Gillian Flynn’s Widows, which hit movie theaters last month.

Pandora’s Podcast Genome Project enters the wild. Sydney Pollack had a great line in Michael Clayton where he wags his finger at George Clooney’s down-in-the-dumps fixer protagonist saying: “Fer chrissakes, Michael, you’ve got something everybody wants! You have a niche!”

That line popped into my head when I first heard that Pandora was planning to graft its famed Music Genome Project onto the podcast universe. I mean…it makes sense. If the company was going to start properly distributing podcasts, this would be the way in. It’s great to have a niche, a thing only you have in the world. If you were born with a hammer for an arm, why wouldn’t you smash everything?

This morning, Pandora’s podcast offering, powered by the “Podcast Genome Project,” begins rolling out beta access to select listeners on mobile devices. Chances are you won’t see it: The feature will first appear to about 1 percent of users before expanding out over time. But it’s coming, and you can find the landing page here.

The beta rollout comes shortly after Pandora hired its first podcast chief, the lawyer Lindsay Bowen, formerly of Cowan, DeBaets, Abrahams & Sheppard LLP, and about two months after SiriusXM announced that it was going acquire the company. It also comes almost a full calendar year after Roger Lynch, who became Pandora’s CEO in September 2017, first signaled his intent for the streaming music platform to get seriously involved in the podcast ecosystem in an interview with Variety.

That intent doesn’t come out of the blue, of course. As some avid readers might remember, Pandora had deployed two significant experiments with spoken audio in the past: the first being a streaming partnership with Serial and This American Life and the second being an original production, the weekly podcast Questlove Supreme.

“The goal is to do something similar to what we’ve done for music over the years,” Chris Phillips, the company’s chief product officer, told me when we spoke last week. “To provide effortless discovery that’s also personalized.” Something similar, but not the same. Phillips tells me this isn’t a situation where existing technology is simply refashioned to fit a new context: “More like same concept, different tools.”

The Music Genome Project is a fairly well-documented Internet artifact, but to briefly explain the thing: It’s a technologically-facilitated effort to break songs down into their component elements and to then group them to create meaningful clusters of contiguous listening experiences — which allow for the discovery of similar new-to-you songs. Some of these elements are technical (tempo, musical families, etc.); others are more conceptual (genre, “female singer-songwriters,” etc.). Creating those clusters is a mostly automated process, but Pandora also houses a team of musicologists tasked with helping to form better epistemological rubrics. The team is “small but mighty” (or at least that’s how Phillips describes them) and the arrangement illustrates the marriage of technology and human expertise in pursuit of an edge in user experience. Very utopian, but also, concordant with a suspiciously familiar philosophy underpinning the enterprise: the belief that you can quantify and codify something previously considered subjective to unlock some higher level of achievement. (Alternate hed: Moneyball, but for music. Musicball?)

On the surface, the Podcast Genome Project exhibits much the same skeleton. Podcast episodes will be ingested, transcribed, and analyzed for taxonomical elements that are then grouped into discovery clusters. In our conversation, Phillips talked about things like content topics, themes, energy level. (Two examples given: “true crime” and “animated conversations about cooking.”) But the podcast skeleton won’t feature the same heart: There’s no spoken audio equivalent of a small but mighty musicology team pumping blood and wisdom through the whole system. Instead, there will be a more conventional group of human beings tasked with providing curatorial guidance and quality assurance. (So, antibodies.) That absence of an expert “podcastology” team — oh god I’m so sorry — is noteworthy, and I think probably crucial: It may well be the determining factor in whether Pandora’s podcast discovery technology will be revolutionary or merely additive.

Nonetheless, I fancy the notion. I remain unconvinced that podcasting has an existential discovery problem (once again, I’m more of the unpopular opinion that it has an existential marketing problem), but having another vibrant space to learn about new podcasts is undeniably a good thing for both publishers and listeners. Plus, for a podcast publisher, accessing potential new audiences on Pandora would theoretically require little more than plug-and-play. Which is, you know, pretty dope.

Of course, the True Promise is for the listener, and all the unique consumer adventures that an effective Podcast Genome Project can potentially create. The platonic ideal of the Pandora experience is something that sits firmly between the paralyzing freedoms of on-demand and the punishing captivity of linear radio. Take music, for example — something I enjoy tremendously but simply don’t have much bandwidth to do my own research. My life on Spotify is perhaps best described as a complete failure of imagination: the same playlists, the same albums, the Top 40 charts, over and over again. On the other hand, commercial radio is a straight-up hellscape: more ads than music, and when you do get to the tunes, it’s the same ten songs ramming your eardrums, because that’s how you make stars, right? The promise with Pandora is essentially better radio, featuring a scalable human-machine cyborg curator instead of the more specific hit-or-miss taste of a mortal DJ. Or worse, the capitalist imperatives of the music industrial complex.

Forgive the fan fiction, but: In theory, with Pandora, you’d have a situation where a listening session of, say, The Woj Pod leads me to efficiently surface and sample other (weirder) hoops podcasts like Horse and Buckets — ones that I’d otherwise have to plumb the murky depths of Google search results to learn about. (As an aside, one potential metric for discovery gambits like this would be its ability to elevate “weird podcasting.” Note to self: Revisit this idea later.) Upon discovery, I’d be in a position to engage in two follow-ups: First, I can add them to my “collections” — which is Pandora’s way of functioning like a straightforward podcast app — and second, I can give it a little thumbs up to help Pandora learn more about the stuff I like. Table-stakes stuff, really, especially in the age of tech companies knowing more about me than my mother does. But given that podcasting is still an Internet mosquito preserved in amber in so many ways, it’ll be cool to see those standard tools applied to podcasts at scale.

All right, publishers, let’s talk brass tacks. There are a few important things to note.

First of all, there is some trickiness around what will be included in Pandora’s podcast offering, at least for now. The product enters public beta with a series of launch partners: APM, Gimlet, HeadGum, Maximum Fun, NPR, Parcast, PRX+PRI, reVolver, Slate, The New York Times, The Ramsey Network, The Ringer, WNYC Studios, Wondery, and Libsyn, plus This American Life and Serial. Which is to say, Pandora isn’t beginning with an open platform, and inclusion depends on a series of discussions and negotiations. For now, to be distributed through the platform, you need to either be part of the aforementioned list of publishers or be hosted on Libsyn. A spokesperson told me that not all content partners available on Pandora are listed in the press release, and that it’s still a dynamic process at the beginning of the beta launch. Definitely expect more inclusions over time, but for now, I’d check with my hosting provider to see what’s up if I were you.

Another front to watch: monetization. Pandora’s podcast product enters public beta without any advertising tools, which are still being developed with the intent of rolling out sometime next year. How would podcast advertising on Pandora work? The details are still being worked out, I’m told, but Phillips discussed a potential scenario where it comes down to whether a publisher has an advertising deal with the company. In this hypothetical future, if a publisher does have a deal with Pandora, then the platform will strip the midroll ads baked into their episodes and swap it out with whatever podcast advertising experience the company comes up with. (The company is currently building the necessary tools to allow for those strip-and-swaps.) If not, those midrolls will be preserved. Again, this is how advertising might work, and Phillips notes that the company is in close contact with various podcast companies to figure out the best way to execute these relationships.

Publishers will also get enhanced analytics of whatever listens happen on Pandora, including episode completions, audience demographics, and so on. Again, table-stakes stuff, mosquito in amber, etc. etc.

For good measure, I asked about how the platform will handle content policing. (I was thinking, specifically, of The Alex Jones Problem that popped up over the summer.) Phillips acknowledged that it’s a tricky issue. “We try to be thoughtful and balanced,” he said, when it comes to the broader issues of censorship and policies. They do, however, have strong policies around hate speech.

Finally: original content. I’m told that there are no immediate plans for more original Pandora podcasts beyond Questlove Supreme…for now. “Watch this space,” Phillips said when I raised the question. Which, you know, sounds like they’re definitely going to do more stuff at some point in the future. I mean, come on: Spotify’s doing it, Google did it at one point, iHeartMedia literally bought a whole podcast company to keep doing it.

So will Pandora’s Podcast Genome Project end up being a significant boost for the podcast industry? Or will be slow on the take, as Spotify was? Obviously, I have no idea. More broadly, it’s been a long time since I bought stock in any flashy narratives about new “inflection points” for podcasting. Every time I see something that makes a little voice in my head go “this could be big,” I try to take the voice out back and bury it beneath the shed. (It’s just good practice.)

Still, there’s something about Pandora’s Podcast Genome Project that strikes me as particularly interesting, if only because its approach seems genuinely untested within the context of podcasting. As such, it wouldn’t surprise me if this was the thing that could well bring podcasting to a new place, even if I won’t buy into the possibility right this second. But even if it doesn’t, I won’t be blaming Pandora for under-cooking the pursuit. They have a niche, a place in the world. And they’re leaning into it.

Tracking:

• Conan O’Brien’s podcast, Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, launches next Monday, and the production has circulated a star-studded guest list preview. Stitcher (née Midroll Media) is handling ad sales, and there’s an interesting connection there: Adam Sachs, the former CEO of Midroll, is now the COO of Team Coco, O’Brien’s production company.
• ICYMI: “Some podcasters are reporting that they are seeing a steep decline in listenership, specifically when using Apple’s Podcast Analytics tool,” per 9to5Mac. Apple is reportedly on it.
• The New Yorker published a pretty chunky piece on podcasts yesterday (titled “How Podcasts Became a Seductive — and Sometimes Slippery — Mode of Storytelling,” or “Binge Listen” in print). It’s a strange one, in that it could be read as a limited analysis of the kinds of shows New Yorker staffers typically listen to. But it also feels emotionally true, especially in its findings of entrepreneurial power (public radio “vow of poverty” be damned) and potential narrative pitfalls. The ending is superb.
• I don’t think I’ve mentioned the actual date yet, but: Post Reports, The Washington Post’s daily news podcast, officially drops December 3. Also, as host Martine Powers noted on Twitter, the team will be “managed, hosted, and majority-produced by women of color.”
• Found this Vulture interview with Homecoming creators Eli Horowitz and Micah Bloomberg, on how the podcast was adapted to television, pretty interesting. Of note: The second season and the TV adaptation were written at the same time, and there will be no third season for the podcast. One swapped out for the other, it seems.
• Surviving Y2K, Dan Taberski’s followup to Missing Richard Simmons, dropped today. It’s really good.
• WNYC Studios tells me the new Jason Reitman film, The Front Runner, about Gary Hart’s 1987 campaign for Democratic presidential nomination that was taken down by a scandal, was apparently directly inspired by a Radiolab episode, “I Don’t Have To Answer That.” Wild.
• Who Weekly’s Lindsay Weber and Bobby Finger with the goods: “The Safe Space of the Celebrity-on-Celebrity Podcast.” Also, whoever gave Weber and Finger a column at Slate should be given a raise.
• You probably saw this, but in case you didn’t, here you go. Think it could’ve been a hundred times better? It’s SNL.

The case for transcription [by Caroline Crampton]. One thing about producing audio for the Internet that a lot of people I talk to really like is the relative tranquility of the whole experience, especially when contrasted with all other forms of online publishing. There’s no comments section, and audiences generally have to explicitly listen to a whole show to hear what’s actually said, rather than being able to Ctrl+F their way to outrage. As one female political podcast host told me, the comparative isolation really “cuts down on the number of drive-by haters.” (The flipside of this isolation, one might say, is podcasting’s infamous problems of shareability and discoverability. You can’t have everything, I suppose.)

But there are plenty of good reasons for expanding the publication of podcast transcripts. Chief among them is accessibility: having text alongside audio means that people who are hard of hearing or with auditory processing issues can still enjoy the show, as can those who aren’t fluent in the original broadcast language. (The regular English translations are how I enjoy the Spanish-language NPR podcast Radio Ambulante, for instance.) Increasing the accessibility of podcasting to these groups is innately the right to do; it’s a moral need as much as it is an audience growth tenet. And then there are the secondary considerations: notably, SEO and archiving. Plus it’s just good practice to preserve your stuff in several forms, as I’m sure the good people at the Preserve This Podcast project would tell you.

For some, transcriptions are baked into the DNA of the podcast’s goal. Amanda McLoughlin and Eric Silver, co-hosts of the Join the Party podcast and founding members of the podcast collective Multitude, told me that transcribing is foundational to their show. “In pre-production for Join the Party, we were designing the show to be more accessible than any other Dungeons & Dragons podcast out there — or any podcast in general,” they said. “We knew we had to have transcripts from Episode 1 to make our episodes accessible to people of all abilities, processing styles, and language backgrounds.” The transcripts were part of a broader effort to open up their subject (in this case, the playing of Dungeons & Dragons) to more people, no matter their background or subject knowledge. To this end, in addition to the transcriptions, they also purposefully introduced LGBTQ+ characters early on, cut down on the pop culture in-jokes, and released versions of their episodes that explained how to play.

However, producing accompanying transcripts isn’t yet a widespread practice in the podcast industry. Bigger publishers mostly don’t provide, or provide them sparingly. Sometimes, if you search long enough, it’s possible to find a listener who has done it for themselves (e.g. these transcripts for Dirty John) — but the majority of podcasts are simply left untranscribed. There’s an obvious reason: Producing transcriptions can be expensive and time consuming. I’ve seen rates of around £1.10 per minute ($1.50) for human transcription services; there are also various paid-for automated options that cost less, although they can be far less reliable. Even formatting and posting the final transcript can be onerous for already overworked producers.

The amount of work involved in producing useful transcripts also depends on the type of show. For narrative formats, it’s theoretically fairly easy to assemble a transcript that effectively serves as proper representation of the final episode, whereas for conversational podcasts with several speakers — in which the enjoyment occasionally comes from its chaotic cross-talk — it can take a lot longer. I’ve found these huge disparities in the show I’ve worked on. For Shedunnit, where the episodes are scripted and sub-20 minutes and the interviews are already transcribed for editing purposes, it’s a matter of a couple of hours — whereas for some of the roundtable shows I produce, creating a complete transcript can take all day, or even longer if I’m adding footnotes and links. When I’m in the middle of trying to untangle all the overtalking and track down precise sources, I can see why there are those who would rather not bother.

McLoughlin and Silver argue that just time and labor resource intensiveness is no reason to skimp on transcribing podcasts. “Accessibility is a right, not a privilege. Making great transcripts involves extra work for podcasters, but doing it demonstrates that you truly care about all of your listeners,” they said. They also pointed me towards this guide they published with the Bello Collective, which details some cheap and even free ways of doing it. (Private YouTube videos are great, the automatic caption service does most of the work for you!)

Counterintuitively, they posited, it’s actually the relative ease of taking a podcast from idea to final episode that has stopped transcripts going mainstream. “We all love that podcasting has such a low bar of entry for creators…Transcripts and other features that can improve accessibility, discovery, and potential audience growth are left by the wayside because they’re not required by your podcast host to launch a show.” They also feel strongly that transcripts are not to be released as paid-for extras to Patreon supporters or similar, writing in the aforementioned guide: “Accessibility should never depend on a listener’s income.”

Personally, I find podcast transcripts a great aid to memory — I frequently use them to track down something I half-remember from an episode before I pass it on to a friend. I think McLoughlin and Silver are right about the accessibility argument, too. Just as it is standard for TV to offer subtitles and cinemas to have signed screenings, maybe it’s about time the podcast industry took responsibility too.

The daily news podcast is scheduled to launch before the end of the year, and it will be monetised by Acast, which had previously worked with The Guardian on the latter’s Football Weekly and Politics Weekly shows. Bose will serve as its first sponsor, and I’m told that the launch sponsorship slots for the show in the U.K. have already been sold out.

Leo Hornak, formerly of the BBC (and who you might remember as the producer behind This American Life’s “Abdi and The Golden Ticket“), serves as executive producer overseeing a team of six journalists. Hornak wasn’t able to share any details at this point when I reached out. He did, however, offer a broader view closer to launch date, so we’ll probably revisit the story then.

In the meantime, some brief thoughts and a dash of historical context from my end. The challenge for any show like this is a big one: how to get into major subjects deeply (the announcement says the aim is to “take listeners behind the headlines”) while also maintaining a wide enough topic range for the podcast to be fully current and informative, all in a tight 20- to 30-minute package and on a daily release schedule. News consumers can already get basic headlines and recaps pretty easily from the news segments on commercial radio and social media feeds; if it’s to get them to put on their headphones and download a podcast, the upcoming daily news product needs to offer something more.

I would argue the daily news podcast terrain in the U.K. presents an additional challenge, given the BBC’s unparalleled reached and fairly unassailable reputation as an unbiased source of news. That’s on top of the fact that podcast awareness here lags behind the U.S. According to RAJAR, the official body that measures radio audiences in the U.K., 11 percent of U.K. adults listened to a podcast in the first quarter of 2018, whereas this year’s Infinite Dial report put monthly podcast listening in the U.S. at 26 percent.

On the flipside, there are two things that could potentially work in the Guardian’s favor. First, the newspaper has a distinctively liberal and left-leaning outlook, which could give its daily news podcast a way of attracting listeners who are keen on exploring the news more deeply but are frustrated by the way BBC has covered divisive issues like Brexit. (The success of single-issue podcasts in this space like Remainiacs and Agitpod certainly suggests there is a market for an unapologetically left-wing take on such matters.) If Asthana is permitted to put her personality and views into the show, that will go a long way to differentiating it from the sterile, characterless style enforced by the BBC’s impartiality rules, too.

Second, podcast listenership in the U.K. is highest among younger people, who are also far less likely to listen to live radio or watch traditional televised news broadcasts. They are the growth market for a show like this, and it shouldn’t be afraid of tailoring its content and style to them.

It should be acknowledged that this isn’t the first time The Guardian has produced a daily news podcast. That honour goes to a show first called Newsdesk, later renamed Guardian Daily, which ran from March 2006 to July 2010 (here’s the first ever episode and the entire archive). Interestingly, this fact was first left off the press release about the new daily show and only subsequently added, presumably after host Jon Dennis reminded people of the original podcast’s existence on Twitter.

I spoke to Dennis on the phone to find out a bit more about how Newsdesk came into being in 2006. At the time, he was deputy news editor for Guardian Unlimited, as the publication’s website was then known (it had a separate staff from the print newspaper). The site’s first foray into podcasts involved the comedian Ricky Gervais when, in the latter part of 2005, the site hosted The Ricky Gervais Show. According to Dennis, the editor Alan Rusbridger, further encouraged by his daughter, eventually proposed The Guardian make its own podcasts in house. Dennis auditioned to host the first of these projects, which was to be a daily news show.

“I got the gig, and I was really just tasked with developing it on my own,” he said. “They found me a desk — there was no studio, it was in the process of being built in a stock cupboard or something — and I had to figure out what The Guardian’s daily news podcast might sound like. No other papers that we were aware of were doing anything like that.”

The format ended up being about 20 minutes, involving Dennis having “conversations with The Guardian’s reporters and writers about things that The Guardian had published.” He also interviewed guests who were in the news. He and his producer saw the purpose of Newsdesk/Guardian Daily as adding value to the publication’s other output and bringing in new readers. “If you didn’t read The Guardian or know anything about it, you should be able to listen to that podcast and get an idea of the stories we thought were important,” he said. “We certainly tried to reflect The Guardian’s values.”

Talking to Dennis, I had the impression that he was pretty much left alone to figure out the proto-daily news podcast. It ended up garnering around 26,000 listeners each day — which, for a mid-2000s British podcast, is pretty strong. But the ad sales team at The Guardian was unable to find an effective way to make money off the show, and Dennis found himself hampered by various technological hurdles. There would occasionally be breaking news developments that instantly rendered Newsdesk/Guardian Daily moot, as he wouldn’t be able to derive enough resources to re-record an emergency podcast or respond in any adequate way.

Without any marketing budget and with a poor internet presence, the podcast struggled to grow, although the existing listeners remained loyal. By 2010, Dennis said, “the enthusiasm internally at The Guardian had gone for it. They were convinced that there was something wrong with it. They tried various things, and it didn’t really feel like there was much left of me in it really by the time it finished.” Guardian Daily received a surprise stay of execution while it covered the aftermath of 2010’s inconclusive general election, but was eventually put to pasture in July of that year.

Dennis is surprised that it took so long for The Guardian to resurrect the idea of a daily podcast, especially given the direction podcasting has taken since 2010. “They bloody well should be doing a daily news podcast,” he said. “That’s why they brought it back — it’s absolutely the obvious thing that The Guardian should be doing.” He also suggested that a desire to follow in the footsteps of The New York Times’ The Daily could be behind the new launch, but stressed that it absolutely made sense for The Guardian as a news organization to put news at the heart of their podcasting operation, too.

While I’m sure that Hornak and his team will be wanting to start afresh with their new project, I think it’s fair to say that Dennis’ efforts back in 2006 had blazed a fair bit of trail for them. Yes, the production quality for Newsdesk/Guardian Daily wasn’t always top notch, and a few more narratively-reported segments wouldn’t have gone amiss. But the seeds for an informative, fast-moving show with a distinctive viewpoint that drew on The Guardian staff’s expertise was planted then and there.

This is a long article. It will be challenging to some, especially those that have been in podcasting a long time (which, for the record, I have). I’ll make a deal with you, however — I’ll back up every assertion in this post with credible research data. You, in return, keep an open mind. Deal?

Last week I gave an opening keynote at Podcast Movement, which has become one of the most important events in podcasting. In my talk, I took stock of where we are in the medium, where we need to go, and what we need to do to get there. I suspect some of what I had to say raised some eyebrows, but the issues that I mentioned need to be grappled with. So, I’d like to share those issues here with you, and I welcome your constructive dialogue.

I first became involved in podcasting back in 2005, when I pushed to get the medium included on our annual flagship media study, The Infinite Dial (which we publish every year with our partners at Triton Digital). We announced our first data on podcast consumption in 2006 — it was basically a rounding error then — but we believed it would continue to grow.

Since then, it has grown, pretty steadily year-over-year, in several important ways. First of all, we have tracked awareness of the term “Podcasting” for over a decade. it was flat for several years, but since 2015 it has risen 15 percentage points, and is nearing two-thirds of the U.S. population 12+. People will often point to this graph as a kind of validation of podcasting, but (as I always point out on the annual Infinite Dial webinar) this only means that 64 percent of the country is familiar with the term. They’ve heard it mentioned — maybe on the radio, maybe by a friend. However, it does not mean that 64 percent of the country actually knows what a podcast is. Indeed, I can assure you that millions of these people do not, and I’m going to set down the proof of that assertion in a moment.

At this point, I think it’s necessary to stipulate something right up front: I have never advocated that we change the term “podcasting” to something else, though some have colorfully misinterpreted my stance in that way. No, the name is what makes the medium special — if anything, I think we should double down on it! But let’s be honest about something:

Have you ever had to explain to someone what a podcast is?

Of course you have.

Have you ever had to explain to someone what a show is?

Not to anyone over six years old.

Podcasting is the name. But it is a name that requires explanation. We can agree on that, yes? Whenever I make this point, some will point out some other terms that required explanation, but stuck: VCR, DVD, Blu-Ray, etc. That they did. When was the last time you watched your VCR? Those terms are formats. Formats die. If podcasting is a medium (and I believe it is), then we have to do a better job explaining it to the general public. We haven’t done it yet.

We may think we have because everyone we know, knows what a podcast is. Everyone you know probably has a podcast, for that matter. But I can assure you, millions of Clinton voters say they don’t know anyone who voted for Trump, and millions of Trump voters would say the opposite. We have to get out of our bubbles and understand the real bottlenecks to the growth of podcasting, because it just isn’t growing that fast.

There. I said it. And it’s time to look at this graph and have an honest conversation about it:

Since we started tracking podcasting in 2006, weekly consumption has gone from essentially zero to 17 percent of Americans 12 and older. That’s zero to 17 in 13 years, or less than two percentage points per year. Now, it’s grown a bit faster over the past 5 years, but can anyone look at this graph and call podcasting a fast-growing medium? It’s actually one of the slowest-growing media we’ve ever tracked in the Infinite Dial.

The title of my Podcast Movement talk was “Podcasting’s Next Frontier: 100 Million Listeners.” And the 100 million I am talking about is weekly listeners — the graph above. Right now we are at 48 million weekly listeners. So, to get to 100, the medium has to more than double its number of weekly listeners. At the current rate, how long do you think that would take? 8 years? 10? Longer?

I hope it doesn’t take longer. Listen, I’ve done some hard livin’ — I need this to pay off now. In any case, we need to step back and look at the last 13 years and admit something: It’s been a slow build, over a period of time when streaming music and video and social media and mobile have all grown muchfaster. The growth curve of streaming music online is nearly identical to the growth curve for smartphone penetration. Why doesn’t podcasting’s curve look anything like that?

And there is also this: some year we are going to release the Infinite Dial report and it’s going to show podcasting flat — or maybe even down. I’m sure back in 2006 executives at MySpace were busily projecting that they would soon surpass Geocities or even AltaVista — but growth isn’t guaranteed. And someday, it stops, just as it did for Facebook and Twitter this year.

That’s the constructive conversation I’d like to have here. The cold, hard truth: 17 percent of Americans say they listen to a podcast at least once a week. 64 percent of Americans say they know the term. That means that about three-quarters of the people who say they know the term “podcasting” are not weekly listeners. Do we think that is good? Great? Not great?

Here’s something I can tell you for a fact: Millions of those people who say that they are familiar with the term podcasting, but have never listened to a podcast, do not understand what a podcast is. There are dozens of opinions and beliefs out there about the nature of podcasting, and if we are going to continue to grow the medium as its own distinct channel, we have to understand something: We are never going to “educate” someone to become interested in something they aren’t interested in. Some of the beliefs people have about podcasting are misconceptions, to be sure — but some of them aren’t.

Got podcasts?

I once believed that podcasting required its own “Got Milk?” campaign — a concerted effort by the industry to explain exactly what a podcast is, how you would listen to it, and where you could find them. I don’t believe that anymore — or at least, I don’t think it solves the real underlying problem. To grow the medium from its current 48 million weekly listeners (in America) to 100 million listeners means converting 52,000,000 — or, as I will call them, The 52. To believe that The 52 will convert once we explain podcasting to them is to assume that The 52 are similar to the 48 we already have — that what got us here is going to get us there.

I can assure you that The 52 are different people than the existing audience for podcasting. The 52 don’t need podcasting explained to them. They need a reason to care.

At the beginning of this piece, I promised you some research data, and here it is. My colleagues and I at Edison set out to understand The 52 — especially those millions of Americans who say that they are familiar with podcasts but have never listened to one. We did this first with a series of qualitative interviews with people who fit those criteria exactly — familiar, but have never listened — to get a sense of what their perceptions of the medium are.

So first I’d like to introduce you to some of the “nevers.” I hope you watch this, because these are truly representative of millions of The 52:

So how much of this is true? I mean, these people were very compelling, but are they representative of any of The 52? How many people really have these various perceptions?

To find out, we conducted an online survey of 1,000 Americans 18 and older, all of whom told us they were familiar with the term “podcasting.” We weighted that data to the Infinite Dial dataset for 2018, and we asked those people when, if ever, they last listened to a podcast. We set aside those who told us they’d listened to one in the last 6 months and took a close look at those who say they’ve never listened, as well as those who haven’t listened in over a year and those who listened in the last 6 to 12 months. The largest group by far of those three were the “never listens,” who were as large as the other two combined. So we had a great sample of The 52, and in particular, those who say they’ve heard the term, but never listened to a podcast.

Podcasting perceptions

I’m going to come back to the stat at the bottom of this graphic later, but let’s quantify something right off the bat. 37 percent of the people who are familiar with the term “podcasting” but haven’t listened to one don’t really know what a podcast is. And you heard some of those misconceptions in our video, right? Here’s the thing — none of these people are wrong. They’ve had no reason to find out what a podcast really is because we haven’t really given them a reason to find out.

And by the way, that 37 percent is the percentage of the “nevers” who admitignorance, which very likely means this number is a bit of an underestimate. In fact, I would submit that the second number, the 48 percent of the “nevers” who say they don’t know how to listen to a podcast, is probably the real percentage of the “nevers” who do not, in fact, know what a podcast is. After all, if you truly knew what a podcast was, you’d probably know how to listen to one.

Of course, one of the ways that people can listen to a podcast is with a dedicated app. When we asked the “nevers” if they had one, we got a fairly surprising result:

80 percent of the “nevers” say they don’t have a podcast app on their phone — and these are both Apple and Android users. Very few of them are correct, by the way. Not only do most people have a podcast app on their phone — most people have multiple podcast apps on their phone. If you don’t believe me, you need to expand your definition of podcast app to Google, Spotify, TuneIn, Pandora, iHeart, and many more apps that people already likely have on their mobile device. The fact is we are lousy with ways to listen to podcasts, but not lousy with reasons to do so.

There were once was a time when plenty of people didn’t think they had a Netflix app, didn’t know they needed one, and weren’t sure how to watch it without getting discs emailed in those red envelopes. So what did Netflix do? They didn’t spend a bunch of money on a “Got Netflix?” campaign. They spent a lot of money on “Orange is the New Black” and “House of Cards.” What gets people to discover Netflix is curiosity, and what drives curiosity is the show. The killer show. But we aren’t there yet, as the next two graphs will show you:

So here you see that nearly a third of the “nevers” think that most podcasts are for educational purposes. And you know what — they aren’t wrong, are they? Similarly, nearly half say podcasts are too long. Now, you will never hear me give you an ideal length for a podcast. I get that question weekly from journalists. I’ll never answer it because there is no single answer. There’s room for Up First and there’s room for Hardcore History. Podcast hosts will tell you that many of the most popular podcasts are an hour or so — but that’s partially because many of the best podcasts today happen to be an hour long. Again, what got us here won’t get us there. Shorter, daily podcasts are driving more podcast consumption, and what these data tell us is not that the ideal length for a podcast is short — it’s that many people don’t perceive that we have enough quality shorter content. People want options. And they don’t have them. I’ve made this argument for years now, and it’s still true — look at the top iTunes podcasts:

You see a lot of public media, a lot of highbrow content, and a lot of longer content. The 52 seem to have nailed this one! Now look at the Nielsen top shows from a couple of weeks ago:

Nearly four years after I first wrote about this, these two charts still look nothing alike. Two of these shows are “America’s Got Talent,” and I don’t think we do! There’s “The Bachelorette,” and one of those acronym-cop shows that always seem to be in the top 10. The top show of the 2017–18 TV season was “Roseanne.” In short, it’s crap — but it’s high-quality crap.

We need more high quality crap.

Of course, there’s a giant hole in content for podcasts, and its relative paucity is surely one of the biggest barriers to faster adoption. Of course, I am speaking about the most popular form of audio content in the world: music.

This is absolutely one that the podcast industry has to fix. Right now, if you podcast-licensed music, a music industry lawyer will shoot you in the face. According to Edison’s most recent Share of Ear data, 77 percent of the time we spend listening to audio we spend listening to music — and that ratio is not going to move quickly, if at all. I recently keynoted the podcasting track at MusicBiz 2018, where I spoke about this issue before an audience of the people who, if not the actual shooters, are at least the ones that ordered the hit. The fact that they even had a podcasting track shows that the music industry is at least thinking about this — after all, every time you listen to a podcast on Spotify, you are not listening to a song, and they are not getting paid royalties.

So there is some incentive on the part of the music industry to address the licensing challenges of music in podcasts. But podcasters need to push, too. Music is a huge, relatively untapped focus area for podcasts, and one that The 52 in particular would certainly enjoy.

Please don’t subscribe

Now we are getting to one of the more dangerous perceptions — that podcasts cost money. This is a flat out misconception, but it’s one that we created with our continual insistence that people “subscribe” to our show. With the exception of a YouTube channel, you pay for things you subscribe to — magazines, satellite radio, HBO, the fruit-of-the-month club. The listeners we have may understand that podcasts are largely free. But many of The 52 do not.

Also, it’s kind of a big ask, no? Here’s what you don’t subscribe to: TV shows. Radio shows. Movies. Almost anything else we choose to watch or listen to. We ask for this incredible order. We don’t deserve to have our shows automatically delivered every week with a notification. “Westworld” doesn’t get that. You earn a listen, week after week. Because Apple has accelerated the pace of the listen. The download may be what we trade on now, but we all know that the listen is the ultimate goal, and Apple’s analytics and the RAD working group are all accelerating that dialogue. And when we get there, do you think you are going to want your show to have a bunch of unlistened-to downloads? Why would you have or want those? Also, “Subscribe to us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, or anywhere else you get your podcasts” is a cry for help. It’s a confusing, twisted call-to-action.

We need to give The 52 — the people we need to get to 100 million — a better on-ramp to podcasts. Your podcast needs a website. And the most obvious thing you need to be able to do when you get to that website is to listen to the show. Sure, have your subscribe buttons here — but maybe explain them. Or maybe change the language to “Follow my show to receive it free every week.” And let’s think about replacing “Subscribe to us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, or anywhere else you get your podcasts” with “listen to my show at myshow.com.” Isn’t that better?

I really believe things like this do more damage than good. You can insist that a podcast automatically be delivered via RSS enclosure all you want, but make sure you stock your compound with canned food and bottled water and hunker down for the end times, my friend. I’m interested in what gets us there. And I don’t care about what you say on your website — I’m talking about the audio of your show. If the audio call to action in your show is “Subscribe to us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, or anywhere else you get your podcasts,” then you are not reaching The 52.

Ultimately, there are more people out there with misconceptions about podcasting than there are regular listeners. And that’s really what I want to address in the last section — what I think the ultimate issue is, and what the marketing plan for podcasting needs to be to reach 100 million listeners as quickly as we can. And that’s this — if we have one thing to tell people about podcasting, what should it be? Let’s look at a few final graphs.

Let’s put on a show, kids

I want to come back to a data point I presented earlier — the 65 percent of the “nevers” who agree that there are “so many podcasts you don’t know where to start.” If you read this as a discovery issue, you’ve read this wrong, friends. These aren’t people who already listen to podcasts. These are the people that have never listened to a podcast. The issue isn’t that there are too many — the issue is that there isn’t one. Here’s the simple truth: Just as it was for Netflix, Hulu, and any other form of new online media, the on-ramp is the show. And while we need to make listening to the show simpler — we also need a show. When people say that “Podcasts just aren’t for them” or that there aren’t topics that they are interested in — maybe we should take them at their word? They need a show — just one show — and we either haven’t led them to it yet or maybe…just maybe…we haven’t made it yet.

Commercial broadcast radio hasn’t helped with this perception, by the way. For years, AM/FM morning shows have been telling listeners that “if you missed Weenie & The Butt this morning, just go to WQHG.com and download our podcast!” On the one hand, this has spread the name “podcasting” for us (but, as I mentioned earlier — awareness isn’t our problem). On the other, in this context, it has taught millions of Americans that a podcast is just that: catch-up radio. Nothing special. And nothing that can’t be heard every day, on the radio. There is, however, a valuable lesson we can learn from commercial broadcast radio.

Earlier I mentioned that the final answer here is not a “Got Podcasts?” campaign. I’ll tell you how I know this. Commercial AM/FM radio still has incredible reach in this country, but ad revenues are down, and media buyers are migrating more and more to digital. Commercial radio certainly has an image problem — and so for years, commercial broadcast executives have lamented what they consider the real problem — they aren’t telling their story as an industry well enough. But look, all the PR in the world can try to change your mind about the medium of AM/FM radio — but what would it say? That radio is the transmission and reception of electromagnetic waves of radio frequency, especially those carrying sound messages, and that you need this device to hear it, and here is how you operate that device? Absurd. It didn’t work, and it doesn’t work, because people don’t care. But give them “The Handmaid’s Tale” and they’ll figure Hulu out right quick. Where commercial broadcast radio is underperforming is in marketing The Show. Unfortunately for commercial radio, most stations are either playing music or syndicated programming. They don’t own a translatable show to market. It’s Billy & The Beanbag in the morning and classic hits all day long.

Now, we podcasters potentially have The Show. And the way to get podcasting to 100 million listeners is to put on a show, make it a great show, and market the show, not the medium. And a great show starts with a great idea. If someone asks you if you have a podcast, and what that podcast is about, what do you say? Do you say “It’s two regular guys talking about the Cubs?” Is that a show? Or is that the equivalent of eavesdropping on conversations at the bar at Lou Malnati’s? Or listening to a Hootie and the Blowfish cover band? Or watching “NYPD Blue” after David Caruso left? Or “Jar Jar’s Gungan Adventure”?

Two guys talking about sports is banter. Jalen and Jacoby is a show. And a show starts with a great, unique idea. My friend and podcast partner Mark Schaefer calls this the “only we” of a brand. The key to whether or not you have a show lies in your ability to complete this sentence: Only our podcast…

Answer that question for your show. What is the magic, big idea that gives your show its reason to earn that listen? Is it: We say funny things about the movies? Or is it: A futuristic western theme park turns to terror when the robot hosts begin killing guests?

And once you have that big idea, the “only we” of your podcast, then you owe it to your audience and to The 52 to produce it, to edit it, and to make it as compelling to listen to as you can, because you aren’t competing against the Billy & The Beanbag podcast. Not anymore. The OGs of podcasting were, and those things worked if you started in 2006. Today? The No. 1 competition for your podcast isn’t another podcast. It’s Netflix. We need more high-quality content out there, because The 52 demands high quality, broad-concept content.

Once you have a show, you need to market that show. We need you to market your show! You need a simple message — the “only we,” the big idea — and then you need that simple call-to-action: Listen to my show at myshow.com. And you need to put that message in front of people. You don’t need to run digital outdoor in Times Square like Midroll’s great campaign. Social media can work, but honestly, I’m a big fan of doing offline things, locally where you are.

If you can get your show in front of 100 people in your city or town, those 100 people know 10,000 people. Soon, eleventy billion people are listening to your podcast. But you can’t eat the elephant all at once. There are so many cost-effective ways to reach 100 people. Be where people are: street fairs, food festivals, the mall! If you have a sports podcast, you should be posting placards above the urinals and behind the doors in the restrooms at sports bars. These things don’t cost much, and they work.

You can even advertise on other podcasts. Heck, my friend Kris Smith can put ads for your podcast onto other podcasts with a credit card and a hundred bucks. Start locally. If you have a simple concept, a simple call to action, and a great show, it isn’t rocket surgery. But to get The 52, we need to set the bar higher.

Once people discover The Show, then you can make the bigger asks. Introduce them to what subscribing means, or ways that they can support the show. But not at the start. Remember, these are The 52: the people that you haven’t gotten doing things the way you are currently doing them. And you don’t have the right to them, you do not deserve them, and you aren’t naturally going to get them over time. You are going to have to earn them.

If we are dependent on educating people about the medium and how to use it, we are doomed to be a curiosity. But if we can build The Show, give people the simplest, single on-ramp to The Show, play them The Show, and market The Show, we’ll get The 52. I know we will. It works in every medium.

And I’ll leave you with some proof:

My colleagues and I are proud to have served this industry for 14 years. And we’ll be around for the long haul. But let’s not wait too long. We’ve spent the early years of podcasting creating great shows that we are passionate about — often, creating the shows that we wanted to hear because they weren’t available elsewhere! But my challenge to you, to me, and to the entire medium we call podcasting is this: Let’s make a show for them.

Huge shakeups at Audible Originals. I can confirm that the Amazon-owned audiobook giant announced internally last Thursday that it was eliminating a considerable number of roles within its original programming unit. Sources within the company tell me that the role eliminations span a number of different teams within the unit, but most notably, they include nearly the entire group responsible for Audible’s shorter-form podcast-style programming, like the critically acclaimed West Cork, The Butterfly Effect with Jon Ronson, and Where Should We Begin? with Esther Perel. That group was previously led by former NPR executive Eric Nuzum and his deputy, the public radio veteran Jesse Baker.

NPR’s Neda Ulaby first reported the development in a newscast on Friday evening. In the spot, Ulaby noted that about a dozen employees were affected and that the changes came “with no warning.”

Yesterday, Nuzum, who held the title of SVP of original content development, circulated an email announcing that he will be leaving the company in the next few weeks. He also noted that he plans to engage in some consulting work in the short-term, before diving into a new venture by the year’s end.

These developments come as Audible reshapes its original programming strategy. A spokesperson for the company tells me: “As you may know, we’ve been evolving our content strategy for Audible Originals (including our theater initiative, narrative storytelling ‘written to the form’ as well as short-form programming). A related restructure of our teams resulted in the elimination of several roles and the transfer of some positions to other parts of the business.”

I briefly wrote about this shift last month, using the release of the author Michael Lewis’ audiobook-only project, The Coming Storm, as the news hook. In the piece, I posited a link between the strategic changes and recent shake-ups at the company’s executive level:

Audible has long been a horizontal curiosity for the podcast industry, given its hiring of former NPR programming VP Eric Nuzum in mid-2015 and subsequent rollout ofthe Audible Originals and “Channels” strategy in mid-2016, which saw the company releasing products that some, like myself, perceived as comparable to and competitive with the kinds of products you’d get from the podcast ecosystem.

This signing of authors like Michael Lewis to audiobook-first deals appears to be a ramping up of an alternate original programming strategy, one that sees Audible leaning more heavily into the preexisting nature of its core relationships with the book publishing industry and the book-buying audience. It might also be a consequence of a reshuffle at the executive decision-making level: in late 2017, the Hollywood Reporter broke news that chief content officer Andrew Gaies and chief revenue officer Will Lopes unexpectedly stepped down resigned from their posts. (Later reporting noted that the resignations happened in the midst of a harassment probe.) The ripple effects of that sudden shift in leadership is probably only hitting us now, and in this form.

So that’s the context. Here’s what I don’t know:

• What happens to all the podcast-style Audible Original programs that are still ongoing? What happens to their future seasons currently in production? And will those properties be given the opportunity to leave for other podcast companies — or will they be integrated into Audible’s new strategy in some form?
• What happens to the dozen or so producers that were affected by the role eliminations?

And then, of course, there’s the question of what this means for Audible. I’ll leave this for next week.

The Alex Jones problem. The past few months have seen a flurry of activity on the subject of internet platforms and their responsibilities around hateful content, harmful material, and the limits of free speech. The issue largely focused on high-volume media-distribution platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, but its scope actually extends much further than that: the e-commerce giant Amazon, as well, has faced scrutiny over some of the products it allows on its platform.

Last week, the ongoing saga reached podcasting shores, and it is there that the story proceeded to reverberate back outwards with significance.

Over the weekend, both Apple Podcasts and the Midroll-owned Stitcher removed podcasts by Infowars, the conspiracy theory-peddling media company led by Alex Jones, from their platforms. (If, for some reason, you are unfamiliar with Jones and Infowars, I highly recommend this profile by Charlie Warzel.)

Stitcher and Apple’s decisions came shortly after Spotify announced they were removing specific episodes from Alex Jones’ podcasts from its platform that were found to be in violation of its Hateful Content policy. At the time, the music streaming service was facing backlash for continuing to distribute the conspiracy theorist’s podcasts after Facebook and YouTube had temporarily suspended some of Jones’ programming for similar content policy violations. Spotify remained under pressure even after the selective removals, with critics continuing to raise questions on whether the platform had done nearly enough.

It’s worth noting that Stitcher was the first major podcast-distributing platform to delist Jones’ shows in their entirety. The company did so on Thursday evening, citing over Twitter that Jones had, on multiple occasions, violated its policies when he published episodes that “harassed or allowed harassment of private individuals and organizations, and that harassment has led listeners of the show to engage in similar harassment and other damaging activity.” Sources within the company told me last week that the decision to completely remove Jones’ programming, as opposed to just focusing on specific offending episodes (as in the case of Spotify), stemmed from its concluding judgment that the podcasts were likely to violate its policies on harassment and abuse in the future. Stitcher’s move attracted a fair bit of media attention, with writeups on Billboard, Engadget, BuzzFeed News, and TechCrunch.

Apple’s removal of Jones’ podcasts took place sometime during Sunday evening. I first noticed the delisting around 6:45 p.m. Pacific, and BuzzFeed News published the first official report on the matter shortly after. In the report, Apple similarly cited policy violations as the grounds for Jones’ removal. As a spokesperson told BuzzFeed News:

Apple does not tolerate hate speech, and we have clear guidelines that creators and developers must follow to ensure we provide a safe environment for all of our users…podcasts that violate these guidelines are removed from our directory making them no longer searchable or available for download or streaming. We believe in representing a wide range of views, so long as people are respectful to those with differing opinions.

Strangely, Apple’s decision only impacted five out of six Infowars podcasts. Real News With David Knight, Infowars’ daily news recap show, remains active on the platform. No explanation was given as to why. The BuzzFeed News report also highlighted the efforts by Sleeping Giants, a social media-based activism group, to lead pressure campaigns to get major internet platforms to cut ties with Jones.

Apple’s decision to delist Jones’ podcasts is noteworthy for its ripple effect within the podcast ecosystem. The Apple Podcasts platform does not actually host podcasts itself, functioning instead as an inventory to which you have to submit your RSS feeds to review for inclusion. Because of Apple Podcasts’ historical scale, infrastructure, and preexisting inventory map, a significant number of other podcast apps, including the public radio coalition-owned Pocket Casts, rely on Apple Podcasts’ inventory to determine their own offerings — sometimes to be efficient in populating their app, other times to lean on a larger authority for content policing. The removal is also noteworthy, obviously, for the fact that Apple Podcasts is believed to still be the most widely used podcast listening app in the market.

And it seems the ripple effect has extended outwards as well. Yesterday, Facebook, YouTube, and Spotify all followed up by completely removing Alex Jones and Infowars programming from their platforms, all citing repeated violations around their hate speech and harassment policies.

As the bans from Facebook, Spotify, and YouTube trickled out on Monday, there emerged some debate about whether the bans were the result of separate processes that were all bound to end up at the same conclusion, or whether this was a situation where these gargantuan platforms were simply waiting for someone else to take the first step. Given the timeline and stutter-step nature of Monday’s Infowars bans, I can’t help but view this as the latter. When it comes to big internet platforms (or any huge organization with massive stakes, really), deeply complicated questions, and moral leadership, stories like these almost always crescendo to a point where everyone arrives at a holding pattern that waits for someone else to take the first step into the muck — and reveals the full ramifications of what happens on the other side.

In this case, the first one in was comparatively smaller Stitcher, and I can’t shake the feeling the company’s actions ended up attracting the right amount of attention and creating a permission structure that made it easier for the others to move in this direction. For what it’s worth, I hope they get the credit for it.

Show notes:

• James Andrew Miller’s oral history podcast with Cadence13, Origins, is returning with three new seasons — or “chapters,” in its parlance — on the horizon: one on college football coach Nick Saban, one on the upcoming season of Saturday Night Live, and one on the legendary HBO show Sex and the City.
• Tenderfoot’s Up and Vanished will kick off its second season on August 20. The podcast has now partnered with Cadence13 for distribution and monetization.
• Radiotopia’s new Showcase series, called The Great God of Depression, dropped in full last Friday. Pagan Kennedy, a coproducer on the project, also published an related op-ed in The New York Times over the weekend.

Existentialism. Last Thursday, Edison Research SVP Tom Webster — one of the principal frontmen for the measurement firm’s Infinite Dial study, which gives the podcast industry its benchmark numbers — published a Medium post titled “Podcasting’s Next Frontier: A Manifesto For Growth.” It is an adaptation of Webster’s keynote from the recent Podcast Movement conference, and it presents a data-supported argument around what he views as the fundamental challenge for the podcast ecosystem…and what, broadly speaking, may be the way through it.

Webster’s argument contains numerous moving parts and side-theses (be sure to clock the bit about music podcasts), and at the risk of oversimplifying his perspective, here’s the main thrust of the piece as I understand it:

(1) Contrary to aspects of its public narrative, podcasting isn’t actually growing that fast. As Webster outlines: “Since we started tracking podcasting in 2006, weekly consumption has gone from essentially zero to 17% of Americans 12+. That’s 0–17, in 13 years, or less than two percentage points per year. Now, it’s grown a bit faster over the past 5 years, but can anyone look at this graph and call podcasting a fast-growing medium? It’s actually one of the slowest-growing media we’ve ever tracked in the Infinite Dial.”

(2) Raising the possibility (or, indeed, probability) that there will soon come a day when its annual reporting will show a flattening or decrease in podcast listening growth, Webster highlights the principal metric that should be the center of our attention: “17% of Americans say they listen to a podcast at least once a week. 64% of Americans say they know the term. That means that about three-quarters of the people who say they know the term ‘podcasting’ are not weekly listeners.” To Webster, this data point suggests that the fundamental problem is as follows: lots of people have heard about podcasting, but they don’t actually know what it is.

(3) That knowledge gap is preventing those potential new listeners from either trying out or buying into the medium. Part of this has to do with simple under-education about some core aspects of the ecosystem — podcasts are generally free, the means to consume them are already pre-baked into your phone, and so on — but a bigger part, Webster gestures, has to do with podcasting ecosystem’s lack of collective messaging that elevates its public identity beyond being a mere technological curiosity. Which is to say: there hasn’t been a push to help podcast programming make sense within the context of the everyday non-podcast consumers, in part by evoking facsimiles of what they already know or channeling the things they are already comfortable with.

For Webster, this conundrum is best expressed through the podcast ecosystem still not having what he calls “The Show”: the one program whose innate draw simplifies, supersedes, or even renders irrelevant the entire narrative around the distribution platform. He writes:

There were once was a time when plenty of people didn’t think they had a Netflix app, didn’t know they needed one, and weren’t sure how to watch it without getting discs emailed in those red envelopes. So what did Netflix do? They didn’t spend a bunch of money on a “Got Netflix?” campaign. They spent a lot of money on Orange is the New Black and House of Cards. What gets people to discover Netflix is curiosity, and what drives curiosity is the show. The killer show.

Technology and gaming enthusiasts can probably broadly equate this argument with the notion of “killer apps” that move new devices and consoles. Same goes as well, I think, with SiriusXM and Howard Stern.

I had originally planned to present a much bigger discussion around Webster’s post, more or less agreeing with the broad strokes of his argument while at the same time looking to do a couple of things: identifying its limits, interrogating its assumptions, expanding the scope of the conversation. Forgive me, but I’m afraid I have to postpone that to next week, both for the reasons of space and because I got caught up digging deep into the Audible and the Alex Jones stories.

In the meantime, I leaned on Tom for this week’s Career Spotlight:

Career Spotlight. Since we have a huge chunk of Tom Webster’s writing to go through, what’s a little more? Let’s go.

Thanks, Tom.

Miscellaneous bites:

• “The Information has learned that only about 2% of the people with devices that use Amazon’s Alexa intelligent assistant — mostly Amazon’s own Echo line of speakers — have made a purchase with their voices so far in 2018, according to two people briefed on the company’s internal figures.” (The Information) As Nieman Lab’s Joshua Benton pointed out over Twitter: “That’s despite survey data suggesting something more like 25%.”
• Breaker, the Y Combinator-accelerated podcast app, rolled out a new feature yesterday called Upstream that aims to help publishers to create and manage a “premium content” structure without having to rely on a non-podcast specific membership platform like Patreon. (Breaker)
• “Apple’s HomePod may have just doubled its share of the U.S. smart speaker market.” (Fast Company)
• “‘The Conservative Movement…Has Become a Racket’: Steve Schmidt Is Starting a Pod Save America for Never Trumpers.” (Vanity Fair)
• “Colleen Scriven’s ‘Lesser Gods’ Podcast in Development as HBO Comedy Series.” (Variety)
• “The Podcast Bros Want to Optimize Your Life.” (The New York Times)
• “Patreon creators scramble as payments are mistakenly flagged as fraud.” (The Verge)

The core mechanic isn’t anything particularly revolutionary, other than the fact that it’s remarkably simple. Every week, the app-magazine-thing serves you a new curated playlist of podcast episodes built around a different theme (most of the time). There’s one about art, there’s another about the Supreme Court, and then there’s a collection that’s really just threading together Lea Thau’s Love Hurts series. In other words, it’s a fancy podcast playlist provider, but putting it that way is a little like saying a magazine is a fancy provider of words. I mean, it is, but also, it isn’t, because something has to be said about how a thing feels in the use of it, and man, Wilson FM feels so…different. And as a result, interesting.

Granted, this just might be a situation where I’m responding extra-positively to a drop of water after weeks of drinking nothing but straight-up seltzer. Which is to say: Every podcast app that I’ve used more or less looks and feels the same despite new feature-concepts — say, a social layer — or an expanded suite of bells and whistles. Which as a matter of collective experience generally brings me to place where it’s a little like waking up every morning and relentlessly commuting in a city you once found interesting: After a certain point, you just stop seeing the world around you in new and renewably invigorating ways.

My positivity might also have something to do with how consumer software technology aesthetics seem to be largely situated within a same, sterile place. My buddy Kyle Chayka, a freelance writer who’s currently working on a book about minimalism, dubbed this aesthetic “AirSpace” in an essay for The Verge back in 2016, and you probably already know what he’s talking about: pastels, curved edges, any sharp sense of personality sandpapered away.

In contrast, Wilson FM is weird. Its visual sensibility evokes the new media section of an art school exhibit (or a moderately-sized modern art museum). Its app icon is a funny little scribble. Its squint-to-see-it font has a counterintuitive charm. All these quirks of expression are tied to the fact that the app is primarily the work of one person: Allan Yu, a New York-based designer who’s done stints at Google X, the search giant’s super secret R&D lab, and Svpply, a now-defunct social shopping site that was acquired by eBay in 2012.

“I’ve always had a soft spot for print design and aesthetics that have a point of view or opinion,” Yu tells me over email. “But I’ve been working in tech for quite some time and am just tired of this A/B-tested, data-proven, metric-driven design.” He continues:

I didn’t want to do that when it came to building something that was my own and close to my heart so the only ethos was Anti. The inspiration is Anti-tech, Anti-convention, Anti-UI/UX Design. I looked at a lot of print stuff that mainly contributed to the organization and focus of these Issue covers. Even the proportion of the cover is print-based and I use two typefaces from one of my favorite type foundry, Milieu Grotesque. I also wanted to elevate podcast aesthetics. I don’t understand why a content form with such richness sonically is watered down visually. In some ways, people do judge books by their covers and I wanted to make the covers better, so you’ll give that episode/podcast a chance.

The playlists on Wilson FM are generally built ad hoc, which Yu believes is the best way to do it. He tries to build them with his friends, and he writes the copy in a way that he feels is natural to the way he speaks. Personal touch, individual voice, all that kind of stuff.

In the physical world, Yu is a design consultant/working mercenary, doing gigs to keep things spinning as he builds out Wilson FM. He tells me that he intends to build Wilson FM out into a business. “We want to do it right and our way, which in context of tech businesses today, it means we want to grow it slow,” he told me. “We’re focusing more in the magazine model as we want to mainly be a voice for podcasts within the podcast community.” In this broader pursuit, he has a business partner, Cameron Koczon, who runs an engineering and design studio in Brooklyn.

That Yu hopes to build Wilson FM into a business — that this wasn’t just a side project or exercise — surprised me a little bit. A big part of me reflexively thinks something this specific and idiosyncratic has a hard ceiling that hovers low (*looks at Hot Pod, shudders*), regardless of what business model gets integrated into the app. But then again, a bigger part of me is in this for the specific and idiosyncratic, and someone’s going to figure out how to make that work and grow, then, hell, this is probably just about how you’d start: simply by being genuinely interesting.

This signing of authors like Lewis to audiobook-first deals appears to be a ramping up of an alternate original programming strategy, one that sees Audible leaning more heavily into the preexisting nature of its core relationships with the book publishing industry and the book-buying audience. It might also be a consequence of a reshuffle at the executive decision-making level: In late 2017, the Hollywood Reporter broke the news that chief content officer Andrew Gaies and chief revenue officer Will Lopes had unexpectedly stepped down resigned from their posts. (Later reporting noted that the resignations happened in the midst of a harassment probe.) The ripple effects of that sudden shift in leadership is probably only hitting us now, and in this form. I’ll be tracking the extent to this new product line overlaps with or, indeed, ends up superseding what’s been happening with the Channels stuff.

All of this matters, of course, because all of it is related. I believe the way to think about this is to see all audio content providers — from the conventional podcasts of the open ecosystem to everything on Audible to whatever Anchor will become to Headspace plus whatever subscription-first audio platforms come over the horizon to the entire digital music ecosystem — as fighting from the same cochlear real estate. A few weekends ago, I fell behind on podcast listening due to falling into an utter binge-rabbit hole of the audiobook version of John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood, and I daresay I haven’t been able to catch up to my listen list since.

Part Two: Book-adjacent. So that was a story about a big book publishing entity investing in strictly digital products. Next, we have a story about a book publishing entity investing in a strategy that hits both audio and book publishing in tandem.

I’ve written previously about the experiments happening over at Macmillan, where its new Tor Labs imprint had developed a fiction podcast — called Steal the Stars, written by The Message’s Mac Rogers — that was published through the company’s podcast network and was also simultaneously novelized for traditional distribution. I thought it was a really smart idea, noting that it scratches at the idea that different platforms simply serve different consumer slices that may never really overlap. This style of multi-platform execution expands Steal the Stars across a wider surface area and further deepens its ability to financially benefit from a single core creative enterprise. That’s the working theory, anyway.

Anyway, Macmillan is coming back for more in this mode of production. The publisher is developing a six-part fiction podcast called The Girls based off an upcoming young adult novel: Courtney Summer’s Sadie — which is, interestingly enough, described to be a “Serial-inspired” young adult thriller, at least according to Bustle. I’m told that the podcast is being designed to stand alone, but that those who consume both the podcast and the book will be treated to different perspectives within the same story-line. Expanded universe, Rashomon-kind of stuff, I suppose.

I asked Kathy Doyle, vice president of podcasting at Macmillan, for some specific detail on how the publisher has viewed the performance of Steal the Stars and other experiments within the company that tie the fates of podcasts and books. She wrote back:

We’re definitely leveraging what we learned with Steal the Stars as we produce for The Girls. In fact, Steal the Stars celebrates its one-year anniversary on Aug. 1 and we’re gearing up for another round of marketing and promotion for the series, which continues to get interest from national media, advertisers, and listeners — that’s the beauty of an evergreen audio drama. The series, to date, has had nearly 1.4 million listens and we’re continuing back-list sales efforts for the Steal the Stars books.

Another strong example of our book-podcast synergy is with our Savvy Psychologist podcast, one of the biggest on our QDT network. We released a book, How to Be Yourself, about social anxiety in March authored by that host, Dr. Ellen Hendriksen, and it went into a second printing. When we review sales data, we see that 50% of sales are for the audio edition, when we might typically see a figure of about 10% for a trade book.

The Girls is set to launch on August 1, with the trailer dropping tomorrow. The novel, Sadie, is scheduled to drop on September 4.

For technical context: Steal the Stars was hosted on Megaphone, while Savvy Psychologist is on Libsyn.

Part Three: Podcast-first. Over at The Wall Street Journal, Ellen Gamerman has a great overview up on the podcast-to-book adaptation trend that’s been picking up lately alongside the podcast-to-film-and-television trend. Aside from listing out several notable projects making the jump, there’s a bit in Gamerman’s piece that provides a nice expression of the risk-ratio factor that I believe is a big part of why we’ve been seeing podcasts heating up as a resource for adaptations:While some books have sparked bidding wars between publishers, the titles don’t tend to carry the high stakes of a Hollywood venture. “If you have 100,000 people listening to a podcast — which is a very modest-sized podcast — and half of them buy the book, the publisher would be thrilled,” said Anthony Mattero, a book agent at Creative Artists Agency (though he noted that publishers will also measure sales against the price of the manuscript).

But the article also offers a peek into a shadow looming over this trend. It’s highlighted in this quote:

With niche podcasts on everything from witches to monster trucks, more publishers are seeing opportunity. “The market for weirdness is untapped,” said Kate Napolitano, a senior editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

The question: With more resources, attention — and, perhaps most importantly, stakes — flowing into the podcast ecosystem, will its capacity for weirdness be preserved?

The possible campaign on the horizon: Keep Podcasts Weird.

Related: “How ‘The Adventure Zone’ Went From ‘D&D’ Podcast to Graphic Novel.” (The Hollywood Reporter)

Beantown. Last Thursday, The Boston Globe announced that its famed investigative unit Spotlight is working a limited-run podcast series that will explore the complicated story of Aaron Hernandez, the former New England Patriots player who was convicted of murder in 2015 and later committed suicide in prison.

The podcast, which will play out in eight parts, is scheduled to drop in the fall. It comes out of a collaboration with Wondery, which is extending its strategy of partnering up with newspapers to break their investigative projects out into longform, multipart podcast series broadly situated within the true-crime genre. The prime model for this is, of course, Dirty John, Wondery’s successful collaboration with the Los Angeles Times that’s now also heading to television — in two separate forms, no less — and the company has since rolled out a collaboration with the South Florida newspaper Sun-Sentinel. That project is called Felonious Florida.

The Spotlight podcast is The Boston Globe’s second creative partnership on a Boston-oriented podcast. The other is Season Ticket, a daily sports podcast that the Globe developed in collaboration with WBUR. Given the increasingly strong cluster of podcast operations in the city, I’m expecting more Boston-flavored podcasts on the way.

Frontin’. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is holding its fourth-annual podcast upfronts September 6 in — where else? — New York City. This year’s venue will be at Convene in midtown Manhattan, marking a departure from the Time Inc. building venue of years past. Slate is slated to keynote, and presenters include Midroll, WNYC, iHeartMedia, and NPR, among others. I’ll probably be there.

Here’s the website for details, and here’s my writeup on the upfront back when I attended in 2016, and here’s my column on the notion of upfronts in podcasting in general. Let’s see what changes and what stays the same.

Smart Audio Report snippets. The latest edition of NPR and Edison Research’s smart speaker report drops tomorrow and, as always, they’re staging a webinar to go through the findings of this year’s survey study.

NPM was kind enough to share some early numbers, if you’re interested in that kind of thing:

• “For first adopters, the smart speaker is now the number one way they listen to audio, and 38% of newer, early mainstream users say they purchased the device hoping to reduce screen time.”
• “While first adopters demonstrate more advanced smart speaker use — controlling home security and other household devices — early mainstream users are quickly relying on the technology for a wider range of daily activities — ordering food, making calls, getting traffic reports, researching products and shopping.”
• “News is one of the most in-demand genres of content among all smart speaker owners, and 3-in-5 who plan to buy another smart speaker want to buy it in order to listen to news in more rooms of their home.”

Here’s the one I find particularly notable: “Among all smart speaker owners, the most preferred formats for audio advertisements are skills/features created by a brand, host-read ads on podcasts, product endorsements and sponsor or underwriter announcements during public radio.” Furthermore: “81% of all smart speaker owners like/would be open to skills from brands.”

On a related note: This Medium post by GENInnovate’s Freia Nasher has a lot of really good observations, and some nifty ideas: “Hi Alexa, is the monetisation conversation moot?“

Start your engines. Heads up, all you producers in the crowd: The sixth edition of KCRW’s Radio Race is now open for registration. The 24-hour production challenge will take place from 10 a.m. Pacific August 25 through 10 a.m. Pacific August 26. Shouts to last year’s winner, River Rats from Miami (Wilson Sayre and Chris Barr).

And while we’re on the subject of KCRW: The Organist podcast is now back with its fifth season. Rootin’ for you, Mr. Leland.

S-Town lawsuit. The estate of John B. McLemore, the subject of S-Town, is suing the creators of the Peabody-award winning podcast, arguing that they “exploited details of his private life for financial gain,” the Associated Press reports.

The suit was filed in Bibb County, Alabama by the executor of McLemore’s estate, Craig Cargile. It names Serial Productions, This American Life, Chicago Public Media, and host/producer Brian Reed as defendants, among others. Cargile’s attorney told Al.com that the suit “stems from the state’s Right of Publicity Act, which prevents use of voice, name or other characteristics of a person without their permission.”

In an email response to the AP, S-Town executive producer Julie Snyder noted that she could not comment on the suit but says it lacked “merit.”

You can read the suit over here.

Anti. And now for something completely different.

So, there’s this new podcast app-doohickey that came out last week that really caught my eye. It’s called Wilson FM — a name I will forever associate with a volleyball (I’M SORRY, WILSON) — and the thing is billing itself as a “podcast magazine,” which on most days would be a piece of nomenclature that I’d find vaguely annoying. Except that a podcast magazine is exactly what Wilson FM is, and it’s also one of the more pleasurable player ideas I’ve seen in a long while.

The core mechanic isn’t anything particularly revolutionary, other than the fact that it’s remarkably simple. Every week, the app-magazine-thing serves you a new curated playlist of podcast episodes built around a different theme (most of the time). There’s one about art, there’s another about the Supreme Court, and then there’s a collection that’s really just threading together Lea Thau’s Love Hurts series. In other words, it’s a fancy podcast playlist provider, but putting it that way is a little like saying a magazine is a fancy provider of words. I mean, it is, but also, it isn’t, because something has to be said about how a thing feels in the use of it, and man, Wilson FM feels so…different. And as a result, interesting.

Granted, this just might be a situation where I’m responding extra-positively to a drop of water after weeks of drinking nothing but straight-up seltzer. Which is to say: Every podcast app that I’ve used more or less looks and feels the same despite new feature-concepts — say, a social layer — or an expanded suite of bells and whistles. Which as a matter of collective experience generally brings me to place where it’s a little like waking up every morning and relentlessly commuting in a city you once found interesting: After a certain point, you just stop seeing the world around you in new and renewably invigorating ways.

My positivity might also have something to do with how consumer software technology aesthetics seem to be largely situated within a same, sterile place. My buddy Kyle Chayka, a freelance writer who’s currently working on a book about minimalism, dubbed this aesthetic “AirSpace” in an essay for The Verge back in 2016, and you probably already know what he’s talking about: pastels, curved edges, any sharp sense of personality sandpapered away.

In contrast, Wilson FM is weird. Its visual sensibility evokes the new media section of an art school exhibit (or a moderately-sized modern art museum). Its app icon is a funny little scribble. Its squint-to-see-it font has a counterintuitive charm. All these quirks of expression are tied to the fact that the app is primarily the work of one person: Allan Yu, a New York-based designer who’s done stints at Google X, the search giant’s super secret R&D lab, and Svpply, a now-defunct social shopping site that was acquired by eBay in 2012.

“I’ve always had a soft spot for print design and aesthetics that have a point of view or opinion,” Yu tells me over email. “But I’ve been working in tech for quite some time and am just tired of this A/B-tested, data-proven, metric-driven design.” He continues:

I didn’t want to do that when it came to building something that was my own and close to my heart so the only ethos was Anti. The inspiration is Anti-tech, Anti-convention, Anti-UI/UX Design. I looked at a lot of print stuff that mainly contributed to the organization and focus of these Issue covers. Even the proportion of the cover is print-based and I use two typefaces from one of my favorite type foundry, Milieu Grotesque. I also wanted to elevate podcast aesthetics. I don’t understand why a content form with such richness sonically is watered down visually. In some ways, people do judge books by their covers and I wanted to make the covers better, so you’ll give that episode/podcast a chance.

The playlists on Wilson FM are generally built ad hoc, which Yu believes is the best way to do it. He tries to build them with his friends, and he writes the copy in a way that he feels is natural to the way he speaks. Personal touch, individual voice, all that kind of stuff.

In the physical world, Yu is a design consultant/working mercenary, doing gigs to keep things spinning as he builds out Wilson FM. He tells me that he intends to build Wilson FM out into a business. “We want to do it right and our way, which in context of tech businesses today, it means we want to grow it slow,” he told me. “We’re focusing more in the magazine model as we want to mainly be a voice for podcasts within the podcast community.” In this broader pursuit, he has a business partner, Cameron Koczon, who runs an engineering and design studio in Brooklyn.

That Yu hopes to build Wilson FM into a business — that this wasn’t just a side project or exercise — surprised me a little bit. A big part of me reflexively thinks something this specific and idiosyncratic has a hard ceiling that hovers low (*looks at Hot Pod, shudders*), regardless of what business model gets integrated into the app. But then again, a bigger part of me is in this for the specific and idiosyncratic, and someone’s going to figure out how to make that work and grow, then, hell, this is probably just about how you’d start: simply by being genuinely interesting.

Miscellaneous bites:

• Fans of the popular Australian true-crime podcast Phoebe’s Fall, take note: The team has a new project out now called Wrong Skin. (Apple Podcasts)
• On a related note: “All serious criminal cases deserve podcast-style scrutiny.” (Baltimore Sun op-ed)
• The dynamics and detail sketches in this piece can almost map directly onto podcasting: “The Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one.” (The Verge)
• Apropos of nothing: Sounds like we’re due for a heavy fall season.

Local TV news

Average audience decreased by 15 percent in 2017 over the previous year, with evening news remaining stable — though late night and early evening declined by seven percent, and midday declined four percent. (The data comes from ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC affiliates.) Partly because it wasn’t an election year (when political advertising bumps up the airwaves’ coffers), total over-the-air ad revenue for local TV decreased by 13 percent, to $17.4 billion. Online, advertising for local TV stations inched up by three percent, to $1 billion.

But the lack of an election didn’t slow down the political advertising revenue too much. In 2017, $112 million came from political ads, compared to $124 million in 2015 and $50 million in 2013, the two most recent non-election years. (Those figures came from Tribune, Nexstar, Sinclair, Tegna, Gray, and Scripps.)

Revenue is increasingly coming from the retransmission fees that cable and satellite systems fork over to carry local channels. Revenue from those topped $9 billion in 2017 — up from $8 billion in 2016 — and it’s expected to keep growing.

Local TV news outlets continue to show their creativity, running augmented reality experiments and crowdsourcing investigations. That innovation comes from the 29,000 reporters, editors, photographers, and visual editors who made up the broadcast newsrooms in 2017, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That number’s remained roughly constant since 2004, though the quantity of local TV news content has steadily risen from an average of 3.7 hours per weekday in 2003 to 5.6 in 2017.

Audio and podcasting

Over in the non-visual corner, 90 percent of Americans over age 12 listen to AM/FM radio at least once a week — down 2 percent since 2009. (This does not include public media, which Pew covered in a separate fact sheet.)

As of early 2018, 57 percent of online radio listeners were tuning in once a week — up from 12 percent in 2007. Podcasts continue to gain listeners, Pew notes, citing previously published Edison Research data. The numbers are still an upward trend — not too bad for an industry a fraction of the age of TV and terrestrial radio, as advertising continues to grow. The revenue side of the radio dial continues to slide, down to $20.9 million in 2017 from $21.8 million in 2016.

Eh, maybe I’m not being generous enough here. In any case, there is one potential positive thing that I’m curious: I wonder how this technology will fit into the Post audio team’s various dabblings with smart-speaker programming.

Meanwhile, elsewhere. I filed two interviews for Vulture last week, one pegged to a beginning and the other pegged to an end.

(1) The first looks at You Must Remember This, Karina Longworth’s fantastic podcast on the secret histories of 20th-century Hollywood, which returned last week. This new season explores Hollywood Babylon, the infamous 1959 book by avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger that traded heavily in scandal and questionable gossip on early Hollywood celebrities, but which has since accrued a complicated legacy in which it is often construed as truth. (A timely topic, indeed.) It’s a pretty long interview, and in addition to discussing the season, Longworth was also kind enough to talk a bit about her process.

(2) The second interview was with Madeleine Baran of In The Dark, who spoke with me soon after the concluding episode of its spectacular sophomore season hit the feeds last week. Baran and her team will continue to cover the case of Curtis Flowers when the next development hits, and they’ll soon be in the hunt for their next story after taking a few weeks off.

I also filed the June update to my Best Podcasts of 2018 (So Far) list. You know what? I like this monthly update format. Good stuff, Vulture.

Maximum Fun broadens its horizons. Last month, Jesse Thorn’s Los Angeles-based podcast network rolled out its first foray into scripted programming. The show is called Bubble, an eight-episode scripted comedy series that — and I’m quoting the pitch I got for it, which is pretty succinct and effective — is “sort of a sci-fi/alternate-universe comedy about a group of friends who live in a town protected by a (literal) bubble.” Having listened to a few episodes, I guess you could also call it a cross between Portlandia and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It’s super zany, is what I’m saying, and if you like Maximum Fun stuff, you’re probably going to like this: It has all the warm, loving, and fun sensibilities that you’ve come to know and love from the network, plus it features a bunch of the MaxFun extended family like Eliza Skinner and the McElroy Brothers.

Anyway, the thing about Bubble that caught my attention was how it presents a case study of a particular challenge that more podcast companies are — and should be — facing: Let’s say you want to push your creative boundaries. How do you think through the business side of that effort? So, in pursuit of that question, I reached out to Maximum Fun’s managing director Bikram Chatterji, and he was kind enough to write at length. I like this interview quite a bit, as he really lays out a good deal of the strategic considerations he deems to be important when breaking a project like this.

• Like all of our shows, we envision Bubble to be paid for primarily by listeners. [Note: For more on Maximum Fun’s audience-supported model, read this column.] Unlike our other shows, it’s a limited-run series, so we’re not asking for ongoing monthly contributions, but listeners can (and have!) made one-time payments at maximumfun.org/bubble.
• We are talking with some folks about advertising as, midway through the run, we have a solid track record of downloads to pique advertisers’ interest.
• The show is especially suited to some other revenue channels — for instance, merchandise. So we’re exploring those as well.

MaxFun has always been different from other networks in that advertising is a secondary revenue source for us. We don’t have anything against ads — they help our creators get rewarded for their work, and we sincerely believe that if done correctly, they provide our listeners with a service. One thing we’ve always insisted on is having the option to forego ads if something doesn’t feel right — because, frankly, as listeners we have experienced ads that feel wrong (two common problems: they are so frequent as to disrupt the listener experience, or they’re so subtle as to blur the line between what is content and what’s an ad). We know that there are a bunch of smart folks working on the challenge of making advertising work in service of listeners, and we’re paying attention to that; practically, though, our approach has been to not make anything we do contingent on getting ad revenue, because it’s easy to see that forcing us into an uncomfortable position.

You can find Bubble…well, pretty much anywhere you’d find podcasts, aside from those pesky podcast platforms with a big paywall blocking out the sun.

Career Spotlight. You know I love running these. This week, I interviewed Stitcher’s John Asante, who spoke about moving through what seemed to be a “conventional” trajectory, having worked on radio with live elements, and the podcast industry being a producer’s market.

Thanks, John.

Bites:

• Pour one out for Current’s The Pub. The public media trade publication of choice is shuttering its podcast after 113 episodes and 3.5 years. Executive director Julie Drizin announced the move last Friday through a post on the Current website, citing lack of underwriting support as the main reason for the show’s termination. However, Drizin also noted that The Pub’s closing doesn’t necessarily mean that the publication won’t be dabbling podcasts anymore. She leaves open the possibility of future projects, provided they are able to “secure committed funding.”
• Filmspotting: Streaming Video Unit, the Alison Willmore and Matt Singer-led online movie-focused podcast in the Filmspotting family, has concluded its run. The long-running show released its final episode last Tuesday. As a longtime listener, I’m pouring another one out for this one too.
• This is really good: “Using true crime to teach Indigenous history: Reporter Connie Walker on ‘Finding Cleo,'” writes Elon Green for CJR. The CBC podcast wrapped the season last month, and yesterday, host Connie Walker tweeted that the season has now been downloaded over 10.5 million times across its ten episodes.
• James Cridland has a pretty interesting writeup on some RSS feed chicanery that seems to be going on with CastBox.
• What an angle: “Amazon Alexa may be better at selling you things, but Google is more likely to understand you, say ad industry insiders,” via CNBC.
• Tangentially-related, but worth keeping tabs: “Apple Music Just Surpassed Spotify’s U.S. Subscriber Count,” per Digital Music News.

Granted, this all happened in Danish — but the language of technology overload is universal. But how often do you see journalists broach the topic of content overconsumption with their audiences? This was the 13th Zetland Live, the in-person performance showcase of Copenhagen-based, membership-driven news outlet Zetland, and the monologue-giver was Zetland’s cofounder and audio editor Hakon Mosbech. I couldn’t tell you what he said, but the audience seemed to respond enthusiastically.

It’s at events like these that Mosbech and other Zetland journalists have gotten to know their members face-to-face. And it’s where editor-in-chief Lea Korsgaard and other staffers started hearing suggestions from their audiences that they wanted to listen to their regular journalism instead of read it. Zetland publishes in-depth reporting daily on topics like culture, the climate, education, and economics, with the mission of “not to make news — it is to make sense.”

“Our members asked for it, literally,” Korsgaard told me in an interview a few weeks after the show. “When we met them at our live events and saw our emails and comments sections, they really asked for it when we asked how we can improve Zetland. A bunch of them asked us to either go into podcasting or reading the stories and letting them listen instead of reading them.”

They didn’t have much hard data to evaluate the idea, but they decided to test it out anyway. The response has been so overwhelming that since the fall, 60 percent of Zetland members have been listening to their journalism compared to 40 percent reading. Zetland has 10,000 members — up from 8,500 last year — with a price tag of 99 kroner (US $12.30) per month or 999 kroner (US $124.08) per year. They haven’t broken even yet, but they’re on track to do so next year and just brought on new investors, Korsgaard said.

“Instead of demanding that ‘we like written word so you have to read our stories,’ we try to get a sense of how can we adapt to your world and your way of living,” Korsgaard said. Zetland spent six months developing the audio component, testing the audio stories in the beginning of 2017 and launching an app for them in June.

Despite their members’ enthusiasm for spoken journalism, the journalists still start out by writing their stories, recording their own out-loud renditions later. Korsgaard said they haven’t changed much of their style or reporting process, and the written content they publish is the same as the audio. Some of the team members have a background in audio — like cofounder Mosbech, who used to host a weekly radio program on the media — but they enlisted the help of a voice coach for training. The Zetland style already gravitates toward a down-to-earth vibe, such as starting a story with “Okay, let’s find out what’s going on with….” Each audio story now begins with a short personal note from the journalist about what the story meant to them before they begin telling it. “It’s some details that tell the listener it’s a person behind the story, not a machine that wrote it,” Korsgaard said.

The experiment appears to be working so far: Members tend to be more loyal and thorough in their Zetland audio consumption than their text consumption, and they seem to be adopting listening to Zetland as part of their daily routine. “We’re definitely not a short-form news outlet,” Korsgaard said. “When we launched, we thought it would be late evening media, something where you would crash on the sofa and read our stories. But we’re definitely more commuter media that we thought.”

Being pleasantly surprised by their members’ desires is a recurring theme for Zetland. In our previous coverage of Zetland, we noted how frequently the organization tries to solicit input from members, like when they asked for suggestions for their newsletter name. (“I totally hated [the name readers chose, Helikopter] to begin with,” CEO and cofounder Jakob Moll said then. “But Mads Olrik, who was running our community at the time, said we can’t ask the questions if we don’t want the answer. It’s been called that since, and of course, it’s perfect.”)

The addition of 1,500 members over the past year helps toss some more voices into the mix. To build their member count (and income), Zetland runs some social media ads, but Korsgaard also said “old school” TV commercials and flyers in Copenhagen’s newspapers have actually helped bring in more members than expected. “It turns out that TV commercials played a much huger role than we would have ever thought,” she said. They’ve run commercials in one of Copenhagen’s evening TV news hours and during the Tour de France. (More than 60 percent of Danes use the country’s two public service TV broadcasters at least weekly, according to the 2017 Reuters Institute Digital News Report.)

On the heels of the audio success, Zetland now also publishes an audio version of that daily newsletter, which aggregates other media organizations’ stories too. And they’re in the early stages of experimenting with video to connect with younger audiences. The company also recently redesigned its website for better navigability — and won the digital Best of Show award from the Best of Nordic News Design competition for its old design the same day it launched the new version.

“If there’s a lesson to learn, it’s really nice to win awards and celebrate when you do, but don’t let that decide how you should develop the site or your content,” Korsgaard said. “It’s your readers and your members who should have the last say in how your product is [done].”

Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is issue 159, published April 17, 2018.

Quick measurement bite. Been a while since we’ve checked back into what is arguably the most important subject in the podcast business. Let’s fix that, shall we?

“The good news for podcasters and buyers is measurement challenges are 97 percent solved,” Midroll Media CRO Lex Friedman said on a podcast panel at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show last week. “What we can report now is more specific than we could before.” You can find the quote in this Inside Radio writeup on the panel.

Be that as it may, there’s still some work left to be done. I reached out to Friedman for his perspective on what constitutes the remaining 3 percent of the challenges left to be solved, and here’s his response (pardon the customary Midroll spin):

In TV today, advertisers would struggle if NBC used Nielsen ratings, and ABC used Nielsen but with a different methodology, and CBS used some other company’s measurement technology.

Today in podcasting, the measurement problem is solved; the remaining 3 percent is getting everyone standardized. It doesn’t happen often, but every once in a while, Midroll loses a show to a competitor. When we sell a show at 450,000 downloads, and the next day the same show and same feed is being sold at 700,000 downloads, that’s a problem.

The IAB’s recommended a 24-hour measurement window, while some folks still advocate for 60 minutes or two hours, and too many vendors continue to sell at 5 minutes, which we universally know is way too liberal a count. That’s unfair and confusing to advertisers, and that’s the piece that needs fixing.

That’s no small 3 percent, in my opinion.

Anyway, if you’re new to the podcast measurement problem, my column from February 2016 — back when a group of public radio stations published a set of guidelines on the best way for podcast companies to measure listenership — still holds up as a solid primer on the topic, if I do say so myself.

Fool’s gold? Something else to note from Inside Radio’s article on the NAB panel: a strong indication, delivered by Triton Digital president of market development John Rosso, that there is increasing demand for programmatic podcast advertising.

Programmatic advertising is a system by which ads are automatically bought and sold through algorithmic processes. In other words, it’s a monetization environment where the facilitation of advertising value exchange is automated away from human interaction. The principal upside that comes with programmatic advertising is efficiency: As an advertiser, you theoretically don’t have to spend a lot of time identifying, contacting, and executing buys, and as a publisher, you theoretically don’t have to spend a lot of time doing those things in the opposite direction. In theory, both sides don’t have to do much more work for a lot more money. But the principal downside is the ensuing experience on listener-side, and all the ramifications that fall from a slide in said experience: Because these transactions are machine-automated, there’s no human consideration governing the aesthetic intentionality of an advertising experience paired with the specific contexts of a given podcast.

Combine this with the core assumptions of what makes podcasting uniquely valuable as a media product — that it engenders deeper experiences of intimacy between creator and listener, that its strength is built on the cultivated simulacra of personal trust between the two parties, that any podcast advertising spot is a heavy act of value extraction from the relationship developed between the two sides — and you have a situation where a digital advertising technology is being considered for a medium to which its value propositions are diametrically opposed.

The underlying problem, put simply: Can you artificially scale up podcasting’s advertising supply without compromising its underlying value proposition? To phrase the problem in another direction: Can you develop a new advertising product that’s able to correspondingly scale up intimacy, trust, and relationship-depth between podcast creator and consumer?

The answer for both things may well be no, and that perhaps the move shouldn’t be to prescribe square pegs for round holes. Or maybe the response we’ll see will sound more like “the way we’re doing things isn’t sustainable, we’re going to have to make more money somehow” with the end result being an identity-collapsing shift in the defining characteristics of this fledgling medium. In which case: Bummer, dude.

Binge-Drop Murphies. Gimlet announced its spring slate last week, and two out of three of them, the audio drama Sandra and the Lynn Levy special The Habitat, will be released in their entirety tomorrow. When asked about the choice to go with the binge-drop, Gimlet president Matt Lieber tells me:

We decided to binge both The Habitat and Sandra because we felt that they were both so engrossing and engaging, so we wanted to give the listener the decision to either power through all the episodes, or sample and consume at their own pace. Sandra is our second scripted fiction series and we know from our first, Homecoming, that a lot of people chose to binge the series after it was out in full. With The Habitat, it’s such a unique and immersive miniseries, and we wanted to give listeners the chance to get lost in the world by listening all at once.

Grab your space suits, fellas.

The beautiful game. The third show in Gimlet’s spring bundle is We Came To Win, the company’s first sports show, which promises to deliver stories on the most memorable soccer matches in history. The press release appears to be playing up the universal angle of the sport: “Soccer is a sport that is about so much more than goals. It’s about continents, countries, characters, and the relationships between them.” (I mean, yeah.)

In an interesting bit of mind-meld, Gimlet’s first foray into sports mirrors WNYC Studios’ own maiden voyage into the world of physical human competition. Sometime this spring, the New York public radio station will roll out its own World Cup-timed narrative podcast, a collaboration with Men in Blazers’ Roger Bennett that will look the U.S. Men’s National Soccer Team’s journey from its triumphant 1994 World cup appearance to its doomed 1998 campaign. (Yikes.)

Public radio genes run deep.

Peabody nominations. The 2017 nominations were announced last week, and interestingly enough, six out of the eight entries in the Radio/Podcast category are either podcast-only or podcast-first. The nominees are: Radiotopia’s Ear Hustle, Minnesota Public Radio’s 74 Seconds, Serial Productions’ S-Town, the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University’s Scene on Radio: Seeing White, Gimlet’s Uncivil, and Louisville Public Media/Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting’s “The Pope’s Long Con.

Notes on The Pope’s Long Con. It was an unbelievable story with unthinkable consequences. Produced by the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting (KyCIR) and Louisville Public Media, The Pope’s Long Con was the product of a seven-month long investigation into Dan Johnson, a controversial bishop-turned-Kentucky state representative shrouded in corruption, deceit, and an allegation of sexual assault. KyCIR’s feature went live on December 11, bringing Johnson’s story — and the allegations against him — into the spotlight. The impact was explosive, leading to immediate calls for Johnson to resign. He denied the allegations at a press conference. Two days later, Johnson committed suicide.

It was “any journalist’s nightmare,” as KyCIR’s managing editor Brendan McCarthy told CJR in an article about how the newsroom grappled with the aftermath of its reporting. (Which, by the way, you should absolutely read.)

In light of those circumstances, the podcast’s Peabody nomination feels especially well-deserved. It’s also a remarkable achievement for a public radio station relatively new to podcasting. “The Pope’s Long Con was the first heavy-lift podcast Louisville Public Media had undertaken,” Sean Cannon, a senior digital strategist at the organization and creative director of the podcast, tells me. “It didn’t start out as one though…Audio was planned, but it was a secondary concern. Once we realized the scope and gravity of it all, we knew everything had to be built around the podcast.”

When I asked Cannon how he feels about the nomination, he replied:

Given the situation surrounding the story, it’s still a confusing mix of emotions to see The Pope’s Long Con reach the heights it has. That said, we’re all immensely proud of the work we did. It’s necessary to hold our elected officials accountable.

In the context of the podcast industry, it taught me a lesson that can be easy to forget. I was worried the hierarchy of publishers had become too calcified, rendering it almost impossible for anyone below the top rungs to make serious waves — without a thick wallet, anyway. It’s a topic that comes up regularly in Hot Pod.

While the industry will never purely be a meritocracy, The Pope’s Long Con shattered that perception. It served as a reminder of something that gets glossed over when you’re caught up in the business of it all: If you can create compelling audio, that trumps everything else.

Tip of the hat, Louisville.

Crooked Media expands into film. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the media (political activism?) company will be co-producing a new feature documentary on Texas congressman Beto O’Rourke’s bid to unseat Senator Ted Cruz in the upcoming midterm elections. This extends on Crooked Media’s previous adventures in video, which already involve a series of HBO specials to be taped across the country amidst the run-up to midterms.

A quick nod to Pod Save America’s roots as The Ringer’s Keepin’ It 1600 here: Crooked Media will likely crib from the playbook The Ringer built around the recent Andre the Giant HBO documentary, which was executive produced by Ringer CEO Bill Simmons, where the latter project received copious promotion through The Ringer website and podcast network. What’s especially interesting about that whole situation is the way it is essentially a wholesale execution of what I took as the principal ideas from the analyst Ben Thompson’s 2015 post “Grantland and the (Surprising) Future of Publishing.”

I’m not sure if I’d personally watch a Beto O’Rourke doc — the dude has been a particularly vibrant entry into the “blue hope in red country” political media subgenre for a long while now, and I’m tapping out — but Pod Save America listeners most definitely would.

Empire on Blood. My latest for Vulture is a review of the new seven-part Panoply podcast, which I thought was interesting enough as a pulpy doc but deeply frustrating in how the show handles its power and positioning. It’s a weird situation: I really liked host Steve Fishman’s writing, and I really liked the tape gathered, but the two things really shouldn’t have been paired up this way.

The state of true crime podcasts. You know you’re neck-deep in something when you can throw out random words and land close to an actual example of that something: White Wine True Crime, Wine & Crime, Up & Vanished, The Vanished, Real Crime Profile, True Crime Garage, Crimetown, Small Town Murders, and so on. (This is a general observation that goes well beyond true crime pods. Cryptocurrencies: Sumokoin, Dogecoin, PotCoin. Food startups: Plated, Pantry, PlateIQ. Names: Kevin.)

Anyway, I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again: True crime is the bloody, bleeding heart of podcasting, a genre that’s proliferating with a velocity so tremendous it could power a dying sun. And in my view, true crime podcasts are also a solid microcosm of the podcast universe as a whole: What happens there, happens everywhere.

When it comes to thinking about true crime podcasts, there are few people whose opinions I trust more than crime author, podcaster, and New Hampshire Public Radio digital director Rebecca Lavoie. As the cohost of the indispensable weekly conversational podcast Crime Writers On… — which began life as Crime Writers On Serial, a companion piece to the breakout 2014 podcast phenomenon — Lavoie consumes and thinks a lot about true crime and true crime podcasts specifically.

I touched base with Lavoie recently to get the latest on what’s been going on in her neck of the woods:

Again, you can find Lavoie on Crime Writers On…, where she is joined every week by: Kevin Flynn, her true crime coauthor (and “former TV reporter husband,” she adds); Toby Ball, a fiction writer; and Lara Bricker, a licensed private investigator and fellow true crime writer. Lavoie also produces a number of other podcast projects, including: …These Are Their Stories: The Law & Order Podcast, HGTV & Me, and Married With Podcast for Stitcher Premium.

On a related note: The New York Times’ Jonah Bromwich wrote a quick piece on the Parcast network, described as “one of several new networks saturating the audio market with podcasts whose lurid storylines play out like snackable television.” The article also contains my successful effort at being quoted in ALL CAPS in the Times.

Bites:

• This year’s Maximum Fun Drive has successfully accrued over 28,000 new and upgrading members. (Twitter) Congrats to the team.
• WBUR is organizing what it’s calling the “first-ever children’s podcast festival” on April 28 and 29. Called “The Mega Awesome Super Huge Wicked Fun Podcast Playdate” — shouts to whoever came up with that — the festival will be held at the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline, Massachusetts and will feature shows like Eleanor Amplified, Story Pirates, But Why, and Circle Round, among others. (Website)
• “Bloomberg expands TicToc to podcasts, newsletters.” For the uninitiated: TicToc is Bloomberg’s live-streaming video news channel that’s principally distributed over Twitter. On the audio side, the expansion appears to include podcast repackages and a smart-speaker experiment. (Axios)
• American Public Media is leaning on Westwood One to handle advertising for the second season of its hit podcast In The Dark. Interesting choice. The new season drops next week. (AdWeek)
• I’m keeping an eye on this: Death in Ice Valley, an intriguing collaboration between the BBC and Norway’s NRK, debuted yesterday. (BBC)
• Anchor rolls out a feature that helps its users find…a cohost? Yet another indication that the platform is in the business of building a whole new social media experience as opposed to something that directly relates to podcasting. (TechCrunch)
• On The New York Times’ marketing campaign for Caliphate: “The Times got some early buzz for the podcast before its launch; 15,000 people have signed up for a newsletter that will notify them when a new episode is ready, twice as many as expected.” (Digiday)
• “Alexa Is a Revelation for the Blind,” writes Ian Bogost in The Atlantic.

Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is issue 154, published March 6, 2018.

Chomping at the bit. “Gimlet is a multimedia storytelling brand, not just a podcast network,” declared Jenny Wall, the company’s newly hired chief marketing officer, in a Fast Company piece in January. That identity refashioning is mostly tethered to Gimlet’s increasingly formalized dealings with Hollywood, but it’s beginning to rear its head in other intriguing ways as well.

Last Thursday, Gimlet announced its first offering for the Amazon Alexa platform: Chompers, a skill that takes the form of a twice-daily toothbrushing companion for young children. To produce the skill, the podcast company partnered with Volley, a San Francisco-based startup that specializes in building entertainment products for voice assistants. They’re also releasing Chompers as a vanilla podcast for those who have yet to join the smart speaker cult.

This is a shrewd piece of business for two reasons. The first is hunger: The kids, they really love those speaking computer tubes. According to Edison Research and NPR’s Smart Audio report, 88 percent of smart speaker owners whose households include children report that said children really, really enjoy Alexa. And while I’m not a fan of anecdotal evidence, I will say I’ve seen this myself and let me tell ya: The level of fervor is genuinely frightening. (Bigger picture: Health experts are apparently warily optimistic about the relationship between kids and smart speakers, though concerns about data privacy seem to be the more prominent thorn.)

The second reason is money: The first season of Chompers, we’re told, is sponsored by Oral-B and Crest Kids. With this move, Gimlet has made the choice to dive headfirst into the ethical hairiness of advertising to children, which is a can of worms commonly tossed about in discussions about kids podcasts. It’s also a notable attempt to grapple with an Alexa development environment that’s ambiguous about how it allows skill developers to monetize their efforts. More on that in a second.

The Wall Street Journal’s Ben Mullin picked up the story, which you should totally check out in full, but there are three nuggets in there you shouldn’t miss:

• Gimlet has hired a voice director to lead further content development for voice assistants: Wilson Standish, formerly the director of innovation at the marketing agency Hearts & Science.
• (Brand) money moves: “In 2017, more than half of Gimlet Media’s ad revenue came from brand advertisers, according to Anna Sullivan, vice president of brand partnerships for the company. Ms. Sullivan added that the company’s brand advertising revenue grew 134 percent in 2017 compared with 2016.”
• Gimlet president Matt Lieber re-emphasized the company’s commitment to audio: “The way I think about Gimlet is that we’re trying to build a new kind of modern media company where everything begins in audio.”

The company continues to sprawl into a myriad of directions, and it occurs to me that Gimlet’s narrative these days has mostly been about its meta-show developments and much less about the actual shows themselves. Anyway, I think they’re due to announce a spring slate soon, so maybe we’ll start getting more of that too.

Okay, back to making money off Alexa. So it’s a complicated situation. Chompers emerges against an Alexa development environment that happens to ban all third-party ads (with some exceptions for music and flash briefing apps). It’s also an environment that seems to encourage advertisers and brands to directly create or commission skills themselves; a sort of Alexa-skill equivalent of the branded podcast. For further consideration of this, I highly recommend this Wired piece, “Amazon’s Alexa Wants You To Talk To Your Ads,” from December.

All of this amounts to a deeply uncertain context for audio publishers thinking about investing time and resources in creating a presence on the platform. Even if the smart speaker category feels really exciting in general, it’s incredibly hard for publishers to figure out a decent way to yield returns — a problem exacerbated by Amazon’s total and often opaque governance of the Alexa platform. It’s a familiar conundrum: You want to be a part of something on the up and up before you miss it, but what are you really getting if the nature of the thing is so capricious and beyond your control?

With Chompers, Gimlet appears to have figured out a loose workaround. Oral-B and Crest Kids are indeed sponsors, but according to Amazon’s rules, the Chompers skill can’t convey the sponsorship of the two brands at all. However, the usual ad spots will be present on the podcast version, which will receive the usual cross-promotion treatment across its show portfolio. A spokesperson further told me:

We are also including P&G in all our marketing materials, including social, promotional boxes/kits with Oral-B and Crest Kids products, an Echo Dot, etc. to pediatric dentists in NY SF LA and Seattle, celebs, press and parenting influencers, etc.

P&G, by the way, refers to Procter & Gamble, the multinational consumer goods corporation that owns both Oral-B and Crest. The move with promotional materials leans onto a larger marketing theory: By virtue of its relative monopoly over dental hygiene products, P&G will likely benefit from any broader lift in general toothbrushing practices — which, you know, is both terrifying in its expression of corporate monopoly and also a value-creation hypothesis I’d totally explore if I were said corporate monopoly.

Again, these feel like cobbled-together workarounds, and the larger problem of how one can derive meaningful revenue through voice assistant platforms remains very much up in the air. Two more things to that point:

• I’m tempted to think that what we’ll see over the long run with the Echo is a media ecosystem akin to YouTube: a closed, centralized platform that largely leads to the creation of a content type unique to itself. As such, if you’re a purveyor of fine podcast products, the choice of developing programming for Alexa is ultimately an optional one — but one that requires its own infrastructures, teams, and playbooks. Which is probably why Gimlet hiring a dedicated director of voice makes sense.
• There’s something about the current demographics of smart speaker users that makes me think it’s a good tool for audio publishers to deepen their relationship with superfans. Drawing from the various Smart Audio reports, these users are highly engaged, display increased audio consumption behaviors, and appear inclined to use the device as a mechanism to make purchases. Seems like a ripe constellation of traits for an audio publisher looking to build out a subscription or freemium model.

But yeah, I don’t know. The more I think about it, the more unsettled I get. If I were a podcast publisher, I’d be incredibly wary of dedicating too much of myself to Alexa. I don’t know where this particular road goes, but it certainly reminds me of the many, many roads that have ended badly.

Chaser: Then again, maybe it’s not a good idea to build out a distribution presence on a sentient platform? “Amazon Alexa Devices Are Laughing Spontaneously And It’s ‘Bone Chillingly Creepy'” (BuzzFeed).

While we’re on the subject of kids podcasts: Gen-Z Media, which joined PRX’s portfolio of clients back in January, has announced a new slate of shows for the spring: The Mayan Crystal, Six Minutes, and a game show called Pants on Fire.

Of particular note is Gen-Z’s new website, dubbed Best Robot Ever, which functions as its new consumer-facing online home that also features programming from kids podcast publishers outside its network.

Clustering. Two months after wrapping Heaven’s Gate, Stitcher has rolled out another podcast that sticks with the theme of cults and cult-ish movements. The new show is called Dear Franklin Jones, and it’s by Jonathan Hirsch, most known for creating the independent podcast ARRVLS.

I liked the first episode enough (and loved the tinkly retro theme music), but what’s up with Stitcher and cults? This reminds me of the twin films phenomenon, except, of course, this isn’t an instance of semi-serendipitous cross-industry synchronicity, it’s just one publisher being fixated on a subject. Anyway, shouts to 1997, when Hollywood released both Volcano and Dante’s Peak within two months of each other, and to 1998, which saw Armageddon and Deep Impact come out within a similar chunk of time.

Anyway, I’d just like to flag that Dear Franklin Jones is another example of Stitcher working the windowing angle to drive more Stitcher Premium conversions through its original programming. The podcast debuted last week with new episodes weekly, but Jonesheads can access the whole run of episodes now if they signed up for Stitcher Premium.

For the record: I go back and forth debating the merits of windowing arrangements like this. I mean, I get it. By virtue of being a short-run series, Dear Franklin Jones is considerably harder to monetize than a longer-term recurring production, simply because there’s a much shorter runway to develop an active listenership and monetize the “head” of the production. As such, I completely empathize with the need to break out complementary channels for revenue.

But the tradeoff involves dampening the upside should it become a hit during its original run. The option to let listeners pay up and instantly access the rest of the show potentially diffuses the listenership and attention; you’d get two populations experiencing the show at different speeds, and are therefore less likely to participate in the same kinds of conversations. We see a version of this diffusion in the streaming vs. linear television context: Streaming platforms Netflix and Amazon Prime Video simply haven’t seemed capable of driving conversations with the same fervor and intensity that linear networks like HBO have consistently been able to do. I guess what I’m saying is: Scared money don’t make money, but I get it.

It’s a tough balance to strike, and I don’t envy podcast programming chiefs juggling the twin facts that (a) there seems to be genuine hunger for great, high-quality short-run podcasts and (b) they’re so much harder to monetize within the current system. And I imagine this will come to a head for Stitcher when the network rolls out its collaboration with Marvel, Wolverine: The Long Night. That show will debut exclusively on Stitcher Premium next Monday, before going wide in the fall.

The Big Listen ends. WAMU will cease production on the Lauren Ober-hosted broadcast about podcasts after “the program in its current format didn’t gain the traction with other NPR stations that we required to continue the investment in its weekly production,” the station announced Friday.

Keep an eye on Spotify. The Swedish music streaming service finally filed to go public on the New York Stock Exchange last week, and the big story thread is how it will pursue a relatively unconventional (and consequently riskier) route to do so. Recode has a helpful summary of the move — Theodore Schleifer writes: “There are no bankers that will underwrite the listing, meaning no one is trying to make a market for shares. There are no institutional investors who will get first dibs at their shares who could prop up Spotify’s value. And a lot of the rules that are meant to keep a stock from soaring or crashing are out the window” — and I also found Andrew Flanagan’s writeup over at NPR helpful to grasp the bigger picture.

You should check out Flanagan’s entire piece, but here’s the money:

Let’s take [Spotify CEO Daniel] Ek at his word here and assume he truly, deeply would like to pay creators as much as humanly possible, enough to survive on their creativity, while at the same time continue to operate a globally dominant technology company. To do that, Ek and Spotify may need to remove other players from the equation — or as he puts it, “break free of their medium’s constraints.” Ek isn’t talking about the constraints of human hearing or the constraints of creating beautiful and challenging sounds. He’s talking about the constraints represented by an industry of fiefdoms. It sounds as though he’d like the job of king.

So why should we care about Spotify again? As a reminder, the platform has made various attempts — albeit in the form of tentative minor experiments — to build out programming alternatives to its core music offering, a good chunk of which revolves around podcasts and non-music audio content. These attempts are ongoing, and to this date they have manifested themselves in a few different ways including: basic third-party podcast distribution (both through manual submission and through new partnerships with Anchor and Spreaker), original content creation (some of which are produced by podcast shops like Panoply and Transmitter), exclusive windowing arrangements (e.g. Gimlet Media with Mogul and WNYC Studios with 2 Dope Queens), and a new multimedia initiative called Spotlight.

According to the F-1, the music streaming platform boasts 159 million monthly users and 71 million paid Premium subscribers as of December 31st, 2017. The document also spotlight’s the company’s apparent emphasis on expanding “non-music content and user experience,” listed within the growth strategy section. Note the following disclosure:

There were a total of 348 million podcast listeners across all platforms worldwide at the end of 2016 and the number of podcast listeners increased to an estimated 484 million in 2017 according to Ovum, representing growth of 39% year-over-year. This engagement presents a significant opportunity for Spotify as we believe we have the ability to enhance the podcast User experience with a better product that is focused on discovery.

I’m not sure how Ovum, the business intelligence service referenced here, counts a “podcast listener,” but the growth rate is notable nonetheless. For what it’s worth, I’m a heavy user of Spotify for podcast listening, mostly because it works better with my data plan and I often spend huge chunks of the day without Wifi. Then again, I’m the guy that hits Chipotle before 11 a.m. to beat the lunch rush. Which is to say, I’m no indicator of anybody.

Related story: iHeartMedia is preparing to file for bankruptcy, Bloomberg reports.

Career Spotlight. We’re back at it again. This week, I traded emails with Vanessa Lowe, the creator of Nocturne, an independent podcast that’s part of The Heard collective. She’s based in Berkeley, California, which I hear has a hoppin’ radio scene these days.

Bites:

• Emilie Aries, cohost of Stuff Your Mom Never Told You, has stepped down from the HowStuffWorks’ podcast after a year-long tenure and launched a new project: Bossed Up, a podcast that comes out of her award-winning career service and training company of the same name. Transmitter Media provided guidance on the project. This is the second instance of SYMNTY hosts leaving the show to start their projects in two years, the other being Cristen Conger and Caroline Ervin, who went on to start Unladylike.
• The team from CBC Original Podcasts reached out to flag a few updates: Its true crime show Someone Knows Something is now back with its fourth season, On Drugs returns for its second, and they welcomed a new show called Personal Best.
• ESPN has announced its third season of 30 for 30 Podcasts, which will mark a departure from its anthology structure to roll out a serialized story. The season will explore the “complicated world of Bikram Yoga — a community grappling with its own identity and survival in the wake of sexual assault allegations against its charismatic guru and founder.” The story is reported and produced by Julia Lowrie Henderson, who notably worked on the “Yankees Suck!” episode from the first season, and the whole season will drop at the same time on May 22.
• The music label Atlantic Records has launched its own in-house line of podcasts. (Variety) Agreed with Nieman Lab’s Joshua Benton’s take on the matter: “It is interesting to see a record company like Atlantic invest in podcasts, but what they really should do is a regular show with actual Atlantic music on it. Benefit from the fact that other podcasters don’t have a music library at their disposal!”
• The New York Times welcomes a new show: Charles Duhigg’s Change Agent. (Apple Podcasts)
• Sort of adaptation in the opposite direction: The Osbournes now have a podcast. (Apple Podcasts)
• “Branded Podcasts Are The Ads People Actually Want To Listen To.” (Fast Company)
• Wild: “An Artificial Intelligence is Generating an ‘Infinite’ Podcast.” (Motherboard)
• “Florida teacher ‘removed from classroom’ after alleged white-nationalist podcast.” (ABC News)
• Marc Maron is moving garages, marking an end of an era. The New York Times produced a lovely package memorializing the storied production space.
• Goodness, Sunday’s This American Life was stunning.

While binging on the S-Town podcast last year, the first thing I did after one episode was search the Internet for more about the central character John McLemore, in hopes of finding a picture of the hedge maze via the GPS coordinates McLemore started giving out. (If you haven’t listened to S-Town and plan to, don’t do this.)

So did the Guardian Mobile Innovation Lab team — an impulse that they guessed many podcast listeners shared. The Lab’s latest mobile experiment is an attempt to address some of the small inconveniences and limitations of the podcast listening experience as it stands today. It’s a podcast player designed for the mobile web, which is being tested first with a new Guardian podcast called Strange Bird, hosted by data editor Mona Chalabi. (The Mobile Innovation Lab and Nieman Lab both receive Knight Foundation funding. You can check out their product process on that Lab’s Medium page, or find Nieman Lab’s coverage of their past experiments here.

Any listener can access the player through any browser on Apple or Android, though Android users get the added option of turning on push alerts timed to different parts of the audio as the podcast plays on. It’s like podcast show notes, but in real time, and with phone notifications that point you to links and graphics at relevant points in the story. Chrome users can also sign up to get alerts when a new episode is available, without subscribing within a dedicated listening app.

“We had a lot of debates about the purity of audio, and the power a good audio story has. We’re trying to play around with the idea: If it weren’t just audio, what could it be? How can we seamlessly deliver additional media assets?” Sarah Schmalbach, the senior product manager at the Lab, said. “We’re not building an entire experience around them, but adding them where they’re relevant, and taking into account that some people also like to keep the visual or other elements a mystery. We wanted to figure out how to blend a couple of different formats together, with audio as the anchor.”

“We’re seeing so many organizations take interest or invest money in podcasts as a source of gaining new audiences, but those aren’t necessarily integrated into the rest of their output,” Sasha Koren, the Mobile Lab’s editor, said. “Maybe they’re available through a basic web player, but you can’t follow or interact with them in any other way, or you can only access them on a podcast app which takes you off platform.”

Have you ever listened to a podcast episode centered around a visual, heard the host mention the website where some of the images in question live, and then never actually followed up with those extra steps to see the extra stuff? For the wonkier among you, have you ever listened to charts getting cited and papers getting quoted, and wanted to check out the data for yourself? The Mobile Lab’s web player experiment addresses some of these use cases for more regular podcast users. It also attempts to both simplify and enhance the podcast listening process for beginners — especially Android users — who are faced with a range of paid and free listening apps, of varying quality.

Strange Bird’s premise is that it will use data to open up difficult issues that are actually common, but insufficiently discussed, making it a useful test case for the Mobile Lab’s web player. The Mobile Lab team worked off of the show script to look for possibilities where added material made sense — where there were characters whose photos listeners might be interested in seeing or data graphics Chalabi created that might be incorporated, Koren said. Its pilot episode is on miscarriage, and will feature chats from Mona herself, links to other stories, and illustrations. The podcast will also be available all the other places where podcasts are found, but the web player audio will include a little introduction about the added features.

“What we’ve created is a sort of augmented traditional podcast,” Alastair Coote, the Mobile Lab’s developer, said. “You can listen to it the way you would a normal podcast, you can engage with the extra bit if you want to.” The web podcast player is a proof-of-concept for the Lab, which is winding down its two-year grant period, but other publishers with resources may want to build on ideas around better podcast listening experiences without a dedicated app (choose your-own-adventure interactive podcasts, perhaps, Coote and Schmalbach suggest).

Some technical roadblocks remain — for instance, if you get an alert that a new podcast episode is posted, and want to tap to download that episode in the background over wifi for future listening offline, you can’t. (Coote outlined a few of these challenges in his own writeup of the podcast player concept from last summer.)

Both platforms and news organizations have experimented with various efforts to give listeners interactivity on top of audio. The investigative reporting show Reveal has offered users the option of texting with the show at given points when it has document excerpts, images, or data to show listeners. The New York Times now offers its morning show The Daily within its app, and listeners can tap around to other stories as the audio continues to play. Last month Spotify announced it would roll out a feature in the app called Spotlight that would show listeners “contextual visual elements, such as photos, video and text, that appear as users move through each episode,” first with partners like BuzzFeed News and Gimlet Media.

Verrry interested to see this new podcast + visuals thing Spotify announced, particularly @BuzzFeedNews and @cheddar use. Despite launch press I can't find any sign of it in the iOS app. https://t.co/OC0lnGX64O

— Sasha Koren (@SashaK) January 23, 2018

The Mobile Lab’s idea is, as always, to get others in the industry thinking about prototypes they’ve built: “We’d love to see more people experimenting with this stuff,” Schmalbach said.

What’s at the top of PSS’s to-do list?

It’s been a week of almost eerie quiet in L.A., as the reality of new owner Patrick Soon-Shiong sinks in. The Guild’s elected its local leadership and the L.A. Times newsroom sees that it barely dodged the bullet of major Tronc reorganization.

Tronc announced Tuesday that it would concentrate all page makeup and design in Chicago, following the centralization models now becoming standard among chains, with GateHouse the national leader in that movement. That will be mean the elimination of more local jobs.

In addition, as reported by Chicago media critic Robert Feder, Tronc’s Tim Knight emphasized a salary review: “Over the next six weeks, while positions are being determined in line with our plan, we expect each local newsroom to review base compensation; where appropriate each newsroom will make pay increases reflecting either change in responsibility and/or adjusting to market.”

Why might that review be happening now? Count two big reasons: the reorganization and coming job cuts — and the unprecedentedly successful unionization of the L.A. Times in January. Tronc’s message to anyone thinking of leading a unionization charge at its other papers: “All pay changes for staffers not governed by collective bargaining will go into effect on April 1.”

While journalists in Baltimore, Chicago, Hartford, New York, and Orlando await the changes, in L.A., sources report “a palpable optimism.” And esteemed former Times publisher Tom Johnson weighed in with his hope on Facebook. (“My sense is that far better days may be ahead. I so hope so.”)

Who can blame them, after 20 years of Chicago-based rule and a decade of mismanagement and wavering strategies?

But no one has any idea what the new owner of the Times will do — most likely including the owner himself.

The brilliant biotech billionaire is but a novice in publishing. Consequently, who he hires to lead the business and the newsroom will tell us much about how much of that optimism may be maintained. Feelers to potential new editors have begun, as trusted Soon-Shiong advisers begin to explore the field, sources tell me.

In one sense, the Times can take a deep breath. Soon-Shiong’s deal with Tronc includes 18 months of shared transition services, I’m told. That would include the continuation of the Arc platform, licensed from The Washington Post. The paper launched it in late January.

If Shiong isn’t obsessed with quarterly financial returns, he can continue to reassure Times employees of a considered — and funded — transformation ahead. Will he offer the same kind of “runway” to the Times that Jeff Bezos offered his wary Washington Post troops five years ago? His initial letter set a good tone, but when will he pay an in-person visit?

Will he offer further reassuring steps, like embracing the paper’s Washington bureau? That team now looks like it could become part of the new Times, when it and its sibling the San Diego Union-Tribune, formally split from Tronc in either late March or early April.

Times seller Michael Ferro had been actively planning to close that bureau. Tronc had been in talks with both Axios and another significant D.C. news player, wanting to syndicate content and cut costs. That Axios/Tronc deal is no longer in the works, and it’s unlikely Ferro will find a high-profile partner.

It’s Ferro’s follow-on steps after the sale that Soon-Shiong may want to watch closely.

For instance, Tronc still owns, we believe, LA.com. And Ferro has recently talked about providing his newly rehabilitated Tribune Interactive CEO Ross Levinsohn with “hundreds” of content creators to make his new, if still hazy, syndication play real.

Could Ferro become a competitor to the L.A. Times?

Takeaway: It’s almost time to place your bets in the game of Billionaire Bingo, a diversion I first mentioned five years ago. Will L.A. get a Bezos, Taylor, or Henry, or an Adelson? Or some other new breed entirely?

Is it just the L.A. Times that’s in journalistic turmoil, or is it all of California?

While the Times hogged all the attention, the state’s other big publisher — Digital First Media — should be getting more national attention. Alden Global Capital, DFM’s owner, continues to cut to a number, a profit number, which it’s been able to maintain even as the newspaper business absorbed a brutal 2017.

In southern California, its eleven titles (including some meaningful and once-proud local papers like the Long Beach Press-Telegram and the Orange County Register) now will pay about 250 journalists, down from about 380 only last year.

In the Bay Area, the once nationally prominent Mercury News is — almost unbelievably — down to 41 in the newsroom. Another 65 are counted as “East Bay” employees, given DFM’s super-clustering of newsrooms. That means its Bay Area News Group has concentrated editing and design in one location, and lots of regional reporting is “shared.”

The net result: “That leaves BANG with no K-12 reporter, no higher education reporter, no health reporter, and no one covering Santa Clara County government. It also significantly limits coverage at San Jose’s City Hall and entirely eliminates coverage in some of the region’s smaller neighboring cities, including Sunnyvale, Cupertino, Campbell and San Jose’s Rose Garden, Almaden, Cambrian and Willow Glen neighborhoods.” You know, Cupertino, an incorporated city of 58,000, hometown of a little concern called Apple.

Takeaway: The Times drama has provided good copy, but the destruction of the Mercury News deserves a moment of attention, if not a moment of silence. The L.A. Times newsroom still houses more than 400 journalists — about 10 times the Merc, amazingly. As recently as 10 years ago, it was the Merc that paid about 400, while the Times, at its height, paid 1,100.

Not that long ago, the San Jose paper proclaimed itself “The Newspaper of Silicon Valley.” Silicon Valley has done quite well, becoming the global economic engine and driving great regional affluence. But the economically fecund region has become — in less than a decade — a news desert.

Is it California, or is it the whole West Coast?

Advance Publications’ Oregonian, the largest daily in Oregon, just reduced its staff by 11, bringing it to 80. “It’s with a very heavy heart that I bring you this news,” said Oregonian editor Mark Katches. “Today, the positions of 11 of our colleagues in the newsroom are being eliminated.” These cuts follow ones in 2015 and in 2013, when The Oregonian flipped its switch on less-than-daily full edition print publishing.

Katches, who served as a top editor for the nationally respected, Bay Area-based Center for Investigative Reporting before taking the Oregonian job in 2014, has managed to preserve a watchdog role for the paper, amid the cuts. Seven journalists make up the investigative team; three data visualization specialists support those projects. Projects include ones focusing on eldercare abuse and bad policing.

Two hours south of Portland, Oregon’s largest family-owned daily recently gave up the fight for independence. The Baker family, owners of the well-regarded-over-the-years Eugene Register-Guard, succumbed to a GateHouse offer. The family bought the paper — still a 46,000-circulation daily — in 1927, and I had the misfortune to compete against it when I launched a local alternative weekly in 1975. Its once-dominant local impact has dwindled along with its staff, but its passing marks another turning point for West Coast journalism.

Takeaway: National media still focuses on the big, odd stories like the L.A. Times, but the desolation of the local press continues to worsen across the country each month.

Kudos to ProPublica. I interviewed ProPublica president Dick Tofel in Miami at last week’s Digital Content Next conference, and he noted both ProPublica’s total of 85 national staffers and the 14 it employs at its recently launched Illinois state project. Most tellingly: the title of its just-published annual report: 2017: The Next Frontier Is Local.

Are those vultures circling Boston?

Casual observers tell me it looks to them like Alden, DFM’s owner, is tiring of the business, as it cuts deeply in California and sees seasoned executives like Denver Post publisher Mac Tully and editor Greg Moore leave, fed up.

Au contraire! On Wednesday, DFM more than doubled GateHouse’s offer for the bankrupt Boston Herald, bidding $11.9 million for the property. Sources say the sum surprised GateHouse, which hadn’t even expected DFM to enter the bidding. Second, it believes DFM is overpaying, having far outbid both GateHouse and Revolution Capital Group, the third bidder.

But DFM’s math is different. The company may spend $12 million — a bankruptcy court needs to certify the decision on Friday — but “then again, when they chop half the staff later this year that ought to make some money,” says one source deeply familiar with DFM’s strategies.

Additionally, while DFM has sold several properties in recent years — including the New Haven Register, Salt Lake Tribune, and Berkshire Eagle — it continues to work the market. “DFM has been bidding for everything, from Pueblo to Boston, from Austin to West Palm,” says the insider. “Can DFM suck three years out of everything it can buy? Of course,” he concludes.

Dan Kennedy, deeply knowledgeable on the Northeast news landscape, nails the likely result of the DFM win.

Takeaway: This is vulture capitalism, pure and simple — the textbook practice of buying distressed and dying assets, squeezing them, believing that remaining “meat on the bone” will pay off. The result, often, is bankruptcy and closure. That’s the Alden long-term milking “strategy”: After extracting years of high profits, turn out the lights, or sell the remnants to whoever may want them.

Is The Washington Post really profitable?

Post publisher Fred Ryan laughed Wednesday when I pointed out the considerable skepticism I’ve heard since the Post announced its second year of profit success — with precious little other data — last month. He points to both its digital subscription growth and greater ad selling engagement as the key reasons. While Ryan won’t divulge numbers, the contours of the Post’s march toward profitability can be estimated.

The Post has reached the 1 million digital subscription mark, and that generates about $100 million a year in revenue, almost all of it new in the last several years. You can do the math: about $100 per digital subscriber per year, achieved even with Kindle, Apple News, and Prime discounting and over-the-digital transom subs for the full-price payers. (By comparison, The New York Times, with twice the number of digital news subscribers, averages $125 per sub.)

Then there’s the Post’s more than tripling of digital audience in four years. That hasn’t quite led to a tripling of programmatic ad revenue, but it’s more than doubled — add another $100 million or so a year.

Takeaway: Jeff Bezos’ annual investment in tech and newsroom staff — now up to about 775 — has meant an investment of about $40 million a year. Yet, the reinvestment seems to be paying off. Just Tuesday, the Post announced an expansion of its international news efforts — new bureaus, new staff. That’s a part — a long-term part — of the Post’s tilt toward digital subscription emphasis, ready to harvest payers from the audience it’s quickly grown.

As with The New York Times, and with players as diverse as Business Insider, HuffPost, and BuzzFeed, it’s global that aims to provide small but growing streams of new readers and new payers. Top of the list for both the Post and Times: Canada. It’s well educated, (mostly) English-speaking — and suffering from sprawling news deserts coast to coast, as its major chain Postmedia (the DFM of Canada) continues to retrench.

Is The New York Times a radio station?

The Times and American Public Media announced Tuesday that the paper’s podcast The Daily will now be a broadcast radio show too. The news further certifies The Daily as a phenomenon. Host Michael Barbaro and his expanding stellar crew just celebrated their one-year anniversary, with the Times announcing huge audience numbers.
Now, American Public Media and the Times can pair Marketplace with The Daily in a one-hour, five-day-a-week syndication package.

Expect that many stations in the top 25 markets will carry the new joint hour. The Times gets big branding benefit, of course, but also compensation in the form of some combination of licensing fees and/or advertising extensions.

Takeaway: The podcast revolution has stunned us in its intensity, claiming hours per month of media time, and redefining audio and radio. It may seem confusing to see a podcast morphing into a broadcast radio program. But others have pioneered that shift — especially, recently, NPR.

You may have heard the more recent crossovers. They include Planet Money, How I Built This, Hidden Brain, and It’s Been A Minute with Sam Sanders. NPR launched each as podcasts and transformed them into radio shows for weekend programming — often replacing dear, departed shows like Car Talk.

Critically, podcasts have literally broken the public radio clock. That clock — invisible to us as listeners — has long been as confining as limited number of newspaper or magazine pages or a 30-minute TV newscast. Podcasts, of course, know no such limits. As low-cost, testable concepts of topic and of talent, they’ve introduced many new voices and faces in the world of news and newsiness.

Finally, it’s a case of innovation supporting innovation. “It’s Been a Minute is an interesting case study as it piloted on [the NPR mobile app] NPR One, where we got tons of data and feedback that helped us perfect the concept,” NPR’s Isabel Lara tells me. “Then it became a podcast in June 2017 and ultimately a radio show in October of 2017.” It’s now on 155 stations.

How do you find scale after leaving The New York Times and NPR?

Kinsey Wilson’s found a way: Today, he becomes president of WordPress.com, which now powers more than 29 million websites, even if it sometimes doesn’t get the attention of the bigger platforms.

Fifteen years after its founding, the big question is where does WordPress go now? (Beyond launching a new, truly multimedia interface this summer.)

Founder Matt Mullenweg believes he’s found the right partner to chart that path. “He’s one of the few people on the planet who has built a CMS,” he told me Tuesday. “Many cite him as one of the best people they’ve ever worked for.”

It’s that combo of strategic publishing chops and the ability to create productive teams that has propelled Wilson through careers at USA Today, NPR, and The New York Times.

Wilson talks about the challenge ahead in both big and small terms — about maintaining the open web in a time when massive platforms seemed to have absorbed all the air, for instance.

It’s no surprise that he is also intrigued by the potential of WordPress to help solve the problems of growing news deserts. “WordPress powers a lot of local news sites and it creates an opening to address a crisis that is frankly a pretty alarming one in journalism,” he told me.

As he begins work next month, Wilson will start his WordPress tenure the same way all WordPressers — there are 680 of them — do. He’ll do customer service as a “happiness engineer.” Call in with an issue and you’ll have a 1-in-200 chance of getting the former top NPR and New York Times exec on the line.

Takeaway: Hundreds and thousands of journalists have reorganized themselves, as buyouts and layoffs have decimated daily ranks. I’ve been struck by the lack of powerful yet simple-to-use platforms to support them and their work. Perhaps a changemaker like Wilson can help solve that problem and harness the tools of the time in the nick of time.

What was that thing called digital display?

We’ve talked about it here at the Lab for years: Google and Facebook have eaten almost all worldwide digital ad growth. They’ve left maybe 10 percent of that growth — table scraps — for news and all other ad-supported media. That’s not news, but the reckoning it has prompted is. Finally, publishers are now acknowledging that the first big digital revenue stream — digital display — is going, going gone, just like the print business that’s ebbing away even more quickly.

The Reuters Institute’s recent survey of publishers — mainly in Europe, but with some U.S. representation — emphasizes that point, below.

Fully 62 percent now say “it will become less important over time.” Just 16 percent (and who are they, exactly?) say more important.

Takeaway: Commercial revenue isn’t going away, but digital display — optimized by Google and Facebook — is for news publishers. That’s why the smartest publishers have profoundly move their commercial staffs to the pursuits of branded content, marketing services, video, audio and events — all areas outside the direct line of The Duopoly death ray.

Was poking fun at the Post’s slogan shortsighted?

Yes, it is a dark time. How Democracies Die is getting its just due, including this worthy Fresh Air interview and a recent Fareed Zakaria tout. In the book, historians Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt give us the long view from Mussolini to Hitler to Hugo Chavez to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, telling us how elected leaders who may squeak into office can quickly consolidate power. Among the many parallels they note: attacks on news media.

Takeaway: I was among those who poked a little fun at The Washington Post when it unfurled its “Democracy Dies in Darkness” slogan a year ago. (Slate greeted the news with “15 Metal Albums Whose Titles Are Less Dark Than The Washington Post’s New Motto.”) And yet it seems more realistic as we absorb the shocks of the year that was.

What should I do with the Times?

For a moment, I thought I’d somehow bought the L.A. Times. As I talked with Frank Sesno on CNN’s Reliable Sources Sunday, the chyron below popped on the monitor.

Alas, it will soon be Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong’s challenge, not mine.

Takeaway: Fake news is everywhere.

As Year One of this presidency turns to Year Two, should we keep this thought top of mind?

Where would the state of our republic be absent The New York Times’ and The Washington Post’s incisive reporting? Together, the two employ only about 2,000 journalists, with far fewer than that assigned to national politics and policy, but the impact of these two great journalistic institutions — institutions willing to stand up to state power — has been proven anew.

Takeaway: Don’t dither about which you should subscribe to. Subscribe to both.

• The choice to target the evening commute is a really, really smart one. I’ve argued this before, but I think it’s safe to assume that there might be considerable overlap between the audiences of The New York Times and Vox.com. As such, a move to complement The Daily is significantly more prudent than engaging it as a direct competitor. In any case, even if the overlap was small, the evening commute remains untapped by the daily news podcast to begin with — aside from Mike Pesca’s The Gist, of course, which isn’t really playing the same game anyway. It’s a safer, and therefore more reliable, base to build from, and besides, Today, Explained could always expand with an a.m. version at some point in the future. (Same goes with The Daily and a p.m. version, a prospect that it has previously explored with breaking news specials.)
• In case it fully doesn’t come across in the writeup: I think Today, Explained’s success will mostly hinge on Sean Rameswaram’s personality — more so, I’d argue, than how Michael Barbaro fits into The Daily as a presence. Which is, I suppose, kind of the point when you bring in someone with a specific sense of showmanship like Rameswaram to headline a project.

And two more things I’d like to add to the preview:

• Here’s Vox.com general manager Andrew Golis, responding to an inquiry about how the podcast fits into the company’s overall business goals: “It gives us an opportunity to have an audio daily presence in our audience’s life in the way our website does in text and our YouTube channel does in video. That persistent relationship and trust is a powerful platform for building our business…we believe ‘Today, Explained’ will give us a new way to introduce audiences to a growing network of Vox podcasts as we continue to expand our ambitions and programming.”
• I’d be remiss if I didn’t discuss Midroll Media’s involvement in the production. The Scripps-owned podcast company serves as the exclusive advertising partner for Today, Explained, but I’m also told that they provided upfront investment to help assemble the team and build out the production. Chris Bannon, Midroll’s chief content officer, was also involved in the development of the show. “Creatively speaking, I spent a day in D.C. with the Vox team, and together we started sourcing host and staff candidates,” explained Bannon over email. “Right now we’re in the fun part, listening to show drafts and sharing notes. They’re alarmingly well-organized, cheerful, and efficient.” Bannon, by the way, worked with Rameswaram back when he was still at WNYC. (He left for Midroll in early 2015.)

When asked about his perspective on the potential of Today, Explained, Bannon offered an analogy. “I think we want Today, Explained to be All Things Considered to the The Daily’s Morning Edition,” he said. “Except that we will be more like All Things Considered’s smart, funny, well-informed, and streetwise uncle.”

“Streetwise uncle” sounds about right.

On a related note: I heard there’s some big news coming later today on The Daily. Keep your eyes peeled.

What comes next for the Fusion Media Group. Last week, The Onion binge-dropped A Very Fatal Murder, the satirical news site’s first stab at a long-form audio project. The show was designed to parody the wildly popular — and eminently bankable! — true-crime podcast genre, which is an appealing premise right off the bat: indeed, there’s no team I’d love to see interpret the phenomenon more than the brains behind The Onion. A Very Fatal Murder turned out to be enjoyable enough, no more and no less, though I did end up thinking it didn’t come anywhere close to realizing its promise as podcast satire.

But there’s a thing, and then there’s everything around the thing. And despite the minor swing and miss of A Very Fatal Murder, I was nonetheless left quite excited about the prospect of future projects from The Onion, and curious about what’s going on with the audio team at The Onion’s parent company, Fusion Media Group (FMG).

So I checked in with Mandana Mofidi, FMG’s executive director of audio. In case you’re unfamiliar, FMG is the sprawling, multi-tentacled corporation best known in some circles — mine, namely — for absorbing the remains of the Gawker empire post-Terry Bollea lawsuit in the form of the Gizmodo Media Group that spans Gizmodo, io9, Jezebel, and others. A television arm factors in somewhere, as does the city of Miami.

Anyway, Mofidi tells me that since her team kicked off operations about a year ago, they’ve been playing around with a couple of ideas and formats to see what would stick. Weekly interview and chat shows made up the early experiments, which apparently ended up working well for Lifehacker (The Upgrade), Kotaku (Splitscreen), and Deadspin (Deadcast). But following the reception they received for A Very Fatal Murder as well as Containers, Alexis Madrigal’s audio documentary about the sexy, sexy world of international shipping from last year, more plans have to been put in place to build out further narrative projects.

Mofidi’s overarching goal this year, it seems, is to ensure that each of FMG’s properties gets a solid podcast of their own. To that end, they have several projects in various stages of development, including:

• A six-part narrative series from Gizmodo about “a controversial and charismatic spiritual guru who uses the internet to build her obsessive following.” That show is being developed with Pineapple Street Media, which appears to be really carving out a niche around themes of obsession, charismatic leaders, and the followings they spawn, following Missing Richard Simmons and Heaven’s Gate.
• A show for Jalopnik called Tempest, which will examine “the funny and at times tragic intersectionality of people and cars.”
• A series that “explores the connectivity of our DNA” — which evokes memories of Gimlet’s Twice Removed — featuring Grammy Award-winning artist René Pérez, a.k.a. Residente. Gretta Cohn’s Transmitter Media is assisting with this project.
• A collaboration with The California Endowment that’ll produce stories on young activists “who are using their platforms to promote solidarity between different communities and causes.”

Mofidi also talked about an intent to dig deeper into events. “We recently did a live taping of Deadspin’s Deadcast in St. Paul before the Super Bowl. We were expecting to sell about 200 tickets, but ended up with over 360 people,” she said. The smart speaker category is also of interest, along with figuring out ways to collaborate with FMG’s aforementioned television arm.

I asked Mofidi if she had any dream projects that she’d love to produce in her role. “A daily show,” she wrote back. “It would be ambitious, but with so many passionate voices across our sites it feels like something we could do in a way that was distinct.”

Related reading: Publishers with TV ambitions are pursuing Netflix.

We’re back with this nonsense: “Public media again in bull’s-eye in president’s FY19 plans.” Re-upping my column from the last time we were in this mess, on why it’s bad in ways you already know and in more ways you don’t.

And while I’m linking Current, the public media publication just announced the new host for its podcast, The Pub: Annie Russell, currently an editor at WBEZ.

Pod Save America heads to HBO. Surprise, surprise. Crooked Media’s flagship podcast is heading to the premium cable network with a series of hour-long specials that will follow the Obama bros — that’s former Obama aides Jon Favreau, Tommy Vietor, and Jon Lovett, in case you’re unfamiliar with the deep-blue podcast phenomenon — as they host live tapings on the campaign trail for what will most definitely be a spicy midterm election season this fall. This is the latest addition to the newly buzzy trend of podcasts being adapted for film and television, and the deal for this adaptation in particular was handled by WME.

Over at Vulture, I tried to turn a series of dots into a squiggly shape linking this development, the recent debut of 2 Dope Queens’ HBO specials, and HBO’s relationship with Bill Simmons to say something about the premium cable network’s potential strategic opportunities with podcasting. Put simply: Traditional standup comedy programming is getting more expensive due to the pressure of Netflix’s infinitely large war chest, and one could argue that certain types of conversational podcast programming offer HBO an alternative resource to adapt and develop content that can potentially hit the same kind of experience and pleasure beats you’d get from conventional standup TV specials.

But sometimes dots are just dots, and those aren’t really constellations in the sky — just random, meaningless arrangements of stars that are indifferent to your experience of them.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

Meanwhile, in the nonprofit world. This one’s pretty interesting: Tiny Spark, the Amy Costello-led independent nonprofit news outfit that covers the world of philanthropy and nonprofits, has been acquired by Nonprofit Quarterly, which is…well, a much larger independent nonprofit news organization that covers the world of philanthropy and nonprofits. “Amy…has done an exceptional job building the audience for her podcast. We are excited not only to add this new media channel to our organization, but also to collaborate with Amy to expand our reach into public radio,” said Joel Toner, NPQ’s president and chief operating officer.

As part of this arrangement, NPQ owns Tiny Spark’s intellectual property and Amy Costello is brought on as a senior correspondent to lead the organization’s investigative journalism work, podcast development, and public radio outreach. “Tiny Spark’s work fits very well into the topics we cover at NPQ,” said Toner, when asked about the strategic thinking behind the acquisition. “Additionally, our 2017 annual audience survey confirmed that our readers had a significant interest in having us develop a podcast channel.”

I’d like to point out just how much this arrangement reminds me of the one that was struck between USA Today and Robin Amer, which I profiled last week. Speaking of which…

A quick update to last week’s item on The City. In the piece, I talked a little bit about the USA Today Network’s podcast plans for 2018, chiefly drawing information from a summer 2017 press release the organization circulated when they first announced the acquisition of The City. The plans mostly involve launching more podcasts across its properties.

The company reached out to let me know that their thinking has since evolved. “The network already produces dozens of podcasts across its 109-plus sites, but is now focusing on a handful of those shows to support with resources and marketing à la The City,” wrote Liz Nelson, the USA Today Network’s vice president of strategic content development. “At the time [the press release] was written, we did have 60-plus podcasts — most of which bubbled up organically at the local level. We’re closer to 40 now. That number will continue to ebb and flow and we encourage experimentation at the local level, which gives our journalists the space they need to experiment in the medium.”

Nelson added: “But from a network level, we are not putting the same amount of resources we’ve put into The City into every single show. We’re concentrating on a smaller set of shows we believe can have national impact.”

Hold this thought. We’re going to talk about other stuff for a bit, but we’ll get back to this notion of resource focus.

“It amuses me,” wrote Traug Keller, ESPN’s senior vice president of audio, in a corporate blog post touting the sport media giant’s podcasting business, “when I read about podcasting in the media with references to it being ‘new’ or ’emerging.'”

Keller continued:

As ESPN has done with other technologies — be it cable TV in 1979, the Internet in the ’90s, HD television or mobile initiatives more recently — we embraced podcasting as soon as we could and ran with it — even if we didn’t always know where we would end up! We launched our first podcast way back in 2005. A head start is often critical in a competitive business environment.

I also chuckle when people refer to podcasting as some mysterious new format to figure out. I’ve spent a career in audio, and I can tell you the key ingredients for compelling audio are constant…

Yeah, I don’t know, dude.

The borderline condescending tone of the post isn’t exactly something I’d want to hear from a company whose public narrative is one of crisis on multiple fronts — from the disruption of its cable-bundle–reliant business model to layoffs to its uneven handling of social media policies to the uncertain future of a gamble on OTT distribution — let alone a podcast publisher whose Podtrac ranking placement (as always, disclaimers of that service here and here) is powered by what is still largely a spray-and-pray strategy, in which 82 shows are deployed to bring in 35 million global unique monthly downloads. For reference, the infinitely smaller PRX team gets 4 million more with less than half that number of shows (34 podcasts), while NPR bags three times more downloads with just 42 podcasts that don’t at all traffic in naturally addictive sports content.

To be clear, I am, very generally speaking, more appreciative of a world with a strong (and better) ESPN in it than one without. And let me also just say that I really like some of its recent moves in on-demand audio, namely the creation of the 30 for 30 Podcast and having Katie Nolan launch her own show.

But I just don’t think very highly of this whole “oh we’ve been doing this for a long time/we were doing this first therefore we are super wise” mindset that either mistakes early sandbox dabblings for meaningful first-mover value creation or simply being first for being noteworthy. To be fair, this isn’t a knock that exclusively applies to Keller’s blog post; that thinking governs an alarming share of press releases and huffy emails that hit my inbox. But here’s the thing: I really don’t think it matters whether you did first. What mostly matters is if you did it right. Which is to say: If you invented Facebook, dammit, you’d have invented Facebook. Furthermore, as it stands, if there’s anything I’m acutely aware of writing this newsletter every week, it’s that, much like everywhere else, nobody really knows anything. It’s just a bunch of people working really hard, trying to figure this whole podcast thing out.

Anyway. I normally try not to be too worked up about anything, but this stuff really bugs me, and goodness, there’s nothing I would love more than to take this mindset, strap it onto the next Falcon Heavy rocket, and launch it straight into the dying sun.

Still, credit should be given where’s credit due: The post goes on to discuss what I think is a really positive development for ESPN’s podcast business:

To get there, we pared our lineup — once numbering in triple digits — to about 35, focusing on the most popular offerings (NFL, MLB, and NBA) and other niche topics where we can “own” the category. It’s a “less is more” strategy, where we can better produce and promote a smaller lineup.

Which reminds me of something…

After spray-and-pray. ESPN’s move to pare down and focus its overflowing podcast portfolio reminds me of another podcast publisher that’s been pretty active since the first podcast boom: NPR.

NPR’s podcast inventory, too, once numbered in the triple digits. In August 2005, its directory housed around 174 programs, 17 of which were NPR originals while others were shows from member stations that the public radio mothership were distributing on their behalf. (That practice has since been terminated.) The show number peaked around 2009, when the directory supported about 390 podcasts.

“Back in those days, podcasts were hard to access and only the really digitally savvy listeners could find and download them,” an NPR spokesperson told me. “We were experimenting and we were excited with the possibility of putting out NPR content on-demand, repackaging content that had aired about specific topics, seeing what the audience would like…It also allowed for additional creativity in programming, podcasts could be a sandbox for piloting new ideas.” Some of those ideas eventually grew into segments and radio shows of their own, but these podcasts mostly ended up being an unruly system of small, quiet, under-the-radar projects.

All that changed with this most recent podcasting boom, which started in the latter half of 2014. Around that time, a focused effort was made to identify and retain shows that fit a certain set of criteria that included having a native podcast experience (and not just recycled segments from existing shows), strong listener communities, an alignment with the organization’s business needs, and so on. The rest were culled. By the end, NPR was left with 25 shows. “Our thinking was that by having a smaller portfolio, we could draw more attention to them, serve them better, cross-promote, bring sponsorship support, create significant reach,” the spokesperson said.

The move felt like a gamble at the time, but it paid off. “While everyone expected our downloads to go down, within two months, downloads were somewhere near 50 million a month,” remembered Audible’s Eric Nuzum, then vice president of programming at NPR. “Within a year, it was over 80.”

That number is now 110 million. The point of this little parable is…well, I don’t think I have to spell it out. You get the picture.

Call Your 2018. There are few teams I admire more than the trio behind Call Your Girlfriend, the podcast for long-distance besties everywhere: journalist Ann Friedman, international woman of mystery Aminatou Sow, and radio producer Gina Delvac. The show has, over its nearly four years of existence, evolved from a fun side project to stay connected into something so much more than that. It is, in equal parts, a platform, a community, and an ever-growing resource. And if the enthusiasm of some friends of mine who consider themselves devout CYG fans are any indicator, Call Your Girlfriend is also damn close to being a full-fledged movement.

Last year was a difficult one for the team, given the political environment, but it was also a call to arms to which they responded with vigor. “Despite the trash-fire that was 2017 in America,” they wrote me, “Better yet, because of it, we wanted CYG to function as a place of refuge for our listeners, and for ourselves.” This translated into an interview schedule that was dense with guests that spoke directly to the moment — including but not limited to Hillary Rodham Clinton, Kirsten Gillibrand, Margaret Atwood, and Ellen Pao — as well as a multipart series on women running for office that featured sit-downs with first-time candidates and organizations that support women seeking political office. The team also worked to push the show creatively, producing a special episode on pelvic pain and trauma and occasionally handing the mic over to other podcasting teams, like Who? Weekly’s Lindsey Weber and Bobby Finger along with Good Muslim Bad Muslim’s Tanzila Ahmed and Zahra Noorkbakhsh.

The year was also fruitful for Call Your Girlfriend’s business. Though specific numbers were not disclosed, I’m told that the show’s revenues — which come from a combination of ad sales, live events, and a healthy merchandising arm — far exceeded their original targets. More ambitious goals were set for the new year.

We’re neck-deep into the second month of 2018, so I thought it was a good a time as any to check in with the team about their plans for the coming months, their thoughts on how the industry has changed, and their commitment to being independent. They were kind enough to oblige:

Good morning, all. So, while not quite breaking news, the late-day publication of a piece on WNYC’s ongoing crisis narrative has led me to rewrite and restructure the newsletter a little bit. As such, this issue is a tad messier than usual. My apologies.

“The Troubles.” We’re three months into New York Public Radio’s reckoning with sexual harassment and an organizational culture that allowed for bullying and discriminatory behaviors that have especially hurt women and people of color. (See here, here, and here.) And it’s far from over.

Boris Kachka, writing for New York magazine’s The Cut (where the original John Hockenberry piece by journalist Suki Kim dropped on December 1), published a whopper Monday evening that provides one of the most detailed looks at the station’s troubling history with sexual harassment and where it stands today. There’s a lot packed into it, and the piece performs a wide range of functions, including, among others:

• Vividly illustrating the toxic nature of the culture that the station has cultivated over the decades;
• Capturing the historically persistent systematic failures of the station’s human resources infrastructure — along with its weaponization (“regarded by many as the organization’s spy and enforcer”);
• Providing additional details on the behavior of Hockenberry, Leonard Lopate, and Jonathan Schwartz;
• Filling in some of the blanks of what has been happening in the station over the past few months.

Kachka was also able to secure an interview CEO Laura Walker last week, and in doing so, creates a partial portrait of a station leader under heavy fire whose future remains deeply, utterly in question.

The piece is sprawling and remarkably dense, but also somewhat strange. I’ve read it a couple of times now, and the piece strikes me as a keyhole-sized window into the chaos gripping the institution in the current moment — there are dangling threads everywhere, and there are places where I’m not sure how they fit together. Anyway, go read the feature, which is illuminating, but here are some details you probably shouldn’t miss:

• Here’s what Dean Cappello has apparently been up to following his demotion to an advisory role: “While Walker made sure to be omnipresent around the office, Cappello traveled to London. According to two sources, he was negotiating with the BBC on a partnership to build a morning news podcast to rival the current market leader, the Times’ The Daily.” Hmm.
• Here’s Walker’s view of what happens next: “She described the future as a monumental but exciting challenge, and gave herself a window of roughly a year to produce results. In addition to [former NPR News executive editor Madhulika] Sikka’s work, Proskauer’s investigation, and several ‘working groups’ of employees, there was a forthcoming ‘integrated plan for change,’ based on a dissection of the workplace now being conducted pro bono by the prestigious Boston Consulting Group.” Not for nothing, though, it should be noted that Proskauer Rose, the law firm brought in to investigate the harassment complaint, is known for union-busting at universities and being on the other side of labor in the sports world.
• And here’s the kicker: “Cappello’s demotion left many relieved, others even more frustrated that both he and Walker are still in the building. But one thing is true, everyone agrees: Walker is trying. ‘I think she wants to save the company and save herself,’ says one WNYC reporter. ‘But my colleagues and I feel like if it doesn’t truly change, we are out of here.'”

Pocket ecosystem. This morning, RadioPublic, the podcast listening platform and PRX spinoff, announced a new revenue initiative primarily aimed at smaller podcasts that haven’t yet developed a big enough audience to secure advertisers. RadioPublic is calling it the Paid Listen program, with a hook that involves the company guaranteeing payments to participating podcast publishers. Here’s how CEO Jake Shapiro describes the basic premise in an introductory blog post:

Podcasters make ad-free episodes available in their feeds, we place ads on our platform that bookend each episode, and we pay participating podcasters $20 for every thousand listens on the RadioPublic apps for iOS and Android.

Those ads will be produced in-house by RadioPublic itself for now — hence, publishers should note that they’ll lose that bit of creative control and experience contiguity, should they indeed be concerned about such things — and producers must first submit their podcasts for screening approval to participate in the program. It’s worth noting that the compensation program is limited to listens that take place on the RadioPublic mobile apps, not its embed players scattered across the internet.

In his blog post, Shapiro situates the Paid Listen program within the broader vision he holds for RadioPublic, one that sees advertising as one-of-many pathways for creator compensation that the platform will ultimately support. “Soon we will support listeners who prefer to pay podcasters directly instead of hearing an ad; brands who pay users to opt-in for more info; podcasters who invite their true fans to become paying members,” he writes. But those alternative models will come some other day; today, we’re given advertising, the tried-and-true and still-sexy business model that still drives the bulk of business in the podcast ecosystem.

Viewed from a distance, the Paid Listen program can be understood as another variation on your standard marketplace-building gambit deployed by advertising-oriented content platforms — see: YouTube, Spotify, Facebook, early Stitcher, etc. — where incentives are created to attract more creators onto the platform, after which their capacity to draw attention and generate sellable impressions are bundled as attention commodities and sold to advertisers. The nexus of content platforms and digital advertising has come under increasing criticism over the years (not to mention the platformization of everything in general, but that’s a whole other story), and so the distinct challenge for RadioPublic here is how the company will integrate its Paid Listen gambit into its orientation as a public benefit corporation and its stated goal to assist smaller publishers. That challenge gives rise to a broader philosophical question: Do differences in the social consequences of digital advertising and its resultant content/platform dynamics come down to details, and RadioPublic’s long-term commitments to those details — or are the outcomes ingrained purely in the structural arrangement, never to be overcome?

Whatever the answer to that question, it’s useful to read this initiative as the latest step in what may well end up being RadioPublic’s endgame: building a pocket ecosystem specifically for small, independent, and upstart creators in anticipation of a future in which that creator class will be pushed out of the current iteration of the podcast ecosystem by bigger, more organized, and typically deeper-pocketed publishers. It’s a pathway towards relevance that I’ve previously suspected we would see from the rising cohort of user-generated content-oriented apps like Anchor and Bumpers, but it seems that RadioPublic is, and has always been, much more aligned with this particular vision of the future.

The Hollywood hustle. A preamble: Last week, a reader wrote me a particularly profane note complaining about all the adaptation, IP-harvesting, and Hollywood/podcast baby-making stories I’ve been publishing for quite some time now. “Why should we care?” the note asked. “It doesn’t apply to 95% of us.” Now, this isn’t the first time I’ve received such a complaint on this subject. But this week, I figure I should just at least acknowledge the question, and make explicit what has been implicit all along: I cover it because it’s happening, and it’s going to keep happening, and it’s likely going to impact the structures of money, power, and leverage that inform relationships throughout the podcast ecosystem. Which means that one way or another, it’s going to impact you, whether you like it or not — and whether you can see it or not, so you should probably be aware about it.

Anyway, here’s the news peg. Last week, Gimlet announced something that should surprise absolutely nobody: the formation of Gimlet Pictures, its official film and television unit. As Deadline emphasized, the new division will be led by Chris Giliberti, the Boston Consulting Group alum (and Forbes 30 Under 30 fella) who formerly held the amorphous “head of multiplatform” title. Giliberti originally joined the company in the summer of 2015 as chief of staff to Gimlet president Matt Lieber. His team includes Eli Horowitz, who initially joined the company as the head of its fiction division in the run-up to the launch of Homecoming, and another development executive who is yet to be hired, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Do read that THR piece on the matter, by the way, which also contains two noteworthy details:

• Messaging from Lieber insisting that the company remains committed to being audio-first;
• IMG Original Content, a division of WME, has hired Moses Soyoola, Panoply’s director business development and strategy, into its ranks.

That Gimlet moved to formalize its film and television unit isn’t particularly surprising; it is, after all, the logical end to much of what the company has been doing on the adaptation front. It’s also worth remembering that Gimlet’s adaptation pipeline — and the commoditization of its shows, episodes, and projects into intellectual property — was explicitly stated as one of its core growth pathways during its $15 million fundraising announcement last fall.

But what does putting up a shingle for a film and television development arm entail? What does having one actually mean? An industry insider tells me:

It’s all about what you do with it. The facade alone won’t open doors. Will you actually build out the resources and team? Will your deals be set up in such a way that you’re actually the production company and receiving real fees for it (a.k.a. will your agency do a good job). There is a layer of deals that are purely options and no real dollars come the way of the rights holders. They may look fancy but there is no serious financial value.

Gimlet’s announcement, together with the premiere of 2 Dope Queens’ standup specials on HBO over the weekend, kicked off a series of writeups formally documenting the ongoing podcast adaptation trend, from USA Today and Variety, along with the aforementioned Deadline and Hollywood Reporter pieces. Over at Vulture, I tried to contextualize this current wave of podcast adaptations within the sporadic podcast-to-TV attempts of the past.

On a related note: Chris Hardwick, the creator of the podcast-centric multimedia network Nerdist Industries, did not renew his contract with Legendary Entertainment, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Legendary acquired the company in 2012. Instead, Hardwick has branched off and rebranded his flagship Nerdist podcast as ID10T, which will be the basis of his new media company of the same name. That said, he remains the CEO of Nerdist Industries, but will not be involved in the day-to-day. Cadence13, formerly known as DGital Media, will support the new show on ad sales, and as such it’ll be hosted in Art19.

A note on last week’s issue. I’d like to revise an element of the writing in last Tuesday’s profile of Macmillan podcasts: in my introductory paragraph that sought to quickly establish the origin myth of the QDT–Macmillan relationship, I regrettably glossed over QDT’s pre-Macmillan history and Mignon Fogarty’s work therein. By the time she struck a licensing deal with Macmillan, Fogarty had already formally founded QDT and developed it into what she describes as a “thriving podcast network” spanning six podcasts. She remains involved in some high-level QDT decision-making to this day. The way the paragraph was originally written implies that QDT did not exist before the Macmillan deal, and that is patently not the case.

On a related note: Tor Teen, a Macmillan imprint, has brokered a three-book publishing deal with Lauren Shippen adapting her fiction podcast, The Bright Sessions. Paste Magazine has the exclusive.

Making your own shots. “If The Wire or Treme were a podcast and all the stories were true, this is what you’d get.” That’s how Robin Amer, the creator, host, and executive producer of The City, described her project in short-hand when she originally developed the concept for WNYC’s 2015 Podcast Accelerator. The City, described nowadays as a serialized longform investigative podcast exploring the “power structures of different American metropolises,” emerged as one of two winners of that accelerator competition, but WNYC Studios ultimately ended up passing on the project.

More than two years have elapsed since, and The City has now found a home in a unique situation: as the core of a big podcasting gambit by the USA Today Network, the Gannett-owned media group uniting USA Today and a wide array of local news operations. And last week, the podcast announced a number of key details: the first season will focus on the city of Chicago, the show is set to debut in the fall, and the project has pulled together a team of veteran journalists and public radio producers to build the show.

And what a team it is. Supporting Amer will be: reporter Wilson Sayre, formerly of WLRN; producer Jenny Casas, formerly of St. Louis Public Radio and City Bureau; consulting composer and sound designer Hannis Brown, formerly of NYPR’s Meet the Composer; story editor Ben Austen, former editor at Harper’s Magazine and current contributor to the New York Times Magazine; and editor Sam Greenspan, formerly the managing producer at 99% Invisible.

The City’s road to the USA Today Network was an unconventional one. After learning that WNYC wouldn’t be picking up the show in August 2016, Amer secured help from a literary agent, Danielle Svetcov, with whom she started shopping the pilot episode around in November 2016. “I knew I needed a large institutional partner to produce the show,” Amer, who is the former deputy editor at the Chicago Reader and a former WBEZ producer, told me over email. “Long-form investigative reporting isn’t the kind of thing you can do by yourself, unfunded, on nights and weekends.”

The process involved preliminary conversations with more than a few of, as Amer puts it, “the usual podcasting suspects,” but she was eventually connected with the USA Today Network through John Barth, the managing director of PRX and a mentor of Amer, who introduced her to Liz Nelson, the network’s vice president of strategic content development and one of the people in charge of expanding the organization’s budding podcasting efforts. One thing led to another, and last summer, Gannett ultimately agreed to buy The City, acquiring its intellectual property, and bring Amer on an as employee to build and run the project.

“They completely bought into my vision for the show,” Amer said. “The network comprises 109 local news outlets all across the country in addition to USA Today, and is extremely committed to investigative reporting, so my vision of focusing on a different city every season not only made sense to them but was actually feasible.” When asked about the budget that the network is granting the project, Amer described it as “comparable to others that have been launched by major media organizations,” though no specific details were given. For the USA Today Network, The City represents a big swing in a larger push to expand its on-demand audio operation. The network hopes to grow its podcast portfolio to over 60 shows this year. (Which is, uh, wild.)

I’m told that the team is currently deep in the reporting process. “Now that our staff is on board, we’re resuming the reporting that I’ve been doing on and off for the last two years. We’ll be reporting through May, then in scripting and production mode through the summer,” Amer said. They are also laying the groundwork for the second season, which they hope to roll out in the spring of next year.

With a vision to build out a whole new platform for investigative reporting, The City could well emerge as the latest entry in a growing lineage of substantively journalistic podcasts like Reveal or In The Dark — or, as Amer hopes, the broader tradition of investigative narrative works spanning so many other mediums, like those of Errol Morris, Matthew Desmond, and as alluded to in The City’s original shorthand, David Simon. “If we’re successful, I hope it will be one more piece of proof that you can both tell a gripping story and have meaningful impact,” she said. “And hopefully that will spur other media outlets to invest in this kind of work.”

But for now, Amer has already carved out another kind of legacy: of pushing past closed doors with grit, and realizing new ways to raise a project.

On a vaguely related note, because Chicago: Ellen Mayer, a former engagement consultant at Hearken, has launched a new local podcast project called IlliNoise, which is dedicated to “answering your questions about the Illinois state government, how it works, and how it impacts your community.” Not to be confused with Illinoise, the second album in Sufjan Stevens’ 50 States project — where the musician would’ve made 50 albums, each based on a different state — that he would dismiss in 2009 as “such a joke.” (Alas.)

Now if you excuse me, I’m going to make audio puns out of every state.

Career Spotlight. This week, I traded emails with Jayson De Leon, one of those young, energetic whipper-snappers.

Bites:

• Pandora is reorganizing its business — which is to say, it’s downsizing and engaging in cost-saving measures while placing bets on new gambles, like ad tech and further expanding into non-music content. The music streaming company is also working to grow its Atlanta office, situated in “a region with lower costs than the company’s headquarters in Oakland.” What finagling! (Press release)
• “Audible’s pursuit of more audiobook publishing rights could squeeze traditional book publishers in the fastest-growing segment of the market.” (The Wall Street Journal)
• Amazon has acquired Pulse Labs, a startup that aims to help voice app developers “test out new apps on a target audience before publicly launching.” (Recode)
• The Modern Love podcast celebrated its 100th episode last week. I asked the team to list out their favorite entries. (Vulture)
• The Onion binge-dropped a six-part true-crime spoof yesterday, titled “A Very Fatal Murder.” (Website)
• The ever-funny, always-delightful Glen Weldon with “The 6 Eminently Disprovable Rules For Roundtable Podcasting.” (NPR Monkey See)
• Are you reading Caroline Crampton? You absolutely should.

One month in. When Apple rolled out its long-awaited in-episode podcast analytics last month, part of the anxiety (and excitement, really) was finding out whether, essentially, the world would end. Which is to say, whether this whole podcast thing was a bubble, a house of cards; whether perhaps many of the metrics the industry had been using to articulate, extract, and transact its value was nothing more than inflated abstraction, like the hollow vitality of a viral tweet lifted up by a golemnic army of stolen identities.

You can scratch that particular anxiety off the list. Over at Wired, Miranda Katz checked in with a few publishers one month in and wrote:

Though it’s still early days, the numbers podcasters are seeing are highly encouraging. Forget those worries that the podcast bubble would burst the minute anyone actually got a closer look: It seems like podcast listeners really are the hyper-engaged, super-supportive audiences that everyone hoped.

Among those quoted for the piece were reps from Midroll, Headgum, and Panoply.

But of course, whether podcasting was a bubble that better analytics would pop was always only half the question. The other half, whether the new data would lead to a boom, is a whole other bag of nuts. Katz writes:

On the business side, it’s likely that these high engagement rates and low levels of ad skipping will see a flood of new advertisers who have until now been reticent to enter the Wild West of podcasting — welcome news to anyone who feels about ready to throw their phone across the room any time they hear another ad for Squarespace or Casper.

We’ll see! When the analytics were first announced in the summer, Market Enginuity’s Sarah van Mosel told me: “This is certainly a step in the right direction. This is what we asked for and I thank the Apple team for hearing and responding to the podcast community. Now I want more.” More, as in the expected adtech bells and whistles like better targeting capabilities. More, as in anything above table stakes.

But hey, exciting stuff. I suppose this also means that Hot Pod will be somewhat relevant for at least a little while longer. Yay for jobs.

(Side note: I wonder how MailChimp, Squarespace, and Casper feel about their semi-lampooned ubiquity? Probably good, because ubiquity and synonymity with the rise of the medium is a plus, but there’s something about the mocking tone that suggests a more complex linkage.)

Big new clients for PRX. The Cambridge, Mass.-based podcast company announced two eye-catching partnerships yesterday: one with Night Vale Presents, the indie podcast outfit founded by Welcome to Night Vale creators Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor; and one with Gen-Z Media, the kids podcast company founded by the people behind The Disappearance of Mars Patel.

These partnerships will see PRX providing the two companies with marketing, ad sales, and technology support services. That third bit means that both Night Vale Presents and Gen-Z Media will be moving their portfolio of shows onto PRX’s Dovetail platform, which currently serves as the hosting provider for all podcasts in Radiotopia network. (Well, almost. The Allusionist migrates over in April.) Dovetail also hosts podcasts from Serial Productions, most notably handling S-Town’s monster run. (More information on that situation can be found in this column from last April.)

Gen-Z Media’s shows were previously housed on Panoply’s Megaphone platform as a result of a previous partnership struck last January, which saw Panoply supplying production, financing, distribution, and technology support. Gen-Z is also an active partner on Pinna, Panoply’s app-oriented kids programming initiative, for which the podcast company was reportedly developing a suite of new shows.

“Truly, we’re not moving away from Panoply,” replied Ben Strouse, one of Gen-Z’s principals, when asked for clarification on the company’s standing with its previous provider. “Our shows on Pinna will proudly stay there, and we’ll continue collaborating with them on new projects. Our partnership with PRX is all about connecting with new listeners and reaching bigger and bigger audiences for our upcoming shows. We’ve got to diversify our business in 2018 to continue growing, and PRX has a tremendous distribution network and highly respected collection of great podcasts.”

Gen-Z’s move to PRX caps off a complicated month for Panoply, in which the company saw (1) the departure of its kids programming chief, Emily Shapiro; and (2) Slate, its sister company, taking over its podcasts’ sales processes from Panoply.

For Night Vale Presents, the move appears driven by an eye towards scale. Its shows were previously hosted on Libsyn. “We’ve got nothing but positive things to say about Rob Walch and the Libsyn team. They were amazing to work with — we’ve been with them since the beginning of Welcome to Night Vale, and we’ve always been very happy with them,” said Christy Gressman, partner at Night Vale Presents. “That said, we’re really looking forward to working with PRX in a streamlined way, where we’ll get to use their sales team and sponsor management resources and distribution technology (via their proprietary Publish and Dovetail applications), along with sharing other resources.”

Locking down Night Vale Presents and Gen-Z is a pretty big win for PRX, whose operations continue to sprawl out in a myriad of directions. The organization has evolved several times since its founding in 2003, when it was originally built to serve as a technology provider and tool hub for public radio stations looking to take advantage of the internet. (This involved, among other things, the creation of an online marketplace for programming and station-specific app development services.) In its current iteration, PRX has espoused a renewed commitment to independent creators, a stance that has expressed itself through the creation of its “indie podcast label” Radiotopia; the Podcast Garage in Allston, Mass.; and providing end-to-end podcast services for select partners that fit into this indie worldview. The organization is currently led by CEO Kerri Hoffman, who succeeded Jake Shapiro in 2016 when Shapiro moved on to found RadioPublic.

So, what’s the big picture here? One could argue that PRX — with its indie-minded orientation, technology stack, and expanding ad sales capacity supplied by Market Enginuity — makes for a fascinating foil for Midroll, which has long established itself as the dominant full-service provider for a good deal of the emerging podcast ecosystem. It’ll be interesting to see how PRX will further express itself as distinct from its competitors, and what kind of clients it will continue to target and lure away.

On a related note: Radiotopia’s Criminal is working on a spinoff called This Is Love that’s slated for a Valentine’s Day drop. I wrote about the details for Vulture, but I’d also like to say: What the Criminal team is trying out here seems like a good model for creative teams looking to flex their muscles in different creative directions without necessarily compromising the consistent audience interfacing of their core economic/production engines. It sets up an advantage not unlike what you’re getting in the relationship between This American Life and Serial Productions, where talent can flow between the mothership and one-off projects.

This week in public radio:

1. Last Friday, WNYC announced an executive reshuffle that sees Dean Cappello — the station’s chief content officer and CEO Laura Walker’s righthand man throughout her two-decade-plus tenure at the station — demoted into an advisory role with no direct reports. Cappello was previously responsible for overseeing WNYC News and WNYC Studios, the station’s on-demand audio division. The shift comes almost two months after New York Magazine’s The Cut published a piece from the journalist Suki Kim detailing sexual harassment complaints and allegations made against The Takeaway’s John Hockenberry during his hosting tenure at the show. Kim’s story has since catalyzed a broader reckoning about the station’s management, which was deemed to have inadequately handled the Hockenberry complaints and, more broadly, manifested a culture that allowed for bullying, harassment, and discriminatory behaviors that have especially hurt women and people of color.

However, in a statement to Splinter, a WNYC spokesperson clarified that Cappello’s demotion was part of a strategic shift and unrelated to The Takeaway controversies. (Cappello directly oversaw The Takeaway and worked closely with Hockenberry for years, as a recent New York Times piece noted.)

It’s a peculiar clarification. But then again, if Cappello’s demotion was indeed meant to be the official response to the overarching concerns about the station’s culture, then it would have been an insufficient act of accountability. As it stands then, the station still hasn’t outwardly — or inwardly, as far as I can tell — indicated what it will concretely be doing to seriously address its systemic issues.

We may well still see…something from the station. In the WNYC News piece on the matter, it was noted that station management has brought in the law firm Proskauer Rose to investigate workplace conduct and former NPR executive editor Madhulika Sikka to review editorial content and structure. But for now, it feels like the impetus for change remains more centered in the hands of the station’s supporting member base, and how that constituency will collectively choose to alter the cost of reinforcing the status quo.

2. Minnesota Public Radio’s Garrison Keillor problem continues to be a flaming mess. A quick list of recent developments:

• Last Tuesday, MPR News published an investigation going deep into Keillor’s troubling history of inappropriate workplace behavior around women. “An investigation by MPR News…has learned of a years-long pattern of behavior that left several women who worked for Keillor feeling mistreated, sexualized or belittled,” the piece wrote. “None of those incidents figure in the ‘inappropriate behavior’ cited by MPR when it severed business ties.”
• That same day, MPR CEO Jon McTaggart published a note responding to several questions that have been sent in by listeners about the controversy. “The irony is that while MPR has been careful to protect Garrison’s privacy and not hurry any decisions, others have rushed to judge and criticize MPR’s actions without knowing the facts,” he wrote in response to one query.
• A few days later, Keillor pushed back against MPR, MPR News, and an accuser through a statement published on his website and sent to HuffPost. “If I am guilty of harassment, then every employee who stole a pencil is guilty of embezzlement,” he wrote.

There remains a standoff between MPR management and Keillor, with the fate of the Prairie Home Companion archives — considered “historically valuable” by a curator at the University of Maryland, and to which Keillor holds many of the rights — at stake, as the Star Tribune reports.

3. NPR published the 2017 edition of its staff diversity numbers last week, which shows virtually no progress from the year before. Ombudsman Elizabeth Jensen with the details:

The overall racial and ethnic diversity of the news and information division remained virtually unchanged as of Oct. 31, 2017, when compared with the year earlier. Figures supplied by NPR’s human resources department showed the division of 377 people to be 75.10 percent non-Hispanic white (as self-identified). That compared to 75.4 percent the year earlier, when there were 350 newsroom employees. I’ll repeat what I said of the 2016 numbers, which showed only incremental change over the last five years: this was a disappointing showing.

Year-to-year, there were some small changes in the makeup of the remaining 25 percent of the newsroom. The percentage of employees who reported they were Latino or black rose slightly; Asian employees as a percentage dropped slightly.

Jensen’s piece unpacks a number of elements embedded in the station’s problem with employment diversity that’s worth thinking about, including a “trickle down” dynamic as well as the indirect impact of the broader public radio ecosystem’s lack of diversity as a potentially relevant factor in the station’s failure to adequately solve the problem. (One thing I’m personally wondering about, though, because I’m a yellow person: Why did the percentage of Asian employees drop slightly? Are we just, like, not talking more about that?)

But there is absolutely nothing new to be said about this issue that hasn’t already been said, not that doesn’t it have to be said repeatedly, ad infinitum, until the light of the sun snuffs out or the percentages actually change: This needs to be fixed, like now, and it’s ridiculous that the needle has barely moved, maybe even regressed.

In other news: Marjorie Powell, vice president of human resources, has left the organization. Current has some noteworthy background on the development.

Nope, not a good week for public radio.

Personnel notes:

• Dave Shaw, the executive producer of podcasts at E.W. Scripps, has moved to Politico to lead the podcast team there. He started work today. Also at Politico: Bridget Mulcahy has been promoted to senior producer, and Micaela Rodríguez joins full time as assistant producer.
• Vox Media now has a dedicated podcast marketing manager: Zach Kahn, who previously worked in the brand marketing and sponsorship division.

Dirty John in the age of Peak TV. The multimedia true-crime project from the Los Angeles Times is in the process of being adapted into two different series for two different networks, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Bravo, home of the Real Housewives Expanded Universe, is reportedly “near a deal” for an anthology series based on the Times’ Christopher Goffard’s reporting and accompanying podcast (produced in collaboration with Wondery). It will be a two-season order; first season of that show will be based on the Dirty John story, while the second will focus on a new tale altogether.

The Oxygen network is the other suitor, having ordered a companion unscripted series focused on the subject of Goffard’s feature, John Meehan.

Three things:

• Dirty John is the latest in a growing line of podcast-to-television adaptations, which you can read more about here, here, and here. At some point, I’ll put together a spreadsheet or something tracking the pipeline so we can figure out the split between fiction and nonfiction projects, true crime and non-true crime, so on and so forth.
• The fact that Dirty John is being adapted into both scripted and unscripted forms is super interesting. How much juice can you squeeze out of a fruit? Depends on the fruit, I guess. Or maybe not?
• This bit of news comes as the L.A. Times is increasingly engulfed by managerial maelstroms, including dramatic reshuffles in its management, sexual harassment allegations levied against publisher and CEO Ross Levinsohn, and a comically capitalistic parent company called Tronc that’s engaged in questionable business strategies to the detriment of its talented newsrooms. The situation remains fluid; I recommend following Ken Doctor and David Folkenflik if you’re tracking the story.

Macmillan outlook. The podcasting adventures of Macmillan, the international book publishing giant, can be traced back to the closing weeks of 2006 when John Sterling, then the publisher and president of the Henry Holt imprint, called up a science writer named Mignon Fogarty after reading about her rapidly growing podcast, Grammar Girl, in The Wall Street Journal. A phone call about a potential book deal turned into the mutual identification of a unique opportunity, which in turn led to the creation of the Quick & Dirty Tips Podcast Network, one of the earliest podcast publishing experiments by a non-audio native company. (Simon Owens has a great recent history of QDT on his website.)

The network has since grown into a robust and well-oiled machine. It is now over 275 million podcast downloads strong, having added 25 million episode downloads across 2017 to the 250 million in lifetime downloads the network had accumulated by the end of 2016. Fogarty continues to publish Grammar Girl, the network’s flagship program now flanked by an array of spinoffs, and she has published several books that direct extend from her work on the podcast. Meanwhile, Sterling, who continued to oversee QDT even as he ascended to the role of executive vice president at Macmillan proper in 2008, recently announced that he was stepping back from full-time work at the publisher to get into politics. The news comes shortly after he completed work as the editor of Michael Wolff’s Fire & Fury.

With delicious lore to spare, Macmillan is a fascinating figure in podcasting: an early adopter, a persistent player, and a singular operation. And last year proved to be no different for the publisher as it continued to work the on-demand audio angle.

At the tail end of 2016, I wrote about Macmillan’s ambitions to further scale up its on-demand audio operations with the formation of Macmillan Podcasts, a new internal venture that seeks to explore more systematic ways of bridging authors and podcasts. Led by Kathy Doyle, the company’s vice president of podcasts, the newly formed division spent the year setting the table — “We tripled the size of our team and put together a workflow that enables us to be nimble and responsive to requests from our publishers, as well as authors and talent, as we grow our catalog,” she said — and establishing their presence within the organization. This work was mostly tied in the development and rollout of new projects, of which there were five in the latter half of 2017 (Raise My Roof, Dig If You Will, Feminasty, Rossen to the Rescue, and Steal the Stars), but it also revolved around an internal awareness-raising campaign. “We did a road show introducing the potential inherent in podcasts to all our publishers and showcasing the ways we can help contribute to their success — no topic or narrative style is off limits,” she explained.

Steal the Stars, in particular, emerged as the standout project for the division. I first wrote about the podcast last summer, when Tor Books, a science fiction and fantasy-focused Macmillan subsidiary, announced the formation of Tor Labs, an experimental imprint “emphasizing experimental approaches to genre publishing,” which developed Steal the Stars as its first project. I loved the idea of Tor Labs; here you have a new internal venture that’s working to cultivate publishing projects that are meant to contemporaneously span across multiple platforms such that value can be simultaneously extracted from the different markets of different mediums. Such a setup vastly expands the surface area of a single project, dramatically increasing the work’s exposure and further allowing for the possibility of ushering more audiences to cross over between mediums. Sure, much like Subcast from last week, the whole thing isn’t particularly revolutionary — we do live in an age where just about everything gets adapted into any given direction, from podcasts-to-television to documentaries-to-podcasts — but the real innovation is the efficiency and contiguity of the arrangement. Every element is plugged in together from the outset, and that seems new to me.

Steal the Stars was indicative of what the bleeding edge for Macmillan Podcasts could look like. It involved close coordination between Gideon Media (which created and produced the podcast), Tor and Tor Labs, Macmillan Podcasts, and Macmillan Audio (which oversees its audiobooks operations), all collectively working together to ensure that every format of the show was set up to perform well within their respective markets.

Cool! pic.twitter.com/1zwwlkdXKS

— nick q (@nwquah) January 3, 2018

Doyle considers the experiment a success. The podcast ended up clocking in a solid performance with listeners; I’m told that the 14-part run surpassed 1 million downloads and continues to perform well in the postseason. “Our strategy included taking the podcast content and adapting it into a trade paperback and ebook and just last week we released an audiobook with bonus content — we even did a prequel live event that sold out — all of which continues to drive interest in the podcast,” she explained. “We’ll be leveraging this model again.”

As far as the product itself goes, I thought it was a really fun listen. A sci-fi audio drama written by Gideon Media’s Mac Rogers, who also wrote The Message and Life After for Panoply, Steal the Stars was a comparatively straightforward narrative romp involving aliens, secret government hijinks, and romance.

So, what does the year ahead hold for Macmillan Podcasts? As you would expect, they’ve got a pile of projects in the pipeline. The division recently released a few trailers teasing two February launches: the first is called One True Pairing, which will be hosted by two St. Martin Press staffers — “Think My Favorite Murder for people who read US Weekly,” Doyle said, a description that sounds a lot like a Who? Weekly competitor — and the second is called But That’s Another Story, which “looks at how books and reading change and shape our lives” and will be hosted by best-selling author Will Schwalbe. More are on the way.

Doyle also notes that the year will be spent further building out key relationships, distribution points, and co-marketing opportunities within the industry. “We’re spending a lot of time thinking about ways we can collaborate with our partners in support of our authors and continue to innovate with new audio-first formats,” she said. You can already see some of that with Macmillan Podcasts’ participation in the marketing of Launch, a new podcast about writing a novel developed by Wondery.

Like most other podcast operatives, Doyle is thinking about the discovery gap — and where the closing of that gap will come from — as well as the longevity of the advertising model, which is the primary revenue channel for their show portfolio. That latter concern is pushing her to explore alternatives. “We’re open to additional models, perhaps working with distributors on a windowing relationship or developing exclusive content,” Doyle added. “It’s a case-by-case basis.”

But for now, though, Macmillan Podcasts is settling into itself. They remain occupants of a unique corner in the broader podcast ecosystem, hard at work figuring out how to add more layers to its niche.

Bites:

• ESPN is reportedly exploring a sale of FiveThirtyEight. Should FiveThirtyEight break off from Disney — which owns ESPN, among so many other things — there would be considerable ramifications for the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast and ESPN’s 30 for 30 podcast, as both shows share Jody Avirgan as a principal producer. (The Big Lead)
• Gimlet is producing a live festival for itself. Called Gimlet Fest, it is scheduled to take place on June 16-17, not too far from their new 27,000-square-foot downtown Brooklyn offices.
• A documentarian is developing a project about Joe Frank, and is raising funds on Indiegogo.
• WBUR is launching its collaboration with The Washington Post, Edge of Fame, next month. The show is fronted by WaPo national arts reporter Geoff Edgers, and each episode will profile artists, actors, musicians, and comedians — including Ava DuVernay, Jimmy Kimmel, and Norm Macdonald — through a blend of interview and field recordings. Debuts on February 15.
• Two shows to track on the local podcasting front: Nashville Public Radio’s The Promise, a limited-run series on public housing in the city, out now; and KPCC’s Repeat, which investigates the story of an L.A. County sheriff’s deputy who shot at four people in seven months. It starts February 7.
• Variety has a big feature up on Spotify as the music streaming company sets off towards going public, titled “With 70 Million Subscribers and a Risky IPO Strategy, Is Spotify Too Big to Fail?” The piece is super useful to get a sense of what’s going on (and what’s at stake) for the company and its relationship to the broader music industry. Once you’re done with that, pair it with this Financial Times bit: “Songwriters’ court victory deals a blow to Spotify.“
• Not directly podcast-related, but maybe it can be: “A Bunch of TV Writers Are Building a Salary-Transparency Database.” (Vulture)
• Because true crime is arguably the pulping heart of podcasts in 2018…”Hunt a Killer, One Subscription Box of Clues at a Time.” (The Ringer)

One such narrative project was Slow Burn, the Leon Neyfakh-led narrative podcast that sought to capture a sense of how it felt to live through Watergate, which I largely enjoyed and reviewed for Vulture last week. It turned out to be a hit for the company — not just as a standalone podcast project, but also as a lead-generation vessel for its membership program, Slate Plus.

Even though the core Slow Burn experience is available for free as a weekly podcast, a Slate Plus membership gives Burn-heads access to bonus episodes and other additional material. The carrot was apparently effective. “We’re seeing conversion at an extraordinary rate,” Turner said, noting that the Slow Burn campaign yielded 2.5× to 3× the daily conversion rates of an average day. “We’re seeing a ton of overlap between audio audiences and Slate Plus,” she adds. Plans are now in place to develop the property further, including an upcoming live event at the Watergate itself and a broader vision to untether the podcast from Watergate and use its conceit as a way to build future seasons around other historical events.

Slow Burn’s success should give Slate some extra confidence for the upcoming shows they’re planning to launch this year. Projects in the development pipeline includes:

• A documentary series led by the author Michael Lewis, of The Big Short and Moneyball fame, about umpires.
• A project built around Slate TV critic Willa Paskin, which I’m told will neither be a chat show nor an interview-show.

One imagines there will be more to come.

The notion of an online magazine entering its third decade is a wild thing to consider. (I’m not too much older than the site itself, which was founded in 1996.) Even wilder is the challenge of continuing to exist — and to fight for relevance — as a digital publication in a notoriously rough industry environment whose narratives are generally oriented around the downswings of the hype cycle these days. In its relative geriatricity, Slate now has the opportunity to contribute to a playbook that few digital publications get the chance to write.

Some odds and ends:

• I’m also told that, as part of the changes surrounding the redesign and internal shifts, Slate will be taking over its own podcast sales from its sister company Panoply, which previously held that responsibility. A spokesperson explained the change as follows: “Since Slate podcasts are separating from the rest of Panoply, the direct response advertisers that Panoply was calling exclusively for the total network — including Slate — will, starting Q2, be called on by Slate sellers for only Slate’s network of shows. Panoply will continue to call on them for Panoply shows. Obviously, Slate very much believes in Panoply. We are creating this structure so that Slate and Panoply can each focus and do what it does best.” This separation is, of course, quite curious for Panoply.
• It is not lost on me that the Slate Political Gabfest, one of the network’s oldest and most prominent shows, is hosted by three people who are no longer full-time Slate employees: David Plotz (now the CEO of Atlas Obscura), Emily Bazelon (now a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine and senior research fellow at Yale Law School), and John Dickerson (installed last week as cohost of CBS This Morning). This is both a testament to the legacy that Slate Podcasts has created across its run, and an indication of a potential vulnerability.
• Speaking of Dickerson, Slate’s podcast chief Steve Lickteig confirmed that Dickerson will continue with the Slate Political Gabfest and Whistlestop.
• As part of the editorial restructure, the Double X vertical is being phased out as its previous responsibilities become absorbed by all other verticals (there are now five: News & Politics, Culture, Technology, Business, and Human Interest). But the Double X Podcast will continue to operate, serving as the living connection to the vertical’s legacy.

Panoply loses its kids chief. I’ve confirmed that Emily Shapiro, the director of children’s programming, has left the company. Shapiro was originally hired in January 2017 to lead the emerging division, which is primarily built around the Pinna platform. I wrote about Pinna when it first rolled out last October.

Panoply declined to comment on Shapiro’s departure, citing a strict policy on discussing personnel matters.

Prior to joining Panoply, Shapiro was the cofounder of the New York International Children’s Film Festival — considered by some critics as one of New York’s best film festivals — where she worked for almost two decades. Her departure comes at a particularly hot time for the kids podcast genre, including recently launched pushes from WNYC Studios and Gimlet Media, along with long-running efforts from the Kids Listen community.

WBEZ is working on a follow-up to Making Oprah. But it won’t be about Oprah. Brendan Banaszak, the station’s interim executive producer of content development, confirmed the project over email, and noted that they’re applying the “Making” conceit to another Chicago figure whose identity will be revealed at a later date. (A move not unlike what Slate is hoping to do with Slow Burn.) Jenn White will host once again.

I don’t know about you, but I’m really into the idea of “Making” as a podcast template for local public radio stations across the country in the vein of the Hearken-powered Curious City franchise expansions. I would love a Making-style show for Idaho. (Aaron Paul??)

Science Friday joins the WNYC Studios portfolio. The move was announced last Friday. Here’s what that means:

• WNYC Studios will lead sponsorship sales for the Science Friday podcast along with its spinoff show Undiscovered.
• Starting April 11, WNYC Studios will take over distribution responsibilities for the Science Friday radio broadcast.
• Science Friday remains an independent nonprofit media organization, and will continue production as usual in their current studios and offices.
• WNYC Studios will also assist in the scaling of Science Friday’s audience, along with fielding opportunities for potential future creative collaborations between the two organizations.

This development bears strong resemblance to the August 2015 Snap Judgment move to enter into a coproduction deal with WNYC, the specifics of which you can read in this Current writeup from the time. In this case, however, Science Friday is breaking away from its distribution ties with PRI, with whom they’ve had a relationship since January 2014.

“We love PRI — they’ve been great partners, and our audience is bigger than its ever been” Christian Skotte, codirector and head of digital at Science Friday told me. “For us, as we look forward into the future, WNYC has shown how to launch and market podcasts, and as we think about what our future looks like, we’re thinking beyond just being a radio show and podcast towards being able to create whole new suites of content.”

Science Friday is currently celebrating its 27th year of production.

This week in the revolving door:

• Eleanor Kagan, the director of audio at BuzzFeed, is leaving the company to join Pineapple Street Media. This move comes almost a month after BuzzFeed announced that it was parting ways with Another Round due to “strategic changes” at the company. Worth noting: Pineapple was cofounded by Jenna Weiss-Berman, who originated the podcast team at BuzzFeed.
• Jessica Stahl, who originated The Washington Post’s current audio operations in her role as deputy editor on the audience team, has been promoted to director of audio. In related news, The Washington Post’s audio operations launched seven new podcasts in 2017, including two specifically for smart speaker devices.
• James Green, cofounder of the Postloudness collective and a former producer at Gimlet Media, is joining The Outline to work on its daily show, World Dispatch.
• John Lagomarsino, audio director at The Outline, is moving to Anchor to serve as head of production. It is a newly created role.

Wait, Anchor has a head of production now? Yep. But the gig is more a product role than anything else. “Ultimately, I’m responsible for making sure content on Anchor is high-quality, well-curated, and relevant for creators and listeners,” Lagomarsino tells me through a rep, before going on to describe a role that liaises between Anchor’s userbase and the company’s product, marketing, and content teams.

For the uninitiated, Anchor is a mobile-oriented app that originally rolled out within the “Twitter, but for audio” construct. That initial orientation was defined by a twin focus: ease of creation and ease of sharing. The company was founded in 2015 and, after picking up some initial buzz at SXSW the year after, has persisted to kick about in pursuit of a place within the marginally iterating podcast technology ecosystem. Last fall, Anchor raised $10 million in a Series A round led by Google Ventures. According to a TechCrunch writeup at the time, the company is still not generating revenue.

The current iteration of Anchor further increases its focus on creating the “easiest path to making a podcast” for the biggest number of people (the bulk of which, one imagines, is relatively inexperienced in audio production). This positioning was expressed last July, when Anchor seized on the reported instabilities at SoundCloud — previously the go-to hosting option for first-time and newer podcast publishers — by offering easy hosting transfers. It was a shrewd move, as the two services map nicely for their target demo given that both platforms are free and relatively simple to use.

How Anchor fits into the broader on-demand audio universe remains to be seen. Will the platform continue to be the lord of its own content universe, or will it meaningfully usurp portions of the technology stack that supports the rest of the podcast ecosystem? The answer hinges on whether CEO Mike Mignano’s thesis on the space pans out.

“The reality of the current landscape is that podcasting has remained an artificially small industry, because it’s so hard to contribute to,” Mignano wrote through a rep. He continued:

Between the friction that exists at nearly every step of the content lifecycle, and the antiquated technology that the industry has relied on for years, creators are left with limited data and limited opportunity for monetization, thus capping the potential of the market. We’re well past the breaking point where innovation across the entire stack is absolutely necessary for growth.

With Anchor, we’re focused on creating technology that strengthens the entire ecosystem and unlocks the true potential of the audio landscape. I expect Anchor to have a lot of competition in the coming years, which we’re excited about, because true innovation is ultimately going to come from technology pushing the boundaries of what’s previously been possible.

I happen to agree with the characterization of podcasting as an “artificially small industry.” The question I’ve kept encountering throughout my years writing this newsletter is whether that’s actually a bad thing.

Billboard outside ATL, Georgia. Atlanta Monster, the new true crime series from Atlanta podcast companies HowStuffWorks and Tenderfoot, appears to be playing around with OOH advertising local to the Atlanta city area:

Whoa. pic.twitter.com/jl1VPwKjjX

— Jason Hoch (@starexplorer) January 11, 2018

Neato.

“Gimlet is a multimedia storytelling brand, not just a podcast network.” So goes the opening argument from Gimlet’s new chief marketing officer, Jenny Wall, which headlined a quick Fast Company piece last week, as she moves to elevate the company’s profile.

This is, of course, no new revelation for Gimlet, which has pretty explicitly highlighted its formalizing intellectual property pipeline — carved out in large part by Chris Giliberti, its young “head of multiplatform” — as both differentiating factor and exceptionally strong potential growth channel. Nor is it a particularly new revelation for the industry as a whole; as I noted in my 2017 year-in-review column, the adaptation pipeline is one that extends widely across the ecosystem (though with particular concentration within the audio drama category) and offers the industry a significant pathway to gain strength independently from the platform dynamics governed, still, by Apple. Nor is Gimlet the only entity that’s been exceptionally active in ushering podcast-first properties into projects for other mediums; Night Vale Presents has proven to be equally prominent, with the added nuance of not potentially burdened by the demands of venture capital.

But I thought the quote was interesting for three reasons:

• It’s super reminiscent of HBO’s “It’s Not TV, It’s HBO” campaign that Wall worked on earlier in her career, which I pointed out last week when writing up her appointment.
• I was wondering when Gimlet would explicitly make the “actually, we’re not just a podcast company” turn in its narrative. It’s a mindset that you could arguably trace back to a point as early as the company’s participation in the summer 2016 Brooklyn NewFronts event, where it sought to gain association with broader digital media brands like Genius, Atlas Obscura, and Lenny Letter. Perhaps you can trace it back even further.
• One potential function for the narrative redraft: to open and grease more paths for acquisition. It’s one thing if you’re a podcast company whose most literal suitors would be a bigger, traditional audio company — see Cadence13 and Entercom — but it’s another thing altogether when your perceived value is non-medium specific. It definitely makes things more interesting for, say, a talent agency, or perhaps even a global advertising agency not unlike the one that chipped in $5 million into Gimlet’s recent investment round.

Bites:

• Like Slate, This American Life has also undergone a redesign, which includes a new shock-red logo. I think the Washington Post’s Alexandra Petri said it best: “Congrats to @ThisAmerLife on its new job as The Economist.” I myself, er, am not a fan. (Website)
• Last Thursday, ESPN Audio rolled out the first episode of a new podcast from Katie Nolan, who joined the sports media giant from Fox Sports in October.
• The Loud Speakers Network is bringing back its brand collaboration with State Farm, Color Full Lives, with Aminatou Sow and Angela Yee in the hosting seats. Interestingly, this will be the branded podcast’s third season. They’re also set to experiment with an accompanying video component. (Apple Podcasts)
• At CES last week, NPR published a new smart speaker study that has some additional data points for your pitch decks. Check it out.
• This is cool: closing out her third season, Flash Forward’s Rose Eveleth graphed the gender ratio and racial diversity of the guests she brings onto her episodes. (Flash Forward)
• This is also cool: Doree Shafrir, author and senior tech writer at BuzzFeed, is independently publishing a podcast called Forever35, which is focused on serving women in their 30s and 40s. This is her second indie podcast project, following Matt & Doree’s Eggcellent Adventure, which chronicles her and her husband’s experience of conceiving through in-vitro fertilization.
• Meanwhile, on the Beltway: Senator Cory Booker (D-New Jersey) has jumped on the politician podcasting train with one of those shows where he talks to people doing stuff he’s likes. He joins senators Bernie Sanders (D-Vermont) and Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), along with former U.S. Attorney General Preet Bharara, in the style.
• “Pandora CEO Roger Lynch Wants to Create the Podcast Genome Project.” Okay. (Variety)
• “The Opening of the American Mind: How Educational Podcasts Are Making Us Smarter Citizens.” (Pacific Standard)
• “Alexa, We’re Still Trying to Figure Out What to Do With You.” (NY Times)
• PodcastOne announces partnership with the Associated Press around a daily audio news product accompanying the Winter Olympics. (Press Release)
• “Whatever it is, I’m not afraid of what happens after death.” Don’t miss this glorious conversation with Terry Gross by Vulture’s David Marchese.

Next week, we’re talking crypto-pods.

Correction: In the January 2, 2018 edition, I mentioned that Mary Wilson, current producer of Slate’s The Gist, was a former WNYC staffer. She is not. I regret the error!