There is perhaps no more studied — or worried-about — dimension of news over the past five to ten years than the decline of media trust. It’s extremely well-documented at this point, across virtually all corners of the globe. And we now have hundreds of studies examining just about every facet of this decline — its causes, its effects, and its many proposed solutions.

But there’s one less-studied group of people for whom a declining trust in the news media might be particularly damaging for journalists: whistleblowers. Journalists have depended on whistleblowers for some of their most consequential stories of the past several decades. But since whistleblowers often initiate an interaction with journalists, their act is a leap of faith that requires significant trust in both the journalist individually and the professional standards and impact of the news media more generally.

That’s the argument that undergirds a new study by the University of Georgia’s Karin Assmann, published late last month in Journalism Practice. If whistleblowing to a journalist is about the greatest act of trust one can put in the media, Assmann wondered, what were whistleblowers’ criteria for that trust, and how do they evaluate journalists’ performance in light of those criteria? And more broadly, might the decline in media trust generally make it less likely that individual whistleblowers choose to trust journalists with their secrets?

Assmann interviewed 16 American whistleblowers who contacted journalists between the 1970s and 2010s. Nearly all of them worked for U.S. government agencies, and several were quite prominent, including Daniel Ellsberg and Jeff Wigand.

Assmann analyzed these interviews through the lens of institutional logics, the set of practices, assumptions, and values that govern a particular social sphere. She noted that whistleblowers are news consumers just like anyone else — they have an outside understanding of journalism’s institutional logic, one that they must see as substantially more valuable and trustworthy their own institution’s logic in order to use the former to expose the latter.

She found that whistleblowers were drawn to journalists because of the overlap between their own motives and their perception of journalists’ motives — keeping the powerful in check and advocating for the public interest. Their goal was to produce social change, so the name recognition and status of the journalist they approached played an outsized role in their criteria for trust.

Two other criteria were unsurprisingly significant: a commitment to protect their identity and substantial subject matter expertise. What’s more surprising is that many of them — about half — now see the news media as antagonistic and much less likely to fulfill the role they had hoped for when they blew the whistle. They variously described the news media as “corrupt, biased, politicized, self-serving, beholden to the government and neglectful of their sources,” Assmann wrote.

Some of their misgivings are rooted in specific failures of the journalists they worked with — in one case, journalists named the whistleblower at a press conference without his consent. Others were based on a more generally cynical disposition toward the press.

Many of the whistleblowers said they would attempt to circumvent the news media when releasing similar information today, given the ease of self-publishing and their perception of declining specialized expertise among journalists. Yet they were wary of this strategy too, citing the sophistication of government surveillance tools (especially in cases like that of Reality Winner) and susceptibility to censorship by social media platforms.

These whistleblowers have heavily bought into the institutional logic of journalism, with its self-regard for its watchdog role and strong professional standards, Assmann concluded. But even as they continue to reach out to the news media, their trust in journalists to hold up those standards has eroded. “Their expectations are increasingly difficult to meet in the U.S. media environment, where newsrooms cannot afford dedicated beat reporters with the expertise and resources necessary to be discovered and trusted by the next whistleblower as a reliable collaborator,” she wrote.

Research roundup

Examining podcast listeners’ perceptions of the journalistic functions of podcasts. By Kelsey Whipple, Ivy Ashe, and Lourdes M. Cueva Chacón, in Electronic News.

Podcasting, as this study notes, “is both new and old, confident but still coming into its own” — a teenager of a medium, having been born around 2004.

The audience for podcasts has grown tremendously in recent years (consider: how many podcasts have you listened to just in the past week?), so it’s a thoroughly established element of digital storytelling — and yet one without clearly established boundaries, practices, or normative expectations. And when it comes to news on podcasts, should we describe it, as various observers have, as “confessional” or “personal” journalism,” as “audio nonfiction novels,” as “soundworks” — or something else entirely? Moreover, what do people want and expect of podcasts as a form of journalism?

This study explored those questions through a representative national survey of U.S. internet users, about half of whom reported being podcast listeners. The results seemed, on the surface, somewhat contradictory: There was “notably low trust in podcasts as a source of news” and yet also “strong support for the perception that podcasts are a form of journalism and information-sharing.” That is, podcast listeners indicated that they trusted it less as a source of information than radio and other traditional forms of news…and yet they also very much saw podcasting as an important vehicle for journalism.

What might explain this gap? While the study couldn’t say for certain, it seems plausible, the authors suggest, that at least part of it is that creators and listeners are still working out what ethical standards and storytelling norms should look like (er, sound like) in this emerging medium.

Perhaps it’s also a matter of exposure and of developing greater media literacy. Survey results indicate that “people who listen to podcasts more frequently trust them more as a source of information and are more likely to agree with the statement that podcasts are journalism — and that podcast hosts and creators are journalists,” the authors write. “Similarly, consistent (daily or monthly) listening to a podcast could provide listeners more insight into the podcast production process, and this could influence listeners’ perceptions of podcasts as a form of journalism.”

The researchers also looked at how podcast listening was connected with different perceptions about core journalistic functions (e.g., should the press be adversarial like a watchdog? more of an interpreter of events? etc.). They found that listening was most strongly correlated with the idea that journalists should “provide entertainment and relaxation” as one of their roles. “Podcast listeners may indeed understand podcasts to be a form of journalism,” the authors conclude, “but they may tune in to these shows to unwind and be entertained.”

“News for life: improving the quality of journalistic news reporting to prevent suicides.” By Florian Arendt, Antonia Markiewitz, and Sebastian Scherr, in Journal of Communication.

Covering suicide is complicated terrain for journalists. Debates about the relative quality of such coverage have often focused on how truly poor it can be, and why that’s so significant. After all, sensationalistic reporting on suicide — particularly when specific details are provided about the method and location of suicide, etc. — has been shown to increase the likelihood of “copycat” suicides. But it’s not all bad: News coverage that eschews such details and instead emphasizes hope and recovery can be associated with a decrease in suicides.

But how strong is the evidence for such impact on society? Can we really draw such a linear connection between better news coverage and better social outcomes, both in general and on this important issue in particular?

The study here offers a unique approach. First, the authors made an intervention, launching a web-based campaign to promote higher-quality suicide reporting and offering this training to newsrooms in Germany. Ultimately, 22 newsrooms participated in the training, which included having journalists watch videos and also help in spreading awareness to their colleagues. Then, the researchers tested the effects of the intervention on changes in news content (did reporting improve?) and on the rate of actual suicides (did the numbers go down?).

The results are rather heartening: A content analysis of more than 4,000 articles indicated that reporting on suicides improved in quality, and a subsequent time-series analysis found “tentative evidence” for an actual reduction in suicides.

“Acknowledging limitations in terms of causal interpretations,” the authors write, “the findings support the claim that high-quality news can save lives. Similar newsroom interventions run elsewhere may contribute to preventing suicides globally.”

Signaling news outlet trust in a Google Knowledge Panel: A conjoint experiment in Brazil, Germany, and the United States. By Gina M. Masullo, Claudia Wilhelm, Taeyoung Lee, João Gonçalves, Martin J. Riedl, and Natalie J. Stroud, in New Media & Society.

What to do about the crisis of trust in news that we described at the top? Among the many proposals, some have suggested that greater journalistic transparency — that is, pulling back the curtain on who journalists are, how they do their work, and so forth — might facilitate greater audience trust, as news processes and practices come more fully into public view. But does that really work? Generally, the evidence has been inconsistent, these researchers note.

This study attempts to study journalistic transparency in a slightly different way. It uses a conjoint experiment (which allows for the manipulation of many more variables than usual experimental designs, offering a finer level of assessment and causality), and does so in three countries: Brazil, Germany, and the United States, with more than 6,000 participants in total. This more sophisticated approach, the authors argue, allows them to “parse more precisely whether a particular transparency attribute signals to the public that a news outlet is trustworthy.”

Importantly, too, the researchers treated transparently a bit differently than other studies by focusing on a Knowledge Panel-like box of information that people would come across about a news organization when they search for it on Google. They found that, indeed, “journalistic transparency can cue trust when it is done at the level of the entire news outlet, or the domain level, and comes from an external source, Google, as opposed to the outlet itself.”

The study also finds that, at least in Brazil and the U.S., two pieces of information in a Knowledge Panel offer particularly strong indications that a news outlet is trustworthy: “a brief description of the news outlet and an explanation of other sites accessed by people who frequent that news outlet’s website.” In Germany, meanwhile, “information about journalists and the description of the news outlet were the strongest cues.”

In all, the study offers vital clues about the importance of Knowledge Panels in cueing heuristics that ultimately influence whether people trust news organizations.

“Just a ‘mouthpiece of biased elites?’ Populist party sympathizers and trust in Czech public service media.” By Klára Smejkal, Jakub Macek, Lukáš Slavík, and Jan Šerek, in The International Journal of Press/Politics.

There’s so much interest in studying trust in news that it’s worth highlighting just one more study in this vein — this time from the Czech Republic.

You won’t be surprised to learn that people with populist attitudes tend to have lower trust in the press. This is especially true when talking about public service media (PSM). Despite the fact that in European countries with strong democracies, such government-supported media tend to be highly professional as well as fairly autonomous from outside influence, the drumbeat of criticism about them has continued to grow in recent decades, and particularly from populist politicians and those supporting them. However, exactly why trust in PSM tends to be so lacking among populist-leaning citizens has remained less clear, this study suggests. Is it simply an ideological mismatch, or something more?

The authors address that here by exploring “how populist party sympathizers differ from the sympathizers of other, non-populist political parties in terms of what they expect from the news media they trust, and how this difference affects their trust in PSM.” In particular, the study tests two types of expectations that could predict trust: first, the expectation that trusted media are impartial, and second, the expectation that trusted media tend to look out for “us” and serve “our” in-group accordingly.

A representative survey of the adult Czech population finds that, for populist party sympathizers, trust in PSM links exclusively to their assumption that media should “conform to their worldview,” while those supporting other political parties “expect normative standards [of journalism] to be maintained.” To be clear, what the authors call “cohesive trust” and “normative trust” are both important and can co-occur for people. What’s significant is that the path to engendering trust in PSM among populist party sympathizers appears to flow only through the former and not the latter — which underscores the overall challenge of improving trust in the press, particularly in Europe but elsewhere as well.

“Government eyewitness: Considering new approaches to political coverage through local TV’s greatest strengths.” By Brian Calfano, Costas Panagopoulos, and Elisa Raffa, in Journalism & Communication Monographs.

For television as a form of news, its visual qualities as well as the personal connection that people may feel toward the journalists and personalities involved can be one of its greatest strengths. And yet, as these authors note, the same things “also expose the medium’s glaring weaknesses in support of democratic governance. To the extent that visual aesthetics, production techniques, sensationalism, and conflictual framing of political issues overshadow informative journalism, TV’s bad tendencies may make American politics worse, not better.”

So, what might be done about this? Calfano and colleagues offer a monograph — which is like a journal article, but much longer and more elaborate — that brings together insights from sociology, political science, and communication “to focus on how best to bring political coverage of value to TV audiences.”

They begin by tracing the development of the Eyewitness News model that is now universal in local television, and then, using a combination of survey and field experiments, investigate how audiences react to eyewitness reporters, particularly when modifying the use of a policy vs. partisan frame by reporters.

“Across these experiments,” they find, “audiences, and especially Republicans, respond more favorably to local than to national reporters and to the use of a policy than a partisan frame.”

A second set of experiments, among others they provide, examines “false balance and truth-telling in local TV stories about the 2020 presidential election” — and again finds that the local reporter wins out against a national counterpart when it comes to audience response, especially for Republicans.

Ultimately, the authors argue that local TV, being less encumbered by the partisan feelings associated with national networks, has more leeway to adapt and make a difference for people. In their view, “local TV news has the most latitude to demonstrate the kind of political reporting approach that offers the most audience value in keeping with the media’s characterization as the Fourth Estate. We hope that a local TV approach to political reporting (i.e., reducing the strategy and partisan conflict reporting, expanding the scope of topics that count as ‘political’), will influence a reform movement among national outlets.”

The authors of the 2022 Spoken Word Audio Report conducted interviews in English and Spanish with 4,118 U.S. residents aged 13 and older. The report, released annually since 2014, is part of a partnership between NPR and Edison Research. For their purposes, “spoken word audio” means pretty much everything but music — news and talk shows on AM/FM radio plus podcasts and audiobooks of every stripe.

While the share of Americans listening to spoken word audio increased across all age groups, it increased the most for those ages 13 to 34, the report found. That age group now dedicates 26% of its listening hours to spoken word audio (instead of music) — up from just 12% in 2014.

Here’s a few other findings that stood out:

The number of Gen Zers who have ever listened to a podcast shot up. Nearly 80% say they’ve listened to one, up from 37% in 2014.

Gen Z is also the most likely to listen on their mobile device. Other groups listened to more spoken word audio on radio, smart speaker, or computer.

Americans are listening to less news on AM/FM radio, but the increase in podcast listening isn’t making up the gap.

Listening peaks in the morning. A second spike occurs around the evening rush hour — but that second peak has rounded out somewhat, possibly due to fewer people commuting and listening in their cars.

When it comes to weekly podcast listeners, comedy is king.

You can download the full report here.

Co-founders Ana Ormachea, Luis Quevedo, Pablo Juanarena, and Angel Jimenez launched Cuonda, a podcasting platform to help Spanish-language podcasts get standardized metrics for their shows to secure sponsorship and cross-promotion deals.

Seven years later, Ormachea is the chief digital officer for Prisa Radio, in charge of the audio-first strategy for the world’s biggest Spanish-language audio production company. Prisa Radio is one wing of Prisa, a Spanish media conglomerate that also owns daily newspaper El País, sports daily AS, news radio station Cadena SER, El HuffPost, and Podium, a platform that, like Cuonda, supports podcasts by helping them find advertising deals and revenue.

These investments in Spanish-language audio are starting to pay off. Daily news podcasts in Spain are gaining momentum, according to a new analysis of the country’s audio landscape.

Researchers from Spain’s Miguel Hernández University of Elche in Spain looked at the 14 top daily original news podcasts on the Spanish podcast discovery platform iVoox and on Apple Podcasts. Of the 14, 10 are produced by Spanish news outlets like El País, El Mundo, El Diario, and Cadena SER. The remaining four are produced by independent podcasters.

In Spain, 41% of the population reported listening to a podcast at least once a month in 2021. Spanish media companies first started getting into daily news podcasts in 2018, releasing short news bulletins for smart speakers, the report’s authors — Miguel Carvajal, Cristian-Ramón Marín-Sanchiz, and Carlos J. Navas — write. Over the last couple of years, the country’s legacy news outlets have launched more in-depth news podcasts, following in the footsteps of shows like The New York Times’ The Daily and The Guardian’s Today in Focus. The researchers interviewed the founders, creators, or hosts for each podcast and asked them about their business models.

“Finding the product/market fit is more important than creating a big production in terms of sound design and script,” Marín Sanchiz told me in an email, adding, “When trying to make users build a habit, it is vital to intertwine the podcast with their routines…it’s a format that rewards a bit of journalistic intuition, as it’s almost impossible to build podcasts to just fit searches and platform algorithms.”

The report doesn’t formally compare Spanish news podcasts to those from other countries, but Carvajal said that half of the podcasts — including ones produced by legacy news organizations — had just one person working on them. El País’ podcast team is the largest and an outlier in the sample, with 10 people working on its daily podcast Hoy en El País. Eight of the 14 podcasts in the study launched between 2021 and 2022, mostly from mainstream outlets that were either launching or revamping their subscription businesses.

“The podcast sphere in Spain has been [historically] characterized by pioneers from outside the media industry, mostly entrepreneurs focused on niches, and monetization was always [an afterthought],” Carvajal told me in an email. “On the distribution side, Apple Podcasts never had the weight that it did in places like the United States due to low usage of Apple products…It wasn’t until Podium and Cuonda launched that there was an explosion of journalistic, narrative podcasts. The Serial phenomenon, the [success of] daily news podcasts in the United States and the United Kingdom, and the increase in podcast consumption in Spain woke up journalistic producers.”

Listenership varies widely among the 14 podcasts, and the researchers noted that the survey respondents had a “negative view” of the tools and data available to understand podcast audiences (though this isn’t a problem unique to Spain). The producers of the independent podcasts, however, reported their listenership as being largely on par with that of the podcasts from major news outlets.

“The daily news podcasts in international media tend to deal with immediate, current events, but they also delve into long-term or evergreen issues,” Carvajal said. “In that sense, they are similar to the niche podcasts we chose that deal with topics relevant to their communities.”

Marketing Online, a niche podcast about the marketing industry launched in 2014 by Joan Boluda, reported 65,000 listens per episode, while Hoy en El País by El País (launched in 2022) and La ContraCrónica by independent journalist and creator Fernando Díaz Villanueva (launched in 2016) each reported 50,000 listens per episode.

The study shows that podcasters have different goals in getting into the audio industry: major media outlets are focused on building trust and personal relationships with listeners and reaching new audiences, while independent creators tend to focus on carving out space for themselves in their niche in a sustainable way.

All are interested and focused on audience and business growth and sustainability, though revenue data was not included in the study. So far, podcasts have been helpful to national newspapers as they bolster their subscription offerings and create new revenue streams, mainly through sponsorship and advertising. Independent podcasts have more diversified revenue streams, which include sponsorships, programmatic advertising, corporate services, among others. Mixx.io, a daily newsletter and podcast about tech that works with Cuonda, for example, reported €45,000 in annual revenue from sponsorships, while La ContraCrónica has 3,000 patrons on Patreon in addition to revenue from advertising, affiliate linking, and selling merchandise.

You can read the full study here.

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.

I write about the forces that shape family life in America, and there is no greater force in this realm than capitalism. Today I’m dissecting some of my own career experiences and how capitalism, motherhood, and the pandemic have shaped my path. Here’s what I’ve learned.

1. Success and failure are in the eye of the beholder. When I first came up with the idea of The Double Shift podcast, success to me looked like partnering with a big network that would fund the show and let me create and host it. I’d have resources to make this my full-time, salaried job and the support to grow the audience. I was a veteran journalist, but reading this now in 2022, that vision seems incredibly aspirational. It was, but not quite as far-fetched in 2018 as it would be now. A couple big networks actually considered it but turned me down for various reasons, including telling me that “there wasn’t enough that was interesting about being a working mother to make a whole show about it.”

That original version of success never happened. But the first season of the show was a hit. We got critical acclaim, strong downloads, and lots of buzz and momentum. We got attention for telling stories people hadn’t heard before, like from moms who work in brothels, or who are shift workers using a 24-hour daycare in Las Vegas. I got a “building the plane while flying” crash course in podcasting, business, and the podcasting business. (I cried in front of QuickBooks multiple times.) Afterward, I was crispy fried from the non-stop effort. And in between our first and second seasons I got pregnant … with twins. I knew I wanted to continue with everything we’d built with the show, but I also knew the journey would not be linear. I knew I’d have to take some large chunk of time off from the show in 2020. I felt self-conscious talking to partners and making plans for the future. Having a second kid when you make a show about motherhood seemed like NBD. Telling people I was having twins felt like a punchline, a decidedly unserious twist of fate for a “serious” businesswoman. I felt confident in my abilities but unconfident in how my 2020 would go. (How prescient!)

In my early views of success, I was always focused on what my experience would be, but by the end of 2021, I started to understand that a metric for success I hadn’t valued enough in my calculation was the impact on listeners. I’d hear from listeners that the show had changed how they saw motherhood, or was the soundtrack to their pandemic isolation, or had meant so much to them that they claimed, “The Double Shift is my best friend.” Perhaps the most tangibly satisfying impact of the show was reporting on how a group of women advocated for and got better paid leave at The New York Times. I was beyond thrilled when, more than a year after it aired, I started hearing from listeners that the show was a catalyst for them advocating for changes in their own workplaces. To quote listener Karli McNeill, she listened and said, “hot damn, I could do that!” Listeners pushed for real-world change and got it. We even made a follow-up episode about it. Seeing that kind of tangible impact of the work makes me understand how narrowly I understood what success was when I started.

Not all great ideas are going to be profitable under capitalism. There’s a myth in American entrepreneurship that if you have a great idea and work hard, it will become a “success.” Many define success as measured by exponential profits and growth (or even just the potential for them on paper). Most small businesses fail from a financial perspective. Value and profitability are not the same. Originality and financial viability are generally not related. Most “successful” businesses in media and beyond have huge financial runways. The people who run them may have years of cushion to figure out how to make them “work.”

Worthiness of an idea and access to capital are also not related. For instance, Black women receive 0.34% of the total venture capital spent in the U.S. But these guys seemed to have no trouble raising $100 million for an untested (and unsuccessful) podcast platform.

3. Accept there are forces beyond your control and don’t take it personally. When I returned from my “maternity leave” (if you can call quarantining with newborn twins and a preschooler during a catastrophic pandemic a “leave”) I very much wanted to show up for listeners during this ongoing crisis for mothers and families. But not only was my personal life more demanding than ever, I, along with everyone else, was trying to survive and process the pandemic, massive social unrest around racial injustice, and the 2020 election followed by an attempted coup. Nothing to create any stresses or distractions that might detract from “productivity” and business clarity!

In addition, it was pretty clear to me that the podcast industry was changing rapidly, and plenty of seeds I saw that were in the mix in 2018 and 2019 were now fully planted forests. The venture capital and big money fire hoses were on full blast. Companies were consolidating. New shows were entering the market with $30 to $50,000 marketing budgets so they could flood existing popular podcasts with ads to capture new listeners. The economic uncertainty of the pandemic made some advertisers skittish about spending, and massively increased inventory and improvements in ad technology meant we were making far less on our ads than we were in 2019 — a trend that continued into 2021. Even though there was more funding than ever for new content, I noticed that it was generally only for four types of shows:

— True crime with a strong chance of being optioned to become a movie.
— Chat or interview shows hosted by high-profile celebrities (or podcast celebrities) who would bring their own audience and have other celebrities on the show, usually about safe topics like business, women and business, personal growth, or advice.
— Deep-dive reported shows with high production values, usually about some forgotten/fascinating person/thing in history or cultural oddity, again with a good chance of being optioned.
— Podcasts created by big corporations/institutions as brand extensions.

Some quirky indie shows don’t fit this mold but were well-established with big audiences before these trends fully took hold. They might be able to hang on or thrive with robust member donations. But that wasn’t where we were with The Double Shift, which provided nuanced, feminist stories and commentary on motherhood with no celebrities involved. Over the course of 2021 it became clear to me that the podcast industry wasn’t a sandbox I had the resources to effectively play in, and hosting a show that decidedly didn’t fall into any of those four categories made it hard to catch any of the cash raining down on podcasts. (Some well-funded shows did advertise on The Double Shift. Thanks, trickle down economics!) My commitment to my vision made it basically impossible to take advantage of industry trends. I’m O.K. with that. Maybe it makes me a “bad business lady.” But I don’t think these forces of capitalism equate to a personal failure.

4. You can’t have it all. I’m here to deprogram you from the lie most white-collar women have been force fed. It was true before the pandemic, but it’s glaringly obvious now. If you have significant caregiving responsibilities (like most moms), you can’t have it all. I’ll say it again: You can’t have it all.

Take these three things: A job that makes good money; a job that is impactful and meaningful to you; a job that’s not super-demanding and supports a flexible lifestyle well-suited to care responsibilities. If you’re relatively privileged, you can pick two out of three, max. Low-wage workers may have jobs that fit zero of these categories. Or maybe you are a unicorn currently experiencing all three, but that’s probably more like a fleeting rainbow than a predictable rainstorm.

I’ve been preaching the gospel of not having it all for years, but now that I have three children I’m accepting it into the deepest recesses of my own heart. I’m still ambitious and have big ideas, but lifestyle is now a non-negotiable for me. I’m accepting that I may never earn as much money as I did at my last full-time job, before becoming a mom. I just spent the entire morning wrangling a group of first graders in my living room on a Thursday because someone smelled gas for the fourth time at my oldest kid’s school. My weekends are spent chaperoning and then cleaning up from non-stop toddler raves. The fuel I have in the tank for work is the amount I have. There are no nooks and crannies to find reserves.

5. It’s O.K. to stop doing things. One of my biggest fears in pausing the podcast was that I would be letting people down, especially those who love the show and have financially supported it with membership. I think women especially are deeply conditioned to fear disappointing people — customers, bosses, spouses, children, friends, parents, mentors.

But that fear allows us to keep perpetuating unrealistic expectations about work and motherhood. Part of the way we avoid disappointment is by not rocking the boat or challenging the status quo, and personally absorbing all the things that aren’t working while not articulating the cost. Fear of letting people down is a pretty tight cage. I’d rather just be honest about where I am, and invest in a community that has my back on this journey.

It began when The Joe Rogan Experience hosted Covid-19 vaccine skeptic Robert Malone and a number of musicians pulled their music off of Spotify in protest. It has continued with Rogan apologizing for using racial slurs in past years, which prompted the streaming service to remove scores of his old episodes from the streaming platform.

Given the thousands of hours of content that Rogan has produced, the scrutiny is unlikely to stop there. As we argue in our forthcoming book, Rogan’s podcast has long promoted right-wing comedy and libertarian political voices, including some who trade quite gleefully in racism and misogyny.

However, what makes Rogan’s rise particularly important is that it goes beyond the standard partisan political battling that Americans have grown accustomed to in social and broadcast media.

Rogan is not just a purveyor of right-wing ideologies. He is also someone who has built an empire by introducing these ideas — and a wide range of others — to listeners from across the political spectrum. His truly unique skill is drawing in from that spectrum a massive, young, largely male audience that advertisers highly covet.

Ideological whiplash

When the Federal Communications Commission introduced the Fairness Doctrine in 1949, radio and television broadcasters were required to present controversial ideas in a manner that reflected multiple perspectives. However, the combination of cable television, niche consumer targeting, and President Ronald Reagan’s deregulatory FCC succeeded in toppling the mandate.

By 1987, conservative talk radio figures such as Rush Limbaugh embraced fully partisan approaches to content creation and audience accumulation. Ignoring their political opponents as potential listeners, they veered further and further to the right, garnering an increasingly homogeneous audience whom advertisers could easily target.

Later, as Fox News’s popularity and reach grew, it took a similar tack, promoting conservative media personalities like Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and Greg Gutfeld to preach to the right-wing choir.

Today, some conservative voices such as Ben Shapiro and Steven Crowder take this logic a technological step further, embracing the silo-ing effects of social media algorithms to connect with those users most likely to engage with and disseminate their content. Although such figures certainly offend those who disagree with them, their place in the mediasphere is well-established and mostly ignored by opponents.

Rogan, by contrast, is prone to ideological whiplash.

Initially, he supported Bernie Sanders for president in 2020. Then he flipped to Donald Trump. He interviews and asks open-ended questions to figures ranging from staunchly left-leaning voices such as Cornel West and Michael Pollan to right-wing charlatans including Stefan Molyneux and Alex Jones.

There is no political commonality among these people. But there is a demographic connection. For one, they are all men, as are the vast majority of guests on The Joe Rogan Experience.

They are also provocative guests that appeal to young people and particularly young men, a group that is notoriously difficult to aggregate, often has disposable income and has a tendency to believe that mainstream political ideas don’t reflect their own.

While Fox News sells politics to TV watchers, Rogan sells a sense of edgy authenticity to podcast listeners. His blend of comedy and controversy certainly has political implications, but from his perspective, it isn’t politics. It’s demographics.

Spotify’s main attraction

Rogan’s economic model of accumulating young male listeners, who make up a good chunk of his 11 million listeners per episode, is particularly powerful in today’s fractured media environment.

Rogan is, for worse and for better, a true outlier in the world of contemporary talk media. Most political and many comedy podcasts employ the business model of finding an ideological space, connecting via cross-promotion and guest selection with similar shows, and allowing the algorithms of social media to drive traffic their way.

“The Joe Rogan Experience” takes this idea and pulls it in multiple, contradictory directions. Media figures left and right have — until now, at least — coveted opportunities to appear on the show. Once a comedian or podcaster has saturated their own political space, Rogan offers a chance to win over new converts and, in principle, have a discussion that breaks free of partisan constraints. For many Rogan fans, this breadth of discussion and freedom from norms is the heart of the show.

Rogan, however, is far from a neutral host of a new public sphere. His feigned naïveté is all too often a cover to promote edgy, offensive, and irresponsible theories that appeal to his audience’s self-styled suspicion of authority.

He pushes the boundaries of political discourse by “just asking questions,” but then hides behind his background as just a comedian to distance himself from any undesirable repercussions.

Spotify, like other streaming services, is primarily built on a wide range of content creators, each of whom attracts a small, dedicated audience, but none of whom are, on their own, particularly powerful.

Rogan is the closest thing to a mass cultural product to be found in the podcast world. He is also one of the only names in podcasting big enough to garner headlines, good or bad. For a company like Spotify trying to boost subscriptions, Rogan’s cross-partisan, youthful, mass appeal is very hard to resist.

Rogan’s recent apologies, however, prove that he is not impervious to pressure. We suspect Spotify will try to thread the needle: covering up Rogan’s penchant for misinformation and offensive provocation just enough to meet the minimum standard of acceptable corporate citizenship without tarnishing the comedian’s brand and demographic appeal.

More Than This, hosted by author and 2BG founder Danielle Prescod, tells stories of people who “set new paths for themselves” — changing careers, countries, or their own community. The series is branded content, sponsored by prepaid phone provider Straight Talk Wireless and created and produced by Vox Creative without input from Vox’s editorial staff. (“The goal of the podcast is to reach potential Straight Talk consumers, specifically those who feel limited in some way by the same way of doing things, like paying for their cell phone bill because they’re committed to a contract,” according to a press release.) It’s not the studio’s first standalone podcast; the Ben and Jerry’s-sponsored Who We Are, which examined the harder-hitting topic of systemic racism in America, launched last fall and made it onto Apple’s list of top 10 history podcasts.

Transcripts are hardly uncommon in podcasting but they’re often an afterthought, littered with omissions and inaccuracies thanks to automated transcription. Even if someone adds a [pause] or [laugh], you’re losing a lot of what makes the audio version compelling. Vox Media wanted to do something special — and different — for More Than This.

“We know transcripts are a popular product in podcasting but with the features we built for More Than This, we wanted to elevate the experience of a transcript, by making it more visual by translating the emotions, pacing, and atmosphere of the podcast into a visual medium,” said Annu Subramanian, supervising producer of audio at Vox Creative.

The accessibility-friendly experience was inspired by musician Mandy Harvey, featured in the first episode, who lost her hearing as a music student in college. The transcripts – art directed by Lauren O’Connell and designed by Uy Tieu — use visuals to convey pauses and other moments of inflection.

They also read like a play at times, describing the speech and singing:

The transcripts, like in this example from episode two, try to put the reader at the scene:

Vox Creative said it worked with a team of engineers, graphic artists, and user experience designers to create the new product. (Vox, including its editorial side, hasn’t created anything similar before and Subramanian said she hadn’t seen anything quite like their immersive transcript elsewhere.)

The visual experience was also tested by a focus group of deaf and hard-of-hearing users led by disability activist and accessibility consultant JamiLee Hoglind.

“Within the podcast industry, it’s sacred to discover an authentically accessible podcast that is engineered, designed, and created with an accessibility lens for approximately over 400 million of Deaf and Hard of Hearing people globally,” Hoglind wrote in a note on accessibility. “This podcast’s visual experience is the first of many. Not only will this be a model for others, this will also elevate the industry to continue prioritizing accessibility to the next level.”

More Than This has released three of six episodes so far. You can listen to the podcast or read through the immersive transcripts here.

The Times’ own Ben Smith noted that shows like Serial and This American Life, if packaged with other hits like The Daily, could form the basis of a “HBO of podcasts.” A year later, the Times appears ready to test that theory. It announced last week that it’s been building a standalone app — “New York Times Audio” — to house its audio journalism and will be inviting beta testers to give feedback. (You can volunteer here, though only U.S.-based iPhone users need apply.) The survey for those interested in participating has a number of questions about paid subscriptions and asks users to indicate how much they agree or disagree with statements like, “If one of my favorite podcasts started charging a fee for access, I would stop listening.”

The new app will feature the Times’ own podcasts alongside narrated versions of news, opinion, and magazine articles across a handful of publishers. For those who aren’t participating in the closed beta, nothing will change for the moment. The Times is not putting any podcasts behind a paywall or making them exclusive to the new app with this announcement; you can still listen to The Daily or The Ezra Klein Show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and wherever else you like to hit play.

Despite a mixed history with standalone apps — Cooking and Games live on, but R.I.P. NYT Now and NYT Opinion — the Times decided to move forward with a separate home for its audio journalism because it was the best environment to run tests and solicit feedback. (A similar beta test is underway for NYT Kids.)

And it’s clear the Times is still in test-and-try mode at the moment. Sam Dolnick, assistant managing editor at The New York Times, described the app as a “first attempt” and “just one experiment” in audio-first products. To start, the new app will act as a kind of homepage for the Times’ catalog of audio journalism. A rotating selection, curated by Times editors, will guide listeners through a mix of formats and topics — from newsy pieces and short updates to feature stories and longer, “more suspenseful” narratives.

“Something that has the dynamism and serendipity of a great homepage — does that appeal to listeners?” Dolnick said. “Does that become something that they could build a habit and relationship with? We don’t know, but we want to find out.”

Stephanie Preiss, the Times’ VP of TV and audio, underscored the importance of habit by pointing to The Daily, which sees more than four million downloads per day and a majority of listeners tuning in at least four times a week. (The listenership also trends much younger than the average print subscriber — meaning podcasts like The Daily reach an audience that the Times would love to, eventually, convert into paying subscribers.)

“From a business perspective, we’re interested in figuring out what are habits that we can scale,” Preiss said. “The Daily is a huge habit, but what are audio experiences inside our app — and maybe in this new one — that we see evidence of people not only sampling and exploring but returning to day in and day out, week over week? Because that’s what we know drives willingness to pay. That’s what we’ve learned enables us to start to get those people into a paying relationship with The New York Times.”

The Daily, of course, is currently free and widely distributed, something Dolnick says the Times has “no plans to change anytime soon.” Much like the popular morning newsletter that the Times keeps free as a way to build a daily habit with readers both paying and not, The Daily is more valuable to the Times outside a paywall.

“Over many years, the Times has figured out a way to both have a huge audience of readers and also have a paying audience of readers. We believe that the same thing is possible in audio,” Preiss said. “We believe there’s a way to make sure that this morning’s episode of The Daily is going to all of the places where people listen to audio and reach a huge audience and at the same time, that if there is somebody who is listening to five episodes or listening to something from us every single day, that those people are making their way into our ecosystem and into our pay model.”

The app will also help address a mismatch between the resources the newspaper is devoting to audio journalism and its digital footprint.

“Some of the most important and clarifying and ambitious journalism that The New York Times produces these days happens in audio, but audio is not a part of our digital experience almost at all,” Dolnick said. “You could spend hours a day on our home page and read seemingly everything that our newsroom produces and not come across much of our audio. That has increasingly felt odd to us.”

Preiss added that New York Times app users could open the app “every day” and still miss the Times’ audio offerings there, too. “It’s there, but it’s not a central or signature part of what we present to you,” she said. “That’s out of sync with how we have scaled and grown our audio journalism over the last several years.”

So the Times knows it wants to better incorporate audio into its digital experience. It just isn’t sure the best way to do it quite yet. Alongside this new beta app, there are experiments underway to present audio within the existing New York Times app — such as having journalists read their own work and incorporating the ability to play some podcasts. (You can see an example here.) It’s also serving Daily listeners Audm narrations — like one of Dolnick’s recent favorites, about the composer Nicholas Britell — through existing feeds.

Ultimately, the hope is that behavioral data and feedback gathered via the new app will help the Times get in on the ground floor of paid audio products. “I would say the market for people paying for audio is pretty nascent, with the exception of audio books,” Preiss said. “Certainly there are products that people pay for in the audio space but it’s not a huge market at the moment.”

“It’s a packaging question and it’s a digital question: What’s the best way to present this stuff?” Dolnick added. “But journalistically, the work is already there.”

The island, an unincorporated territory of the United States since 1898, often makes it into mainstream, English-language news in a way that’s removed from its people. Stories focus on the likelihood of a statehood bill passing, the island’s debt crisis, or natural disasters. The decisions about those things, due to Puerto Rico’s status as neither a sovereign nation or a state, are made more than 1,500 miles away from the island, in Washington D.C.

It’s no wonder then that the term “la brega” or “bregar” gets used so often. “La brega” expresses the way someone deals with or hustles through a problem, an injustice, that they can’t fix.

To Alana Casanova-Burgess, a reporter and producer for WNYC, “La Brega” could almost be summed up by the pothole problem in Puerto Rico. Potholes are rarely fixed properly and so people have to do all sorts of things to get around them.

She described a video in Caguas, Puerto Rico, where a water truck couldn’t make it to its destination because it hit a pothole.

“There’s a lot happening here,” she says. “A truck filled with water tried to reach a community that had been without it, then that truck gets swallowed by a hole in the road, that was caused by a broken water pipe. And lastly, as if adding insult to injury, the water in the truck was lost to the pothole.”

This is just the first episode of La Brega: Stories of the Puerto Rican Experience, a bilingual podcast series about the island’s past and present. It’s a co-production between WNYC Studios and Futuro Studios, the podcast and programming arm of Futuro Media.

La Brega has seven episodes, and each one is produced in English and Spanish. It’s one of the few fully bilingual podcasts series that services audiences in two languages. Vice’s Chapo: Kingpin on Trial also has bilingual episodes; ¿Qué Pasa, Midwest? is presented in English and Spanish and tells stories about Latinxs in the heartland.

The idea came out of a lunch between Casanova-Burgess and executive producer Marlon Bishop at Futuro Studios. They both cared about Puerto Rico and were frustrated by the mainstream coverage they were seeing of the island. After they developed the idea for a deeper narrative podcast about Puerto Rican history, they got the green light from their respective organizations.

“We wanted to serve, first and foremost, the Puerto Rican audience, and that included both the Puerto Rican diaspora and Puerto Ricans on the island,” Bishop said. “[Editor] Luis Trelles brought up the idea of doing it entirely dual-language. If we don’t do that, then we’re not serving a Puerto Rican audience. How do we make a project that really represents the community, and that is equitable in how it’s created?”

Futuro Studios had produced bilingual podcasts before, but it was a new experiment for WNYC Studios. Neither, however, had experience in producing a podcast like this one during a pandemic. Casanova-Burgess did her first interviews on the island in February 2020, and once the team realized the pandemic was here to stay, they had to rework some of their plans and come up with safety protocols. In some of the interviews, you can tell that people are wearing masks as they speak.

La Brega’s stories range from U.S. surveillance in Puerto Rico to quash the pro-independence movement to the David vs. Goliath-like basketball game of the United States vs. Puerto Rico in the 2004 Athens Olympics. The episodes not only center regular Puerto Ricans, but they focus on informing Puerto Ricans first, rather than diluting and over-explaining for an American, non-Spanish-speaking audience.

“With [the secret surveillance files known as las carpetas], there’s a rich history that a lot of people in the United States don’t know about,” Casanova-Burgess said. “There’s also a Puerto Rican audience who doesn’t know that history. And then there’s a third level in that episode, which is the actual story of this family and their belief that there was an informant close to them. We were looking for stories that would be surprising and new and fresh, even to a Puerto Rican audience. Once you hit that bar, it’s obviously going to be new and surprising to, to an English-speaking, non-Puerto Rican audience.”

Eleven out of 12 people on La Brega’s production team identify as Puerto Rican. The episodes feature collaborations with journalists regardless of their audio experience, including Puerto Rico’s Centro de Periodismo Investigativo. Casanova-Burgess held workshops over Zoom to train journalists who didn’t have audio experience.

“We wanted to have everything be very lyrical and have a strong point of view,” Bishop said. “We weren’t doing a cold, distant report. Every person had a very close relationship to the topic.”

One way La Brega centers Puerto Rican voices is that it doesn’t use voiceovers. Casanova-Burgess and Bishop instead opted for bespoke translations. Where possible, all of the sources were interviewed in their dominant language (either English or Spanish) and then in their secondary language. When that wasn’t possible, or when archival footage was only available in one language, the reporter would explain what was being said in the clip either before or after it was played.

“We wanted to make sure that we weren’t making two different things from scratch, because that wouldn’t make any sense,” Bishop said. “But at the same time, we didn’t want to just take the easiest road. We wanted to take the road that led to the best listening experience in both languages. We’d write one script in the dominant language of whoever the reporter was. Once that was fully edited and fully completed, we would do the translation.”

In the episode about Levittown, a suburb of San Juan built to emulate the middle-class lifestyle of Levittown, Long Island (minus the racism), Casanova-Burgess was able to use archival tape from WNYC from the 1950s when Eastern Airlines ran its first nonstop flights from New York to San Juan. WNYC sent a radio crew and had tape of the ceremony being conducted in English and Spanish.

In the Basketball Warriors episode, reporter Julio Ricardo Varela interviewed basketball player Rolando Hourruitiner about how his team beat the United States in an Olympic basketball game. In English, Rolando described it as a “David vs. Goliath” matchup, but in his interview in Spanish, he also said it was like the Taínos vs. Spanish conquistador Diego Salcedo, a reference that would hit home for Puerto Ricans.

“I was hanging out with some friends who were saying how great it is to hear Puerto Rican Spanish because they were always told growing up that they had to mellow their accents in professional settings and polish off the edges of that very particular Boricua way of speaking,” Casanova-Burgess said. “[Our producers] Ezequiel Rodríguez Andino and Victor Emanuelle Ramos really looked through a lot of the scripts and thought about the moments where we could more Puerto Rican, for lack of a better phrase, and be a little funnier.”

Every aspect of the podcast, from the scripts to the sound design to the original music and illustrations by Puerto Rican artists, was produced in a way that would speak to a Puerto Rican audience. Since it premiered on February 24, some of the feedback the team has gotten is that without the bilingual component, many listeners wouldn’t have been able to access it.

“We’re going beyond the traditional audio journalism bubble,” Casanova-Burgess said, “so an audience beyond that bubble can enjoy it.”

Podnews, which first reported the change, noted that the terminology was confusing to listeners, who hear “subscribe” and think “not free.”

Tom Webster from Edison Research says 47% of people who don’t currently listen to podcasts think that ‘subscribing’ to a podcast will cost money, describing it as a stone in the shoe of podcasting’s growth run. He tells Podnews: “Today, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube are the three most widely used services to play podcasts, and now the word Subscribe means ‘automatically download for free’ in exactly none of them. Podcasters will have no choice but to adapt their language accordingly or risk confusing listeners.”

With so many news organizations pushing readers to “subscribe,” it’s not terribly surprising that people have come to associate the word with coughing up some cash. The change will appear in iOS 14.5, scheduled to be released later this month.

The Podcasts app, a default for many iPhone users, is currently the most popular choice for U.S. listeners. Apple’s share of podcast listenership has dropped from 34% in 2018 to 27.6% in 2020, however, and Business Insider’s eMarketer recently forecast it’ll be surpassed by Spotify — which has been investing in exclusive content and podcast technology left and right — within the year.

Other apps have already introduced similar language. Spotify and Audible use “follow,” Stitcher uses “+ follow,” and Amazon Music uses “♡ follow,” noted Podnews. (Google Podcasts, Castbox, Overcast, and Castro still use some version of “subscribe.”)

But is this merely a tweak in language? Or setting up Apple Podcasts to roll out paid podcast content in the future?

Currently, Apple doesn’t support paid subscriptions and doesn’t allow shows to charge people to download episodes. (Podcasters can get around the model by creating private feeds that they open to Patreon donors or other paying subscribers.) For such a seemingly small change, the news caught a lot of people’s attentions.

*ignores podcasts for a decade after pioneering it

Some director at Apple : What if we replace the text “subscribe” with “follow” in our app?

Another director : This is the best podcasting app the world has ever seen. Consumers are going to love it! https://t.co/qNEz7fQJM8

— Sar Haribhakti (@sarthakgh) March 9, 2021

“The word ‘subscribe’ has been confusing potential listeners for more than fifteen years. It’s time for every podcast app to copy Spotify, Stitcher, Apple and Amazon by using ‘follow’ – and for every podcaster to follow their lead.” https://t.co/lL5wrU3oUI

— Blake Eskin (@bdeskin) March 9, 2021

Important news for my fellow podcasters: Subscribe is changing to Follow in Apple Podcasts. Be sure to change your call to action on your website and in your show intro/outro. This article explain more. https://t.co/9js0i1Fk4b #podcast #podcasting #podcastnews

— Mary-Lynn Foster (@marylynnbfoster) March 9, 2021

RIP ‘subscribing’ to podcasts. And about time too. ‘Follow’ makes so much more sense. https://t.co/wzbuh1Hz5q

— Martin SFP Bryant (@MartinSFP) March 10, 2021

This is probably less about clearing up language and more about Apple preparing to do some type of paid podcast subscription service. https://t.co/AZbqtVlR45

— Jaa (@Jaastradamus) March 9, 2021

47 percent of people think ‘subscribing’ to a podcast will cost money, so Apple is changing the verb from ‘subscribe’ to ‘follow’ in iOS 14.5. Wild! https://t.co/HFabog19np

— Casey Newton (@CaseyNewton) March 9, 2021

If you have to find things from multiple meetings, repeat the same tedious steps.

But recently, journalists from Michigan Radio, the NPR station in the state, have been using a database they built in-house to better sift through public meetings. The database is called Minutes and it searches, downloads, and transcribes videos of public meetings in a few dozen cities in Michigan. The project is funded by the Google News Initiative’s Innovation Challenge.

Meeting are already public in Michigan because of the Open Meetings Act, but there was no searchable index of meetings from across the state, Dustin Dwyer, a Michigan radio bureau reporter and 2018 Nieman Fellow, said.

Just because information is public doesn’t mean it’s easy to find. Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy gets it. And so does @MichiganRadio. We’ve got an exciting new project launching tomorrow that will help you get at what’s in that locked cabinet. Stay tuned! pic.twitter.com/oGBZDwizNc

— dustindwyer (@dustindwyer) March 2, 2021

“It is unbelievably complicated to find out what happens in these meetings, even though all the information is online,” Dwyer said. “We’re trying to make the content of the meetings searchable, so that you don’t have to spend a lot of time scrolling through the agenda finding out when they’re talking about the thing that is important to you. [Instead], you can search for the information and get a meaningful result. It’s overcoming an informational barrier around these meetings.”

The tool is called Minutes. An application code monitors YouTube channels it can pull from, Michigan Radio’s digital tech specialist Brad Gowland explained. When it sees that there’s new videos, it gets the audio of the video, and it transcribes it in 45-second chunks so there’s enough text to transcribe complete sentences. So if a reporter is looking for a certain topic, they can search through the transcripts to find legible sentences about what they’re looking for, and then they can go to YouTube to watch the full video and pull out soundbites.

The database allows reporters to keep tabs on issues across the the state, even in places where there aren’t any Michigan Radio reporters covering them regularly. It’s somewhat inspired by tools like City Scrapers and Documenters, both of which are open-source, collaborative community efforts to make information from and about public meetings in select cities more readily accessible. Minutes doesn’t create an excuse for a newsroom to not cover a city council meeting, Dwyer said, but it helps catch things that might otherwise slip through the cracks. Often, issues become more important for coverage when it’s clear that they exist in multiple places. Minutes helps figure that out.

“I live in Grand Rapids so if something is happening in Grand Rapids, I’m going say it’s kind of important, but I may not know that it’s also happening in other communities on the opposite side of the state that we don’t normally cover,” Dwyer said. “But then there’s people showing up at those meetings every week giving public comments and saying ‘this is important to me.’ If we don’t know that those things are happening in other parts of the state, we may not realize how big or how important something is or how widespread it is. Being able to draw those connections is a big part of what this database is about for our reporters.”

The Minutes database and its transcripts aren’t available to use to the public because they aren’t checked for errors (the program could hear the word “vaccine” and transcribe “Maxine”). It also isn’t a definitive database of every meeting in Michigan because it still takes time to process so many videos and costs money to store those large files. But since the program is already downloading audio from the meetings, it then sends the audio to one of Michigan Radio’s 42 new podcast feeds. That means that anyone can listen to a public meeting in 42 of Michigan’s cities as a podcast. Michigan is a large state with fewer and fewer reporters, Dwyer and Gowland wanted to be able to provide public meetings information to people who are interested in them, but it’s difficult to continue the current model: reporters attending meetings and producing stories about them.

“I see this already available in so many other aspects of local life,” Dwyer said. “If I want to know what the weather is in my city or what the weather was yesterday, I can know that immediately. If I want to know high school prep scores, I can know that immediately. All of these things are already indexed and searchable and if I type it into Google or ask a device I get an immediate, useful result. Why in the heck can’t it be that easy to find out what’s happening within my local government?”

Clubhouse’s key attribute is its medium: audio, which sets it apart from established social media and messaging services like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp and YouTube that use text, photos, video or a mix. Clubhouse combines the structure of old-school text chatrooms with the immediacy and emotion of the human voice.

The social media service is tapping into the creativity, intimacy and authenticity that audio can deliver, a trend that lies at the heart of the current golden age of podcasting.

Amid the hype, Clubhouse faces privacy and harassment challenges that could make it difficult for the company to maintain a trajectory that has seen it grow from 1,500 users and a US$100 million valuation in May 2020 to 2 million weekly active users and a potential $1 billion valuation.

How it works

Once you’ve scored yourself an invite, the app is pretty easy to navigate. You can look in your calendar to find conversations based on your interests, which you identify at sign-up. Or you can browse “rooms” with discussions currently in progress. You can also set up your own event. Rooms can be public or private, you can listen quietly or join the conversation, and you can enter and leave rooms at will.

Activities typically range from interviews to panel events and wide-ranging discussions. Some efforts are even more ambitious; at the end of last year a group of Clubhouse members put on two performances of “Lion King: The Musical,” featuring actors, narrators and a choir.

3400 people listening to a live performance of the Lion King musical…in Clubhouse. This is emergent culture pic.twitter.com/pBfB3TeUf9

— Josh Constine – SignalFire (@JoshConstine) December 26, 2020

What’s the appeal?

Exclusivity, media buzz, engagement from Tesla founder Elon Musk, and high-profile investment from venture capitalists have all helped pique interest in the app. As a scholar who studies storytelling, I’ve identified three other factors that may contribute to its ongoing appeal.

First, audio is an intimate medium. You can hear the inflections in people’s tone of voice, which convey emotion and personality in a way that text alone does not. If you make a joke or are sarcastic over a text or email, your attempt at humor can easily fall flat or be misinterpreted. That is less likely when people can hear you.

Moreover, hearing from people directly can generate empathy and understanding – on tough topics that listeners might have become desensitized to, such as bereavement, addiction and suicide – in a way that text alone cannot.

Second, there’s serendipity. Although events and structured conversations are increasingly held on Clubhouse, you can wander around, dropping into rooms on topics ranging from hip-hop to health tech.

Eavesdropping on random conversations brings with it a certain unpredictability. It’s hard to know where to look for quality conversations, which is why the network is proposing to develop a “Creators” program designed to nurture “Clubhouse Influencers.” But sometimes frivolous and trivial is fine. After all, it would be exhausting to listen to TED Talks 24/7.

This unstructured approach has an appeal at a time when people’s media habits are increasingly governed by algorithms, making it hard to bump into something new.

Finally, there’s the fact that audio is a great background medium. I grew up in a household where public radio, the BBC in my case, was always playing in the kitchen. Audio is perfect for multitasking. People listen to it while commuting to work, sitting at their desks or walking the dog.

Clubhouse taps into these elements, and at a time when many people are deprived of pre-pandemic levels of human contact, it enables a plurality of voices and human experiences to babble away in the background.

Major growing pains

Clubhouse is expanding quickly, bringing with it increased scrutiny. The company is facing issues such as managing misinformation that are familiar to many other social networks.

In an unregulated space, people can say what they want. This has implications for fact-checking and content moderation, enabling conspiracy theories to potentially run rife. Journalists and users have reported issues of harassment, anti-Semitism, misogyny and racism, though these are against Clubhouse’s community guidelines.

Privacy and security concerns also abound. Chats have been rebroadcast online. Earlier in the month, the Stanford Internet Observatory revealed security flaws that meant user data was vulnerable and accessible to the Chinese government. The app may fall foul of data protection rules in Europe, known as GDPR.

Other commentators have expressed concern about the fact that users hand over the contact details of everyone in their phones when they sign up.

The contacts list in my phone is not a list of my friends. There are people on that list that I never want to hear from and that I would prefer not to have any information about what I'm doing. I will never want to send an invite to anything to my contacts list.

— Eva (@evacide) February 11, 2021

The app is also available for iPhone users only, which means that it doesn’t work on other devices. That’s a problem, given that more than 70% of the world is on Android, Google’s mobile operating system.

Meanwhile, closing an account also appears to be more problematic than it should be.

Riding the audio wave

Whether people will still be talking about Clubhouse six months from now remains to be seen. What is clear, however, is that the attention the app is getting is part of a wider reinvention and reinvigoration of the audio medium that’s been playing out over the past few years.

Podcasting has continued to expand. More than a million podcasts are already available, and for audio streaming services like Spotify, podcasts are at the heart of their strategy for growth.

Meanwhile, Audible, Amazon’s audiobook service. is expanding around the world, and smart speakers like Amazon Echo and Google Home are among the fastest-growing technologies of all time, enabling users to listen to music, podcasts or the latest weather report on demand.

It’s not just Clubhouse that is seeking to harness this trend. Facebook is reported to be creating a Clubhouse clone, while Twitter Spaces is the microblogging network’s latest foray into the audio space. The tech industry analyst Jeremiah Owyang has identified more than 30 social audio efforts, calling it a “‘Goldilocks’ medium for the 2020s: text is not enough, and video is too much; social audio is just right.”

Humans have felt the need to connect and tell stories since time immemorial. This is audio’s secret sauce, driving much of the renewed interest in the medium. Clubhouse may be today’s digital campfire, but it’s highly unlikely to be the last.

The report — authored by Nic Newman and Nathan Gallo — looked at 102 daily news podcasts in six countries (U.S., the U.K., Australia, France, Sweden, and Denmark) and finds the format is thriving. Thirty seven daily news podcasts have been launched within the last year, including a number of “pop-up” coronavirus podcasts that, despite a warp-speed production process, found success.

The Daily — The New York Times’ ultra-popular podcast — gets a lot of credit in this report. Hosted by Michael Barbaro, The Daily is widely cited as inspiration and the report authors credit its popularity with driving the explosive growth of daily news shows in the United States.

Some daily news podcasts are finding huge audiences — and the listeners tend to be younger and better-educated

Some daily news podcasts are reaching more people than traditional print or TV. The New York Times says The Daily now averages four million downloads per day, up from two million just a year ago.

On an earnings call earlier this month, CEO Meredith Kopit Levien said the Times has found The Daily “drives affinity” for the news organization at large and that the vast majority of its listeners are younger than the average print subscriber. Levien said most listeners of The Daily tune in four to five times per week and noted that The Daily’s feed has proven to be an effective distribution mechanism for other audio products from The Times — like The Sunday Read, The Latest, and the multi-episode series The Rabbit Hole.

The Reuters report found that the younger-skewing audience held true across countries:

Podcast listening overall also skews young, with under-35s in the UK four times more likely to consume a podcast when compared with over-55s. Previous research shows that younger groups spend a considerable amount of time listening to podcasts and generally listen to the majority of each episode. They say they appreciate the diversity of voices and enjoy getting away from screens.

Many broadcasters we spoke to for this report see podcasting as a crucial way of attracting the next generation of listeners … While podcasts are certainly attracting younger groups, data from the Digital News Report 2020 also show that news podcasts currently tend to perform better with highly educated and more urban groups. This is a highly prized group for advertisers and for publishers looking for potential new digital subscribers.

Apple remains the most-used podcast app but Spotify is now a strong second

The default Apple podcast app still reigns supreme but Spotify and other platforms — Google Podcasts, Pocket Casts, iHeart Radio, Castbox, Acast, Stitcher (and more!) — have gained ground.

The authors reported that “public broadcasters in particular are concerned that, as podcast listening grows, they may lose the direct connection with audiences they have enjoyed on radio.” In response, the BBC is experimenting with releasing content first in its own BBC Sounds app while ABC in Australia has prohibited some of its podcast content from appearing on Spotify.

The “deep dive” lasting about 25 minutes has emerged as the most popular format

Many of the producers interviewed said their shows were directly inspired by The Daily’s “deep dive” format in which one episode examines a single story in detail. (Other highly-produced “deep dive” examples cited include Post Reports from The Washington Post, Please Explain from The Sydney Morning Herald, Today in Focus from The Guardian, La Story from Les Echos, and the Danish Broadcasting Corporation’s Genstart.)

All in all, nearly half of daily news podcasts fall into this category:

“Print and digital-born media in particular have focused most on [the deep-dive] format because it is seen as a good way of showcasing the depth and range of newsroom expertise,” the report notes. Other formats were the “extended chat” (BBC’s Newscast, The Daily Wire’s the Ben Shapiro Show, or NPR’s Politics), “news roundup” (FT News Briefing or Sweden’s OmniPod), and “microbulletin” shows (NPR News Now, BBC Minute, or Swedish Radio’s Ekot).

As you might expect, the microbulletin podcasts tend to be shortest and the extended chats the longest. For the others, there’s a cluster around the sweet-seeming spot of 25 minutes.

The coronavirus impact has been mostly positive

The authors found that, after an initial dip as routines and commutes changed in late February and early March, podcast listening “bounced back.” Daily news podcasts fared “better than most other genres” and some — like Today in Focus from The Guardian and NPR Up First — saw their highest numbers yet. (Overall, the data the authors analyzed found that news and comedy podcasts got a boost while shows focused on sports have yet to return to their pre-Covid numbers.)

Many daily news podcasts were designed to be heard in the morning. (Think: “Here’s what else you need to know today.”) But Covid-19 has changed when listeners are pressing play. The report found the typical morning spike has flattened as more listeners listen throughout their day.

In interviews, publishers also reported that advertising for daily news podcasts held up better than other areas and that, overall, their revenue matched or exceeded what they were seeing before Covid-19.

You can read the full report here.

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.

According to the press release, the transaction will involve $265 million in a cash payment to Scripps, with an additional $60 million on the table based on performance goals through 2020 and 2021. This puts the value of the deal at $325 million, officially making this the most expensive podcast acquisition to date. The transaction is expected to close sometime in the third quarter. Until then, SiriusXM and Stitcher are expected to operate independently.

In a note circulated to employees, SiriusXM CEO Jim Meyer wrote:

With this acquisition, SiriusXM’s combined properties will contain the largest addressable audience in the U.S. across all categories of digital audio — reaching over 150 million listeners. With our team’s collective expertise in digital audio, analytics and ad tech, plus Stitcher’s deep experience in podcasting, I see significant opportunities ahead. Together, we can create a transformative one-stop shop to better meet the needs of podcast creators, publishers and advertisers — while also providing listeners with new ways to find and connect with great shows.

Emphasis mine, mostly to draw attention to how SiriusXM seems to be view itself (i.e. primarily as a monetization and distribution entity) compared to Stitcher.

If you missed my analysis on the deal in last week’s newsletter, you can find it here.

IAB: 2020 podcast advertising projections revised downward, some recovery expected. We now have a tangible glimpse at how the pandemic has affected podcast advertising in the U.S. — as opposed to listenership, which had been our primary focus over the past few months — courtesy of the IAB’s fourth annual podcast ad revenue study that came out Monday.

These reports are principally supposed to provide insights into podcast advertising for the year before, but the IAB moved to conduct a supplementary survey to account for the economic pressures of the pandemic. As expected, the U.S. podcast advertising forecast for the rest of 2020 were revised downward, from 29.6% in projected growth down to 14.7%.

That’s down by almost half. Nevertheless, there are encouraging signs, as the study found that ad revenues are expected to bounce back in the third and fourth quarters. They won’t meet previous projections, of course, but the bigger point is that the drops are expected to be less dramatic than originally feared.

Furthermore, the IAB maintains that podcasts can be considered to be “more resistant” than other media formats against the economic pressures of the pandemic. Three main reasons were cited:

• The format’s relative flexibility around swiftly changing ad messaging to meet the pandemic context
• One of podcasting’s faster-growing and more reliable genres, News, also happens one that’s heavily favored by advertisers; and
• Already strong categories of podcast advertisers, like direct-to-consumer brands and financial services companies, are largely maintaining their market position despite the pandemic.

The downward revision comes after what turned out to be a particularly strong 2019, with the year’s podcast advertising hauls beating expectations. The sample reported having collectively brought in about $503.9 million, more than the estimated $467 million. The total market estimate for the year, meanwhile, was pegged at $708.1 million, more than the estimated $678 million. These numbers indicate a whopping 48% growth in U.S. podcast advertising revenue in 2019.

As always, it’s important to consider the study in its proper context. The report builds its findings based on surveys of self-reported numbers delivered by a pool of podcast publishers meant to represent a critical mass of the market, from which a broader total market estimate is generated. Participants in that pool include the usual suspects: Midroll Media, National Public Media, Spotify, Megaphone, and so on.

Should you peruse the methodology, you’ll see that this year’s survey received 19 responses — down from 22 in last year’s report — and that the follow-up Covid-19 impact survey drew only 17 responses. I don’t think that fundamentally changes anything about how we should read these findings, but it’s worth clocking nonetheless.

Anyway, don’t sleep on the 2019-specific findings. Here are the ones that stood out to me:

(1) The two things that publishers most cited as the drivers behind decreased revenue projections were “cancelled campaigns booked but not yet live” (31%) and “paused campaigns currently live” (25%). This gives a sense of scale to what we’ve anecdotally found in the early weeks of the pandemic: Publishers saw advertisers pull back their spends as they sought to figure out the new conditions.

Two other reasons worth noting: 19% reported attributed decreasing revenues to a lower volume of advertising requests, while only 3% reported not having enough impressions available to tap into advertising campaigns, which I read as a proxy for changes in listenership.

(2) As discussed earlier in this write-up, news appears to be the podcast genre most favored by advertisers. Specifically, the genre captures 22% of the overall advertising revenue share. The next three largest categories are comedy (17%), society and culture (13%), and business (11%).

This year’s report doesn’t show the changes in percentage share by content genre compared to previous years. I suspect this might have to do with the changes in category usage: this year’s report seems to be using the Apple Podcast taxonomy — hence buckets like “society and culture” — for the first time, which means that you might not get clear matches with the genres listed in the last few reports. So keep that in mind if you go back to check things out.

(3) Here’s a data point that should be meaningful to advertising agencies that have been in podcasting for a while: the proportion of baked-in and dynamically inserted advertising remained virtually unchanged between 2018 and 2019. I imagine we should expect this to shift dramatically when Spotify moves to kick its streaming ad insertion product — and its supply chain, presumably provided via Anchor — into high-gear, in which case I assume those dollars will be classed as “dynamically inserted advertising.” Also relevant to this trend: the growth of programmatic advertising-minded hosting platforms like Megaphone over time.

Meanwhile, host-read ads continue to be the dominant ad format, growing their share from 63% to 66% over the past year.

(4) Direct-to-consumer brands still represent the largest share of podcast advertisers, unchanged at 22% compared to last year, but fast-growing advertiser types include telecommunications, consumer packaged goods, and “professional services for non-business entities.” The advertiser types with decreasing shares includ financial services (though that still makes up a sizable 16%), business-to-business companies, and automotives.

All in all, the IAB study indicates a broadly positive outlook for podcast advertising despite the pandemic. The stark reality remains: it could have been so much worse, even catastrophic. In late March, I was having conversations where podcast producers and executives were quietly wondering if overall audience numbers would hold, let alone advertising. I wonder if some of this resilience could well be attributed to podcasting’s  youth and smaller size relative to other media.

Keep in mind, though: the structure of the IAB study is principally built around the biggest podcast publishers, meaning that it may very well not be capturing the experiences of the smaller- to medium-sized publishers in the data it’s captured. (Not unlike, you know, the way using corporate indicators to reflect the state of the economy often glides over how small businesses are faring within the economy.) While the story of podcast advertising writ large appears to be positive, it might also be hiding a story of centralization.

Furthermore, while advertising is the largest and most prominent business model for podcast publishers, it isn’t the only relevant business model in this ecosystem. There’s a growing appetite for and push toward non-advertising revenue channels, one that applies to both bigger publishers and smaller independents. This appetite has been fueled in large part by the pandemic, which brings attention to the volatility and vagaries of advertising money, but it’s also been driven by an increasing sense that the pipes of podcast advertising will likely end up being largely controlled or dominated by the bigger corporations: Spotify, iHeart, SiriusXM (now that the Stitcher sale has been finalized), so on.

Historically, the strongest non-advertising revenue channels have been direct support (Patreon, membership, so on) and live events (now indefinitely on hold, or transmuted into the infinitely more competitive live streaming space), and to my mind, there hasn’t yet been a persistent data collection effort to track the health of any of those channels. Perhaps there should be.

Burnout while parenting and podcasting [by Caroline Crampton]. Burnout is a topic we’ve been consistently keeping tabs on for a while here at Hot Pod, especially since the substantial reader response we got to this piece last spring. From all the conversations I’ve had about this since, I’ve come to realize that there are several traits specific to podcast work that can amplify existing stress: The relentless production schedule of a weekly podcast, the fact that many professional or semi-professional podcasters work either alone or in very small remote teams with each person fulfilling multiple roles, and the personal or confessional nature of plenty of audio work.

Put simply: even in the best of times, podcasters are prone to burning out, and the last few months have most emphatically been the worst of times.

Unlike some areas of the media and entertainment industries that had to pause production all together, podcasting has largely been able to keep going, with producers working from home and contributors rapidly adapting to recording in their closets. But even if most audio production work has stayed somewhat the same, an awful lot about the rest of podcasters’ lives has changed dramatically, especially for those who are parents or caregivers to children.

With schools and many daycares still closed, people are not only trying to podcast from home, but also fill in for what kids are missing out on. Of course, this has been a challenge across all industries, with it being obvious to lots of people from the start that the math of working full-time remotely while at the same time running a homeschool timetable just doesn’t compute. It’s an impossible situation, one that Farhad Manjoo summed up in this New York Times opinion piece from April.

But for those who work in audio and need to edit for long periods, or record links and tracking to the highest possible standard that the moment will allow, there’s the extra challenge of finding the space and quietness to do that. It might just about be possible to bash out an email with one finger while comforting a toddler, but you really can’t narrate a segment of a show that way. “Take after take just gets nuked,” was how one anonymous podcaster put it to me.

I’ve had lots of conversations with parent-podcasters operating under these conditions in the past couple of weeks, and a few consistent themes started to emerge. The first was the constant disruption of the day, which makes it really hard to settle down with any one task and get it completed.

“In the heart of lockdown, I felt that I couldn’t focus on any work for more than 10 minutes,” Canadian producer Lauren Bercovitch said. “I could shoot off an email here or there, but actually giving dedicated brain power or a sustained hour of thought toward one thing was nearly impossible. So tasks like writing a script, reading a script, giving notes on an edit — I couldn’t accomplish any of it.” Her husband Chris Kelly, who is also her colleague at the Vancouver based production shop Kelly & Kelly, echoed this, describing how the days were segmented into “little bursts of work.”

The second big topic that came up was just sheer exhaustion. As a non-parent myself, I hadn’t truly appreciated the scale of this task until one of my correspondents (who wished to remain anonymous) pointed out that there was never a waking moment when she wasn’t working, parenting, or both. “Down time no longer exists,” she said over email. “After bedtime in the evening is one of the few times I can get any uninterrupted work done, so I stay up really late now.” Bercovitch added that lockdown reminds her of being postpartum, because of “all the unexpected mental labor, and there being not enough hours in the day.”

The third thing that came up a lot was the strain induced by the open-ended nature of this situation. Some people I spoke to expressed that this would all be easier to handle if there was a definite end point — a concrete date when in-person school would resume, for instance. Yet that kind of certainty seems a long way off, with many places reintroducing some lockdown measures and a lot of doubt about when or even if schools can safely reopen.

Meanwhile, it’s summer. Freelance writer and producer Samantha Hodder said that the start of the school vacation has reduced her available time even further. “While ‘school’ was still happening, online, we had a wee bit of a schedule. And I could get up early and work away for a bit until they woke up,” she said. But now? “It’s completely nuts… It’s exhausting. It’s frustrating. And the bottom line is it’s not very productive.”

Bercovitch and Kelly both said that finding a routine had been crucial to getting work done. “We had to become really focused and intentional with our time and what kind of work you could try to accomplish in that timeframe,” Bercovitch said. “We eventually built out a routine that gave space for each of us to accomplish what we needed, but it was massively reduced hours.” They traded off their kids so that one person could get stuck in an edit for a few hours, and then swapped over, but were still trying to cram what would normally be a full day’s work into a few hours.

While I was looking into all of this, I revisited the World Health Organization’s definition of burnout, which it classifies as an occupational phenomenon — rather than a mental health condition — with three major dimensions: chronic workplace stress, energy depletion, and reduced professional efficacy. This seemed to me to encapsulate what the parents I’d spoken to were describing perfectly — a classic burnout presentation, in other words.

I finished a lot of these conversations wanting there to be a solution to all of this, which of course there isn’t, beyond it becoming safe for childcare to resume. Most of the parents I spoke to were fine with that. Many requested to speak on background or anonymously because of concerns that employers would react poorly to accounts of bad working experiences at the moment.

What many did want, though, was solidarity and visibility. As Hodder put it: “Maybe I just need some virtual high-fives and mild encouragement. These days feel long and the windows for productive work are short.”

This week in Spotify

(1) From the Wall Street Journal: “Omnicom Media Group plans to spend $20 million on advertising in podcasts distributed bySpotify Technology SA under a deal covering the second half of this year, the companies said.”

At this point, Omnicom’s advertising will be limited to Spotify’s exclusive and original podcasts. I see this as an experimental effort to kick the tires on Spotify’s emerging ad products and generate data. After all, $20 million is a fairly small percentage of the kind of budget Omnicom typically controls.

(2) On Tuesday morning, Spotify rolled out revamped podcast charts across 26 markets. They come in the two flavors you’d expect: Top Podcasts and Trending Podcasts. The new charts are billed as a discovery mechanism, but they’ll probably be a huge point of focus for publishers as well, if the persistent discourse around the Apple Podcast charts is any guide.

Audible’s chief content officer is out barely a month after stepping into the job, Bloomberg reports.

Brad Schwartz, who joined from Pop TV, was supposed to lead the audiobook service’s further expansion (or revisiting) of original programming, in part to challenge the growing demand in the podcast category as well as Spotify’s ongoing incursion into the on-demand audio space.

According to Bloomberg, Schwartz’s departure takes place after Audible employees discovered a 2018 lawsuit filed against Pop Media Group, which cited a toxic workplace culture. Schwartz wasn’t a defendant in the lawsuit, but his role as a Pop TV executive caused Audible employees to push back against his hiring, leading to the company reconsidering Schwartz’ employment.

This isn’t Audible’s first executive tumult in connection to problems associated with workplace culture. In December 2017, two senior employees — including then-content chief Andrew Gaies — abruptly resigned during a company review of internal workplace culture, according to CNN.

Schwartz’s dismissal takes place amid a press push around one of Audible’s big original programming projects: a star-studded adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series.

On promo swaps. Got a note from a reader that’s stuck to my brain:

“Feels like a hugely disproportionate number of podcast ads are for other podcasts, to a level that doesn’t feel sustainable given overall audience growth…from a producer side, it’s weird. A promo swap is super satisfying and feels like audience engagement and growth, but then I also feel like it’s all an illusion.”

Are promo swaps actually effective, particularly when podcast ad loads are carrying an increasingly large number of promo swaps? Or do they more realistically emulate thinner and thinner slices of the same stick of butter?

Show notes.

• Missed this last month: the CBC is re-releasing episodes of Wiretap, the legendary Jonathan Goldstein radio show that ran for 11years, as a podcast. Goldstein is now the host of Gimlet’s Heavyweight, and in the wake of ongoing conversations about intellectual property ownership, it’s worth noting that Goldstein himself does not own Wiretap.
• Succession may not be coming back for a while, given that production on the third season wasn’t completed by the time the pandemic shut things down, but that’s not stopping HBO from making an official podcast on the show. And in an unexpected twist, the podcast is hosted by Men in Blazers’ Roger Bennett.
• Decoder Ring continues to be an extremely solid show that I simply need to be talking about more.
• The Ringer’s Cam Chronicles is out this week.
• Shout-out to LAist Studios, with whom I collaborate on Servant of Pod, for the release of and California City.

But as a lawyer, she wasn’t surprised.

The two may be different shows with different people, but to Johnson, who specializes in intellectual property, they’re both versions of the same story.

“You can look at any number of instances over history in our country,” she said. “Black creators often get the short end of the stick when it comes to ownership.”

This long struggle has burst once more into public amid a nationwide reckoning about race in just about every aspect of American society. Media — and podcasting — haven’t been spared. The latest flare-up came as the hosts of both shows recently told their stories on Twitter, causing an outcry from fans and spurring a wave of similar confessions from other creators of color.

“Our podcast is such a consistent piece of conversation in this current moment,” host Eric Eddings said in a recent interview. “And yet it’s not actually ours.”

Eddings and co-host Brittany Luse say they’ve yet to hear anything directly about their posts from Spotify, which now owns the show since it acquired their previous employer, Gimlet Media. By going public, however, they’ve helped to reignite a perennial conversation in the podcast business about ownership and intellectual property.

“Is it fair to say that the work of Black creatives is consistently undervalued across many industries, if not all industries? I think that it’s fair to say that,” said Luse. “So I think it would be naive of me to think that us being Black had nothing to do with the fact that we don’t own The Nod brand. We don’t own the episodes of our show. We don’t have any claim — zero — of our IP.”

She added: “But not having ownership is an issue that affects not just people of color…it affects every single creator in this industry. It affects anyone who hosts a show that is deeply aligned with who they are as a person and their identity and their specific faith and proclivities. It’s a concern that everybody should care about.”

Last year, Shapiro launched PodFund, which invests capital into podcasts while letting creators retain their IP in exchange for a share of revenue. For podcasters connected to the public radio world, Shapiro offers an even bolder solution: from the get-go, public radio stations should simply not try to own the IP for any independently produced shows they are investing in.

“Because they don’t actually have the resources,” he said. “The thing that they really need and want is (A) to make sure that they’re driving membership and philanthropic support to the station, and (B) to build a reputation of being a really positive home for a diverse independent talent.”

There will be resistance to this proposition, obviously. Shapiro went on to say: “Station management, in particular, just haven’t historically been comfortable or knowledgeable about how to work with strong independent talent, diverse or not.”

Of course, it’s trickier for podcasters who are already working for the companies they’re pitching — in particular, those whose work is either within or attached to a journalistic media company. But that doesn’t mean creators shouldn’t push to ask for carve-outs in employment contracts, said Johnson and Spalding, or even an arrangement that would set off triggers to renegotiate as the show evolves or hits certain benchmarks.

In late 2018, Kristen Meinzer and Jolenta Greenberg sought to get ownership of their show, By the Book, when the company they made it for, Panoply, divested from content production. But they were met with a major financial hurdle.

“I was told that Jolenta and I could buy the IP for $300,000,” said Meinzer.

Panoply would ultimately sell the show to Stitcher for far less than the two creators had been originally quoted — specifically, $50,000, according to Meinzer. It’s a sum, she argued, that the duo would have been able to raise themselves, if only they were given the opportunity.

Stitcher, though, proved to be a decent company to work with. It has committed to helping Greenberg and Meinzer develop a second show, and the two creators would have input on any future TV deals. “If we have to be somewhere, Stitcher is a great place to be,” Meinzer said. “We don’t see them as the bad guys in this at all. Of course, they wanted to buy a successful show, and they’ve been very great.”

At this point, Meinzer has made three shows at four companies, and none have ever given her total control of her IP. This spring, she launched another podcast, Movie Therapy with Rafer and Kristen, which she owns outright.

Unlike some, Rebecca Nagle had a bit of leverage when she worked out a deal with Crooked Media to produce the show: they approached her.

“We went back and forth about intellectual property a lot,” Nagle said. “And I think it was really important to me because I just know so much content that is made about Native people is really offensive and terrible. And so I just didn’t want there to be a derivative of the podcast that is like every other movie or TV show that Hollywood has made that has Native people in it.”

Nagle said she worked out partial ownership with the company. She retains rights to her own family’s story, and has a seat at the table when it comes to any derivative works.

At the time she began negotiating with Crooked Media, though, Nagle didn’t have an agent or lawyer. She does now, and tells other creatives they should too.

Unsurprisingly, the lawyers agree with her.

“Don’t ever trust yourself to negotiate something,” Spalding said.

Johnson said the industry could make swift improvement by striking the same deals with people of color that it has made with white male creators.

“There’s always this assumption that these media entities are going to invest more. They’re going to have to do more. They’re going to have to sell harder, push harder to build audiences for content created by people of color,” Johnson said. “It’s a tired narrative that we keep hearing. But we know that is not true.”

In reality, Johnson said, creators of color often bring to table much more than just a show pitch.

That’s been true for Leila Day of The Stoop, who often comes prepared with a plan for audience, marketing, and monetization.

“I’ve talked to white creators at different networks, and I tell them all the things that I have to do when I pitch,” she said. “And they’re just shocked.”

Day and Hana Baba cofounded The Stoop in 2017 at the San Francisco public radio station KALW. The organization was supportive, but didn’t have sustained funding for it. So the pair invested their own money and sourced their own grants. It remains a side hustle.

And though they’ve been courted by podcast companies, they’ve been choosy. They aren’t looking to be the one “Black show” for any organization, often siloed or starved of resources.

“That was my biggest fear, said Day. “I’ve seen it with so many other podcasts.”

Furthermore, she noted, the trade-offs for signing with an external podcast company haven’t been worth it.

One podcast company — Day wouldn’t disclose which — offered $25,000 for the show…on the condition they’d have to give up ownership and produce twice as many episodes.

“That was laughable to me,” Day said. “That for me was a moment where I started realizing that there was an absolute lack of care and lack of value put on some content.”

Day said it’s hard to imagine podcast producers, especially those of color, won’t keep pressing for more ownership options.

“We are in an era right now of sharing information and sharing stories. And I’m not talking about the things that we’re making. I’m talking about what’s happening behind the scenes,” she said. “People are a little bit more savvy right now about what it means to own your own property and what it means when you’re part of a network. They’ve seen what can happen…to create something that you put your heart into and you put all your soul into — and know that it could just not be yours.”

Day added: “I think people are opening their eyes up to that, and they’re really asking, like, why?”

Then, of course, the world changed. The novel coronavirus disease COVID-19 was officially declared a pandemic on March 11 — the very same day the NBA suspended operations after a player was confirmed to have contracted the virus, and the day Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson were also reported to have tested positive.

Shortly after, coronavirus podcasts began to pop up everywhere, and several states began implementing social distancing and lockdown measures. One noteworthy consequence of those lockdowns was a widespread transition among podcast publishers toward remote production. That practice remains the norm today, though some have trickled back into on-site studio production, albeit with the limited capacity you’d expect from a risk-managed workplace.

Another noteworthy consequence was the collapse of the daily commute, long understood to be one of the most important contexts for podcast consumption. The numbers bore that out, at least in the beginning. According to Podtrac data — which isn’t comprehensive, but is still useful in its capacity to tell a contiguous story over time — weekly downloads and audiences started declining following the initial implementation of social distancing measures.

That decline would be short-lived, as listening began to inch back up by the end of April. By the end of May, audience numbers were directionally back on track, so much so that Podtrac opted to retire its weekly coronavirus update at the start of June. (I retired this newsletter’s recurring Pandemic Watch segment a week later.) Meanwhile, listening habits were also found to be adapting. According to the pandemic section in Stitcher’s recent podcasting report, the company found that while listening during weekday community hours decreased, listening during lunchtime hours seemed to be peaking, suggesting that audiences have found another way to integrate podcasts into their lives.

It was a hopeful development, but you could still argue the case in either direction: Americans spending more time at home generally means they have more time to consume media, which might mean that podcasting has to compete more aggressively with other media options, but it might also mean that those with a strong affinity for podcasts actually get more opportunities to listen to more stuff.

Anyway, despite the recovery in listening, the podcast business continues to face severe challenges. Most importantly, the economic picture remains bleak, with the unemployment rate in the United States now clocking in at around 13 percent. In my initial write-up on the pandemic’s impact on the podcast business, back in mid-March, the primary anxiety was around whether we’d see debilitating cuts in podcast advertising spends and whether that would result in the closure of many podcasts and podcast publishers.

When I checked in with several sales and advertising sources recently, a general consensus seemed to emerge: things have looked pretty bad, though not as bad as initially anticipated, and there have been some signs of recovery over the past few weeks. There’s some variance, of course, and to an extent, it’s been a predictable story of haves and have-nots. Publishers with a higher proportion of brand-name shows tend to have weathered the storm with relatively little disruption; others haven’t even started to see any form of the aforementioned recovery. Some have continued to sign new advertisers; others have taken this as an opportunity to start weaning off advertising altogether and push harder into direct revenue. Almost everyone agrees that the industry’s ad revenue projection won’t be met this year, and that we won’t hit $1 billion by 2021.

The pandemic wasn’t the only event that shook the world, of course. The killing of George Floyd in late May sparked a wave of anti-police brutality protests across the United States and elsewhere, and triggered a broader reckoning about anti-black racism and racial inequity in every almost corner of society. In the podcast world, shows about race bubbled up the charts, and some took action: Renay Richardson, the founder and CEO of the UK-based Broccoli Content, launched the Equality in Audio pact, a campaign that’s meant to push audio companies to commit to five simple actions as a starting point toward greater inclusivity.

Eventually, the podcast community’s own issues with race and inequity would primarily manifest around two separate but interrelated issues. The first is the issue of ownership of intellectual property: specifically, the question of what companies owe creators who work for them or collaborate with them on discrete projects, especially when it comes to black creators and other creators of color who are more likely to be exploited in those arrangements due to greater structural inequities. We covered two particularly visible examples of this issue last week — the tension between BuzzFeed and the former hosts of Another Round, and the tension between the hosts of The Nod and Gimlet Media. There are certainly countless more of such frictions quietly happening with many other shows and in many other organizations. (This is a foundational problem that affects talent of all demographics. Consider the friction between Barstool Sports and Call Her Daddy that flared up in mid-May, and if you’d like to go back even further, you could sort the story of Mystery Show into this narrative.)

To address a counter-argument I’ve been seeing a lot since last week: yes, companies tend to shoulder the bulk of the risk when it comes to many of these projects, and yes, they have the right to benefit from any gains that come out of that risk. But when assessing who “deserves” what in what proportion, it’s important not to downplay what the creator or the worker puts on the line as well: they are investing their labor, their time, their creative energy, and in some cases, their very identities. They carry their own risk, and they are giving more in proportion to what they have. As such, it should not be disputed that they have every moral right to a meaningful stake of what they make.

The second issue has to do with institutional support: in this context, how podcast and media companies — predominantly white and white-led — hire, retain, and support black workers and other workers of color. I believe the emphasis on institutions is crucial here. Podcasting, of course, is structurally defined by its open publishing structure, but the capacity for historically disadvantaged demographics to advance in this open (and saturated) context tends to be considerably influenced by the conduct of institutions. Media companies greenlight, finance, and de-risk projects; a large portion of their decision-making involves the allocation of resources. Put simply, media companies can be viewed as monopolies on opportunity, and so it’s imperative that those who govern those companies ensure that sufficient opportunities flow to the kinds of creators who otherwise wouldn’t be able to access those opportunities on their own.

We’re seeing this issue play out publicly with The Ringer. Last week’s report from the New York Times illustrated a number of things about the company — how there is a lack of black decision-makers, how there is a low percentage of black workers on staff, how more than 85 percent of speakers on The Ringer’s podcasts (its most valuable and visible assets) are white — all of which portray an environment that some or many black staffers might find hard to be around. Again, this is just one of the more visible examples; this problem is undoubtedly present in countless other podcast and media organizations. (One other case bubbling up that’s intriguing to me: WAMU.)

This also seems to be a problem at KPCC, with whom I partner to produce my podcast through its LAist Studios division. In a recent Twitter thread, Misha Euceph — a former staffer who worked on The Big One and created Tell Them, I Am — described her experience developing the latter project at the station. It’s a story of working within an institution that couldn’t understand where she’s coming from, where she felt under-supported as a worker of color, and where she ultimately felt exploited out of the show she made. For the record, I have had very different experiences working with KPCC — frankly, it’s been pleasant — but the difference perhaps illustrates the point: Misha and I are at different places and leverage points in our respective relationships with KPCC, and the thing that should warrant the most focus here is how institutions handle and structurally relate to their most vulnerable workers, creators, and talent.

Both these issues speak to a core question about the identity of the podcast business: is it going to replicate older power structures and carry over the sins of old, or will it actually follow through on its potential to become genuinely new — and more humane — from the ground up? This question, I think, will be increasingly important as the podcast industry continues to change in the pandemic era. As mentioned earlier, the story of the pandemic-era podcast business has broadly been a story of haves and have-nots, which means that a likely outcome is an environment where the big get bigger and more power gets concentrated within a corporate few. Under those conditions, the pool of actors that facilitate opportunity gets smaller and smaller, and as history is our guide, the leadership groups behind those kinds of actors don’t tend to be very diverse.

Meanwhile, Spotify’s march onward continues apace. After acquiring The Ringer, Spotify proceeded with its steady drip of deal announcements and feature rollouts: finally bringing This American Life onto the platform, dipping its toe back into video, announcing exclusive deals with Warner Bros, DC, and Kim Kardashian-West, slowly pushing forward with next steps in ad tech and user experience. And of course, signing a multi-year licensing deal with The Joe Rogan Experience, valued at over $100 million.

What Spotify fundamentally represents hasn’t changed, even as the podcast world around it has: It’s the embodiment of a capitalistic force pushing podcasting towards further corporatization. Critics would argue that Spotify’s ambitions threaten to strip podcasting of everything that made it special: its democratic nature, its quirkiness, its sense of possibility. Admirers (and beneficiaries) argue that Spotify is the player that will bring podcasting to the next level: more money, more stardom, more power.

I’m interested to see how Spotify interfaces and grapples with the emerging politics of this moment. After all, the company is now the exclusive home of The Joe Rogan Experience, which comes with a history of deep controversy. It’s the owner of The Ringer, embroiled in its aforementioned problems with diversity, and Gimlet Media, which is working through the aforementioned intellectual property dispute with The Nod. And I should say, it’s not lost on many that all four of Spotify’s podcast acquisitions — Gimlet Media, Anchor, Parcast, The Ringer — resulted in infinitely richer white men.

So that’s the basic story of podcasting in the midway point of 2020. It’s still defined by the fundamental tension between Spotify and Apple — or, if you prefer, between Spotify and the classic open ecosystem — but it’s also been vastly reshaped by a global pandemic, and increasingly refined by a stunning political moment.

ICYMI. Probably the biggest “whoa, if true” story from last week: The Information reported that EW Scripps is shopping Stitcher around for a sale. SiriusXM and Spotify were cited as possible suitors. As a reminder, Scripps paid over $50 million for Midroll Media in 2015 and about $4.5 million for the Stitcher app in 2016, before rebranding the whole thing as Stitcher in 2018.

Here’s the logic as I see it: EW Scripps mostly operates in television and radio, and if you’re not going to be able to compete with more focused and bigger spenders like Spotify and iHeartMedia, you might as well sell the thing in a hot market. But I suppose the counter-argument would be: to what extent is the market actually hot, given the pandemic?

Consider This [by Caroline Crampton]. In late June, NPR launched another daily news podcast. But instead of a fresh product push, this new project is actually a pivot from something that already exists. Coronavirus Daily, the daily podcast NPR launched on March 18 to cover the pandemic, is being rebranded as Consider This, an afternoon counterpart to its morning news podcast, Up First. As the name suggests, Consider This has close ties to All Things Considered, the organization’s flagship news radio show, with the four hosts of that show joining the roster for the podcast.

“We think this is the first time we’ve done something like this,” Neal Carruth, NPR’s senior director of on-demand news programming, told me last week. “We’re pretty confident that Coronavirus Daily was both the fastest launch in NPR history and the fastest-growth audience of any podcast.” Coronavirus Daily was greenlit on a Thursday, with the first episode dropping six days later. Its audience would go on to grow by 56 percent in six weeks.

NPR was already working toward launching an afternoon news podcast when the pandemic started dominating attention in March. It was supposed to be the next show to drop in the organization’s ongoing push toward more short-form news podcast content (the group includes Up First, The Indicator from Planet Money, Shortwave, NPR Politics and Life Kit). Carruth contrasted this moment with when the impeachment proceedings began in December 2019 and many publishers created pop-up podcasts in response. Back then, NPR chose to make the NPR Politics podcast daily instead of starting a new show. But for Coronavirus, a new feed felt like the best way to meet the moment.

When Coronavirus Daily started publishing daily episodes, Carruth said, nobody had any idea how long it would run for. “At that point, who knew what would happen? It might have made sense to keep that up and running for a year or even two years.” Three and a half months in, the moment has changed, and the decision was made to broaden the show’s scope. “We’re hoping to still capture what people remember about how they got first introduced to Coronavirus Daily,” he explained.

Meeting this moment requires being more flexible in coverage, both because of what’s happening in the news, and because of a change in listenership data. “It started to become clear that the audiences were disengaging a little bit from the coronavirus story,” Carruth said. He noted that by transitioning to the Consider This banner, the show will be able to cover things like the current debates over race and policing, the presidential election, and whatever lies ahead.

The original plan for the NPR afternoon podcast was to tie it in with All Things Considered, and that’s still an important element of this new strategy to “elegantly crossfade” Coronavirus Daily into that show. As well as sharing hosts, the new podcast will also see a blend of production teams, with Coronavirus Daily’s Beth Donovan, Brent Baughman, Gabriela Saldivia, and Anne Li being joined by All Things Considered producers Lee Hale and Cara Tallo. (Saldivia and Li are also members of the NPR One team, and they will likely bring audience insights from that work.)

The intention, Carruth said, is that Up First and Consider This will complement each other. The latter is intended to be an afternoon deep dive, providing an extended treatment of a single topic (though it will switch things up on the days where it makes more sense to cover multiple stories).

Avoiding duplication between the two podcasts will be key, because NPR wants listeners to tune into both shows, rather than choosing one or the other. Rather than seeing Consider This solely as a standalone entity competing with other afternoon or evening drops, Carruth suggested that it should also appeal to Up First listeners who want to check in on the news again with NPR later in the day. “We think the audience will get a lot of value out of listening to both,” he said. The aim is to publish each daily episode of Consider This around 5 PM ET, although that’s “flexible” while the team settles into the new schedule.

Just like the original creation of Coronavirus Daily, this transition plan has also come together very quickly, having been put together in the last few weeks. A big part of that is to avoid doing the same work twice, Carruth explained. “We’re trying not to build separate systems, but rather build onto the existing system…That includes the member station work — we’re making use of existing systems and sources to bring this work to a new audience,” he said. “It’s also a way to showcase the strength of the public radio system as a national local network.”

One side effect of 2020 so far that I’m finding fascinating is the deluge of previously unprecedented changes in established organizations. I suspect that if anyone had outlined this plan internally at NPR a year ago — to launch a new daily news show within a week, and then transition it into a new and permanent accompaniment to a flagship show three months later — there would not have been enthusiastic uptake for that strategy. And yet, here it is.

On a related note… The public radio mothership has announced a new slate of podcasts for the fall 2020/early 2021 seasons. It also announced a new phase for Invisibilia; Alix Spiegel and Hanna Rosin are leaving the show, and current producers Yowei Shaw and Kia Miakka Natisse are taking over as hosts. That new version will debut in winter 2021.

Also, don’t miss this profile of NPR’s Code Switch by The Hollywood Reporter’s Natalie Jarvey. A data point to highlight: the podcast experienced a whopping 270% surge in downloads in the wake of the anti-police brutality protests compared with its previous thirteen weeks.

Meanwhile. Stitcher has an intriguing new narrative podcast with Market Road Films called Unfinished: Deep South; Pineapple Street is launching a new show hosted by Tracy Clayton and Josh Gwynn later in the summer; now that Cam Newton’s a Patriot, I have mixed feelings about the upcoming Cam Newton audio doc by The Ringer’s Tyler Tynes.

This is super cool: Death, Sex, and Money is collaborating with Love + Radio on a special series, called Skin Hunger. I’m told that it’s a series in two parts that will draw stories from listeners of both shows, with interviews conducted by both Death, Sex, and Money’s Anna Sale and Love + Radio’s Nick van der Kolk. Most intriguingly, it will also blend the music and sound design styles of both shows. Big fan of crossovers, could use more of ’em.

This is also super cool: Macmillan Podcasts is collaborating with Apple Maps to create a custom map based on the former’s upcoming podcast series, Driving the Green Book, which is being produced by Lantigua Williams & Co.

Heads up: Edison Research is releasing its first report on Latino podcast listeners in the U.S. later today. There will be an English-language webinar at 1 PM ET, and a Spanish-language webinar at 2 PM ET. Here’s the link to register.

This is kinda unexpected: From The Verge: “Reddit will ban r/The_Donald, r/ChapoTrapHouse, and about 2,000 other communities today after updating its content policy to more explicitly ban hate speech.” Chapo Trap House, of course, is the highly popular “dirtbag left” podcast, though the subreddit is described by the article as a “spinoff” of the show.

This is pretty unexpected: From Politico: “How a veteran’s secret podcast put her in the Trump administration’s crosshairs.” That podcast, by the way, is the also highly popular Mueller, She Wrote. Remember the Trump impeachment? Damn.

New BBC podcast unit [by Caroline Crampton]. The BBC Radio in-house production unit relaunched on Monday as “BBC Audio,” having formerly been known as “BBC Radio & Music Production.” I went into more detail on this in Friday’s Insider, but the key element of this restructuring is the designation of a new creative development unit for podcasts in Bristol, to be headed up by Clare McGinn. With a core team of four, this unit has the remit to make shows both for radio stations and BBC Sounds, as well as working with “teams and individuals new to podcasting on pitching and development.”

The part of this news that is coming up most in my discussions with sources at the BBC is its location: Bristol is in the southwest of England and is home to a very prestigious and old university as well as some of the wealthiest suburbs in the whole of the UK. (You might have come across it recently as the place where protestors threw a statue of slaveowner Edward Colston into the harbor, a move that the city’s black mayor welcomed.)

The mission statement for BBC Audio commits it to representing everyone in the UK, but the commissioning power for podcasts so far seems very concentrated in areas traditionally overrepresented in the media, i.e. London and Bristol, with only a couple of people (including the controller of BBC Sounds, Jonathan Wall) based in Salford near Manchester. Prior to the pandemic, outgoing director general Tony Hall had announced that more BBC jobs in journalism and tech would move outside of London, but it’s unclear how much support that devolution agenda has now in an economic downturn, and whether any senior editorial jobs will ever be relocated.

Times Radio debuts [by Caroline Crampton]. Rupert Murdoch’s new radio station, Times Radio, launched this week on the UK airwaves. This is News Corp’s big push against the BBC — it has already poached a number of presenters and journalists — and is part of the company’s ongoing attempt to replace falling print and digital newspaper advertising revenue with subscriptions. The latter is clearly visible in the station’s name, which connects it to another Murdoch property, The Times newspaper, and the fact that a number of that publication’s journalists are now also hosting radio shows.

Times Radio was conceived of in a pre-pandemic moment when relations between the BBC and the government couldn’t have been worse. But there’s been a rapprochement of sorts in that quarter since struggled to use Alexa get hold of Times Radio in London, instead being redirected to a station called Times Radio Malawi based in East Africa, while those on Google devices reported getting a UK station called Radio X, as the assistant mistook the word “Times” for a multiplication symbol, apparently. A timely reminder of how hard it is to name things these days

That’s why publishers have already been rethinking their digital proposition with a greater focus on distinctive content that engages users at a deeper level. This shift to habit and loyalty will be important whether the underlying business model is premium advertising or paid content like subscription or membership. This year’s Digital News Report highlights the benefit of two editorially curated products — podcasts and email newsletters — that are likely to become even more important as part of the drive toward habitual digital use.

Email newsletters

Despite the simplicity and relative lack of sophistication, our data show that email news is striking a chord with many users, particularly those who are older and more interested in news. Across 40 markets, around one in six (16%) receive news via email each week, 21% in the United States. But we also find that around half of these say email is their main way of accessing news.

Daily update emails, normally sent in the morning, have become an important reminder of the range and diversity of the output of the newsroom and an opportunity to build connection. News organizations such as The New York Times and The Washington Post each offer almost 70 different scheduled emails showcasing the work of different parts of the newsroom, including business, technology, culture, and sports. Over the last few months many have also developed “pop-up” newsletters to showcase coverage on an ongoing story like coronavirus or the 2020 US presidential election. Of those who use email, our data show that 60% get a daily update about general news or politics. Americans get, on average, more emails from different news providers (4) compared with Australians (3) or British (3). Across countries almost half (44%) say they read most of their news emails.

With publishers increasingly wary of platforms, email traffic has been an increasingly important route to content. But with a greater focus on paid models, they are also one of the most effective ways of identifying and converting new digital subscribers.

Once just a series of automated links, the most successful emails are now treated as an editorial product hosted by a senior journalist who brings an informal tone and personal touch which has often been lacking in digital media. The New York Times recently appointed David Leonhardt as anchor of The Morning Newsletter, which it also revealed has more than 17 million subscribers — one of the largest daily audiences of any kind in journalism, across television, radio, print and digital. The use of the term “anchor,” a term borrowed from network TV, shows the value now placed on human curation; on guiding audiences through the news of the day.

In the UK Matt Chorley played a similar role for six years as host of the popular Red Box update for The Times newspaper — mixing politics, humor, and various types of user interaction. Chorley has used the email as a springboard to build a wider personal brand with a weekly podcast, and a nationwide stand-up comedy tour. Now he’s giving up the newsletter to take up a new role as a host on the recently launched Times Radio.

Podcasts playing a similar role for younger audiences

The value of editorial curation is a key factor in the success of daily news podcasts such as The Daily from the New York Times and Today in Focus from the Guardian. Hosts like Michael Barbaro and Anushka Asthana play a critical role in setting the tone and building habit.

As our previous research shows, podcasts can also deliver much deeper engagement with people typically listening for up to 30 minutes two or three times each week. Podcast users in the United States say that the format gives greater depth and understanding of complex issues (59%) and a wider range of perspectives (57%) than other types of media. During the coronavirus crisis, we’ve also seen some breakout hits for podcasts that went into significant detail and were hosted or featured experts. One of the most successful has been CNN’s Fact vs. Fiction, where chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta interviews experts on issues like the race for a vaccine. Das Coronavirus-Update is a 30-minute show featuring one of Germany’s top virologists, which reached No. 1 in the podcast charts there.

Podcasts are interesting for publishers because they are much more likely to attract younger audiences, since they can be accessed conveniently through smartphones and they offer a diversity of perspectives and voices.

The deep connection that many podcasts seem to create could be opening up opportunities for paid podcasts, alongside public-service and advertising-driven models. In our data this year we find that almost four in ten Australians (39%) said they would be prepared to pay for podcasts they liked, 38% in the United States, and a similar number in Canada (37%).

Putting the personality into digital

Neither email newsletters nor podcasts are going to be the savior of journalism, but they do offer ways in which publishers can build direct connections and ongoing relationships with digital audiences. While a website home page can often be overwhelming and clinical, the hosts and anchors of these products can help guide people through an increasingly complex world, showcasing the full range of talent in a newsroom in the process. Editorial curators are no longer junior staffers but increasingly important public ambassadors for brands shaping the news agenda every day.

But podcasts and emails may only be the start. Curated editions can take many forms, including multimedia packages of content on third-party networks aimed at different market segments. Editorial vs. algorithmic curation could be the next battleground — a chance to show the extra value that publishers can provide and, in the process, help drive more sustainable revenues.

Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is issue 261, dated June 9, 2020.

The last pandemic watch, for now. It’s week 15, according to Stitcher’s pandemic timeline, or 14 weeks after the initial stay-at-home measures in these United States. COVID-19 cases and deaths continue to grow at different rates depending on where you are in the world. We are officially in a recession.

That said, Podtrac is officially retiring its Weekly Coronavirus Updates, indicating that U.S. podcast consumption is now largely back on track following the shock listening drops in the early lockdown. Further insight into the way podcast consumption played out over the past few months can be gleaned from the Pandemic Update breakout of the omnibus Stitcher Podcasting Report, released in late May: among other things, the decline in daily commute listening appear to be balanced out by gains in lunchtime listening.

Of course, we’re nowhere near a return to normal, and we’ll almost undoubtedly see further turbulence ahead. The nature of economic recovery moving forward remains unclear, and we’re all but certain to see another spike in national coronavirus cases in part due to the push to reopen the economy but also in part, perhaps, due to the extensive protests we’ve been experiencing.

The specific question we’ll be watching closely moving forward: even as podcast listening levels drift back on track, what will happen to ad spends?

This all-consuming moment. Where do we begin? We’re not even halfway through the year, and already it feels like 2020 has carried enough historical intensity to fill decades. The novel coronavirus pandemic has been enough to begin with, but the year has also seen several other events that would’ve been seismic in any other context: the Trump impeachment, the UK formally leaving the European Union, China-Hong Kong, so on. And lest we forget, this is all happening in an American presidential election year where the stakes have never felt higher.

Now, of course, we find ourselves in a breathtaking moment of political mobilization that’s washed over the United States and the world. Sparked by yet another series of police killings of black Americans — George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor — hundreds and thousands have taken to the streets to protest against police brutality, racial injustice, and the severe structural inequities that have disproportionately harmed black communities for generations. The past two weeks have been, and continue to be, a blur: rivers of people, shows of solidarity, skirmishes with police, pressure campaigns against government officials, boiling point struggles over the fundamental culture of certain institutions.

It would be an understatement to characterize this ongoing protest movement as “effective.” In addition to successfully extractingspecific policy outcomesin several cities, the protests have also overwhelmed the public square for two full weeks and counting, to a point where the pandemic has been pushed to the back burner even though its severity hasn’t changed one bit.

The podcast world, as an extension of the media landscape, has reflected this all-consuming moment in several interesting ways. To begin with, you have the Apple Podcast charts, which mirror the digital consumption charts in other media — like the Amazon bestselling books list and the Netflix trending module — in the way that podcasts about race, or featuring race as a primary theme, have bubbled up its ranks.

At this writing, you can find the New York Times’ 1619, NPR’s Code Switch, and Crooked Media’s Pod Save the People jostling about the top 10, tucked in between The Joe Rogan Experience, Crime Junkie, Call Her Daddy, and The Ben Shapiro Show. Meanwhile, COVID-19 podcasts, with the exception of NPR’s Coronavirus Daily and CNN’s Coronavirus: Fact vs. Fiction, seems to have mostly fallen out of the Top 200 entirely. As always, keep in mind what the charts are supposed to be: a measure of heat more than bigness.

(I have to say: it’s been quite a while since I last gave the Apple Podcast charts serious consideration; there seem to be considerably more conservatively oriented shows charting effectively than there used to be, which makes the current foreground of podcasts about race all the more pronounced, even incongruous. Anyway, moving on.)

Another noteworthy phenomenon within the charts: the resurfacing of older, sometimes long-completed shows about race. NPR’s White Lies, for example, which played out its seven-part season last summer, has floated back up to the middle of the charts. John Biewen’s Scene on Radio is back in a strong charting position, presumably propelled by revived interest around his fourteen-part 2017 collaboration with the scholar, artist, and podcast producer Chenjerai Kumanyika, “Seeing White.” Floodlines, The Atlantic’s series about Hurricane Katrina that dropped in March, is back in the mix. About Race with Reni Eddo-Lodge, which was released from March to May 2018, can now be found charting around the hundred mark, but in the UK charts, the podcast has been hovering at the top for the past week. Renay Richardson, who produced About Race (and is now the founder of a joint venture with Sony Music Entertainment, Broccoli Content), told us that the podcast has pulled around half a million listens in its first year of release. Last week alone, the show got around 265,000 listens.

These surges are likely fueled, in part, by those podcasts being featured in recent listen lists published by various publications, meant to guide their audiences towards media that could help them learn more about this moment and race in America more broadly. A partial list of those lists: WBUR, The New York Times, NPR, Oprah Mag, Today.com. I think I’m supposed to be putting one together myself for Vulture, and should that come to be, I will likely do so haunted by Lauren Michele Jackson’s words, who asked in a recent Vulture essay within the context of books: “What Is an Anti-Racist Reading List For?”

Beyond shows about race, the protests have also driven sustained coverage across the robust crop of daily news and politics podcasts. What’s been particularly interesting, at least to me, is seeing how the arguments around defunding or abolishing the police have been thrust into the spotlight. I’ve long been partial to the policy argument (surprise, surprise), but I’ve always tucked it away in the same mental bucket that houses something like, say, state-subsidized healthcare: a policy dream that’s well outside the American Overton Window. Indeed, it’s been a surreal experience to hear those arguments refracted through the lens of various “mainstream” newsy podcasts — a testament, perhaps, to one of the possible goals of protest movements: to push previously under-emphasized ideas and priorities into the public sphere (in part via media channels), to force serious consideration of its nuances, and to accelerate the normalization of those ideas.

This moment is also shaping up to be significant for how it’s opened considerable space for conversations about inequities in numerous other areas of society. Most visible and pertinent to this newsletter, of course, are discussions about inequities in media systems and workplaces, the podcast world first and foremost. Long characterized as disproportionately white and male in composition, podcasting has also come to suffer familiar concerns of unequal distributions of opportunity, particularly when it comes to black producers and other producers of color. The problem, in sum: anybody can publish, sure, but as podcasting continues to industrialize and corporatize, the increasing question is whether traditionally underrepresented demographics will have fair opportunities to participate in its gains or whether it will look like every other established media industry that’s come before it. This has to do, in part, with the flow of capital: who gets adequate investment, support, and resources for new podcast businesses, projects, and ideas. But for the most part, this has to do with workplace fairness and culture.

On that note, one thing that’s been striking about this moment is the extent to which podcast producers of color — along with media workers of color more generally — are speaking up against organizational harm and inequity. For instance… well, see for yourself:

The thing about being black in podcasting, in my experience, is constantly being told your pitches don’t work and wondering whether it’s you or a systemic lack of cultural competency and knowledge of experiences outside of whiteness. (1/12)

— Ngofeen Mputubwele (@ngofeenm) June 8, 2020

The pres of a podcast company accused me of lying at an all-staff about diversity numbers his own HR rep had shared with me shortly before.

Later yelled at me asking "If diversity is so bad here, why are you still here?"

The gaslighting and disregard is in every part of media. https://t.co/P5XUJ9TDJj

— HousePlant Papi (@eeddings) June 8, 2020

This moment also has, I think, a distinct momentum that can possibly lead to tangible outcomes. Perhaps the most prominent and successful effort in this regard — that is, driving specific commitments towards better practices in the audio community — has come from the aforementioned Broccoli Content in the UK. Last Tuesday, Renay Richardson, Broccoli Content’s founder, brought forward a “Equality in Audio Pact,” which challenges podcast creators and companies to pledge commitment to five specific actions meant to push the community towards greater equality.

Those five actions are: (1) Pay interns / No longer use unpaid interns; (2) Hire LGBTQIA+, black people, people of color and other minorities on projects not only related to their identity; (3) If you are a company that releases gender pay gap reports, release your race pay gap data at the same time; (4) No longer participate in panels that are not representative of the cities, towns, and industries they take place in; and (5) Be transparent about who works for your company, as well as their role, position and permanency.

Some may argue that these are small asks relative to the full gravity of the inequities. But as Richardson tells us, these actions were designed to be, as a baseline, doable by companies of any size. And the push seems to be translating into outcomes. At this writing, over 100 companies, shows, and producers — on both sides of the Atlantic — have signed, including BBC Radio, PRX’s Radiotopia, and Somethin’ Else. Hopefully, there will be many more.

We’re going to switch over to Caroline now, who spoke with Richardson recently for insight into how the pact came together. We’re running that piece in an “As Told To” format, because…well, because we can.

How the Equality in Audio Pact came together [by Renay Richardson, as told to Caroline Crampton].

When it comes to the audio industry, I, like many black people in the industry, have been ignored when speaking of our treatment. Many of us are shut down, and many are fearful of the repercussions if we speak up. The culmination of the world watching George Floyd beg for his life and die a slow, degrading, inhumane death and Amy Cooper invoking her privileged white woman victimhood against a black man on camera, all during a global pandemic, was the breaking point for us all.

After many conversations with the Broccoli Content team — that’s Bea Duncan, Jaja Muhammad, Tony Phillips, and Hana Walker-Brown — during that first week of growing unrest, I had a call on Sunday evening with many of my black colleagues. One of the main things that kept coming up was: How do we make white people care? How can we make white people understand?

I couldn’t sleep that night, and decided that I wanted to put a challenge to the audio industry: a five-point pact that could lead to change. I had two points in mind straight off: no longer using unpaid interns, and not only hiring minorities for roles related to their identity.

On Monday morning, I went into our Broccoli video call where we catch up with each other about our weekends etc. and told them the plan. I wanted all the points to be actionable from today and something a company of any size could do. My job was to come up with the wording, and in our group chat, we mixed it up about what the other three points could be.

By 2 pm on Monday, we had five points we were happy with. I made a graphic (which was crap), then had a call with Sony. The call was about something else, but I told them my need to do something. I told them the points and they offered help with the graphics and suggested that I reach out to some production companies who would pledge ahead of time as it would show a united front. Falling Tree, Boom Shakalaka, WeAreUnedited, Don’t Skip, and We Are Grape all got back to me pretty much immediately, and by the next morning it was all set up.

The tweets announcing the pledge and putting out the signup form went out just before 9 am on Tuesday. The response was incredible. Obviously, one entitled white man I’ve never met or spoken to before emailed saying he should have been involved in the planning, but apart from that, we were off.

I then @‘d all the white people who usually ignore me. Strategic public shaming. By the end of day one we had 53 companies signed up including Acast, Transmitter Media, and Third Coast. It’s now over a hundred, and we’re listing them all on the Broccoli website here. Staff at these companies have put pressure on management internally, and that’s why places like the BBC have signed.

Let’s look at the five points in the pact.

(1) Pay Your Interns. If you pay interns, you open up the pool of people who can enter the industry. Even though it is illegal not to pay interns in the UK, many companies still use unpaid interns, which means only the privileged few get those opportunities.

(2) Hire LGBTQIA+, Black, people of color, and other minorities. If you hire diversely across your whole slate of shows, not just black people on black shows and queer people on queer shows and so on, you completely open up the possibilities around how topics are framed, what guests are booked and who is heard.

One of the suggestions when we were discussing this internally with Sony was that this should be framed in terms of making sure shows have diverse guests, that they feature diverse voices. But ultimately I think that if you hire diversely, it filters out into every level. You need to start from the source, and the source is who is producing and who is part of the creative process. You can be more than one identity — and also have interests in other things, I’m a fully formed human! I think for far too long the industry has got away just hiring people for what they see them as.

(3) Pay gap data. This is for larger companies that publish gender pay reports. The reason these reports are published is for companies to be held accountable for making improvements. What most people don’t know is that the majority of pay gap reports are only for the white employees. Race pay gap data is often separated out and released later, usually hidden behind a bigger story. We want the data released at the same time so we can all see the differences and companies be held to account and made to improve the gaps between black people/people of color and white people.

(4) Only representative panels. I mean, this should go without saying. If your panel is all white, you’re doing it wrong. But also if you’re holding an event in Edinburgh, for example, Edinburgh should also be represented on the panel. Let’s stop pretending knowledgeable people only live in London, New York, and LA.

(5) Be transparent about roles. A lot of companies with 10 or fewer employees will have a “team” picture which includes the black and brown faces of their contract workers. We want to see who works for you and know if they are permanent staff, getting all the benefits they deserve. If you have a team of 10 and one black face or no black faces, you are upholding white supremacy.

So many companies have all white employees with just a couple of black and brown faces as temps or on short contracts for their black show or their queer show or whatever. But when they do the team shots on the website, they’re in the pictures. Let’s be real, who actually works with you and what is their role. Be transparent about it.

I think we’re actually at a time now where people want to hear us. A lot of us have been saying the same thing for years, and been ignored. But now we finally have your ear, and you’re listening.

I definitely don’t want to make this about me, and I don’t want to run it going forward — I have my own job to do! But I do want to have things in place where we can each hold each other accountable, and members of staff can hold their companies accountable anonymously so they feel protected. Public shaming clearly works, but we need to scale that.

That said, I’m thinking of holding a town hall soon for all the people who have signed up to the pact and anyone who has questions about signing, because I think it would be good for us all to contribute to how we’re going to be accountable.

I’m kind of…”hopeful” is not the right sentiment. It’s more that I’m observing what’s going on, and I feel like something different is happening right now. And I think it’s a good thing.

You can follow Renay Richardson on Twitter here, and sign up for the pact here.

In other news.

(1) Not long after dunking on Luminary for severe under-performance relative to money raised, it’s come to light that former NBA player Baron Davis is part of the $1.2 million funding round raised by Blue Wire, a sports podcast company. According to Variety, Davis will also be launching his own podcast company, Slic, under the Blue Wire banner. Axios previously reported Blue Wire’s fundraise raise earlier this year, noting that it’s fueled in part by the company’s interest in creating long-form narrative sports content.

(2) In Denver, the podcast incubation hub House of Pod is providing free studio time “to any person of color who needs a safe, professional space to produce an episode about racial inequity or oppression.” The organization has also started a fund that will go toward sponsoring the pilot season of shows created by graduates of its podcast incubator, From the Margins to the Center, that specifically serves women of color.

(3) Quick hat-tip to this Twitter thread by Water+Music’s Cherie Hu, who points out that Spotify didn’t quite follow up on its promise to update its public-facing Diversity Data Report, which it initially made in 2018. According to Hu, Spotify did publish diversity stats for 2019, but it’s tucked away in a sustainability and social impact report meant for investors.

(4) On a related note, Spotify has opened applications for its Sound Up bootcamp, which will run from July 27 to August 21 in the US.

(5) KCRW’s 24 Hour Radio Race is back. Registration closes on Friday. Get in there.

(6) ICYMI: over in the UK, the BBC has appointed Tim Davie as its new director general. Davie was previously chief executive of BBC Studios.

(7) Edison Research with data on podcast listening in Canada, out last week: 37% of Canadians age 18 and older are monthly podcast listeners, about the same percentage of Americans. Full presentation deck can be found here.

(8) On a related note, Rogers Media, one of Canada’s major media conglomerates, has announced that Julie Adam will take on an expanded portfolio in her new role as SVP of TV and radio. Adam was said to be involved in Rogers Media’s move to acquire Pacific Content in 2019.

Show Notes.

(1) Slate’s Slow Burn returns for its fourth season tomorrow. Hosted by national editor Josh Levin, the new season examines the rise of the political rise of the white nationalist David Duke in Louisiana in the 80s and 90s. The move back to politics was first announced earlier this year.

(2) Earlier this week, Reveal dropped a new series on this ongoing moment of protest, called The Uprising. Al Letson, as always, is hosting.

(3) Next Tuesday, the CBC will debut This is Not a Drake Podcast, which is set to explore the history of Canadian hip-hop and R&B though the lens of Drake’s career.

Meanwhile, in Cupertino. One last beat on some Apple developments, which understandably flew under the radar over the past few weeks.

Perhaps most interestingly, the Apple Podcast platform recently saw the quiet release of The Zane Lowe Interview Series, designated within the platform as an Apple Music podcast. Lowe, of course, is the wildly popular radio DJ whom Apple recruited in 2014 to host shows and oversee programming for Beats 1, the Apple-operated live music station. The podcast seems to be a repackaging of interviews that Lowe has done through his shows on Beats 1, and thus should be considered a derivative product, at least for now. But it’s an interesting move to consider in the wake of Spotify signing an exclusive licensing deal with The Joe Rogan Experience, which takes away one of the biggest drivers of consumptions on Apple Podcasts and the open podcast ecosystem. It’s also interesting to consider against reports that Apple is beginning to make some plans around original podcast production, largely meant to promote its other media products, like its Apple TV+ shows.

While it doesn’t quite feel substantial in any way, the rollout of the Zane Lowe Interview Series does evoke some logistical questions around how a broader Apple Podcast original and exclusive programming strategy would work. Among other things, you can still access the show on third-party podcast apps, since almost all of them rely on Apple Podcasts’ indexing to populate their directories, though you can’t, of course, find it on Spotify. If Apple Podcasts getting involved with original programming means that those original podcast are exclusive to the open ecosystem, we could be talking about a very different kind of “platform wars” here.

Two other quick Apple things. First, Apple News will now feature audio versions of stories delivered on the app, presumably as some reaction to (and validation of) the recent New York Times acquisition of Audm. Second, the Apple Podcast team is hiring another editor for its front page, focused on US and Canada, based in Los Angeles.

To be clear: this is a pure licensing deal, in the sense that Rogan maintains full creative control and ownership over the show. The arrangement is similar to what’s been done with The Joe Budden Podcast, which was originally signed in August 2018, and The Last Podcast on the Left, which was first announced last November and eventually realized as an exclusive in February. Which is to say, it’s not a Ringer-Gimlet-Parcast-Dissect sort of thing, just so we’re all crystal on this.

A few wonky details to note. Firstly, the timeline: The Joe Rogan Experience will start appearing globally on Spotify on September 1, and will only become exclusive to the platform a few months after that. (Exactly when the exclusivity doesn’t appear to be specified.) Secondly, the exclusivity applies to both the audio and video components of the show. In addition to being a massive podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience also drives considerable viewership over YouTube, with the YouTube versions, which are mostly just video recordings of the interview tapings, typically averaging well over a million views each. This twin format nature of the exclusivity ties into recent reports of Spotify dipping its toe back into video, specifically with tests around video podcasts that feature Zane & Health: Unfiltered as among the first guinea pigs.

And finally, I should note that The Joe Rogan Experience is represented by PMM for podcast ad sales. I’m told PMM — which, interestingly enough, also reps Serial, Anna Faris is Unqualified, and Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard — has an agreement with Spotify to continue repping the show.

So, this is a big deal. Like, tectonically big. The actual numbers are hard to pin down, but Rogan has mentioned on the podcast that it reaches about 190 million downloads a month, and the show is, again, widely believed to be one of the biggest revenue generators in the industry. The terms for the Spotify licensing deal were not disclosed, but I imagine a crap-ton of money was involved in this arrangement.

While controversial in many ways, The Joe Rogan Experience has long been a massive touchpoint for the podcast ecosystem. It’s the kind of show that ends up being a gateway podcast for many, many people who otherwise wouldn’t have picked up a podcast. By securing this deal, Spotify has effectively rounded out what has turned out to be a near-comprehensive invasion of the podcast space — it’s genuinely hard to see how Apple, the ecosystem’s incumbent facilitator and rival for podcast dominance by default, can match up against this… or anyone else, for that matter.

Shortly after the news dropped, the chief executive of a major podcast company texted me, “Game, set, match.” It’s hard to really argue against the sentiment at this point, frankly.

But none of this greetings revisionism has stopped anyone from launching pop-up news products. If you’re itching for more information about coronavirus and its specific impacts, there’s a product for you and it’s probably free. There are so many coronavirus newsletters popping up that even the same Twitter jokes are going viral.

A newsletter about all your coronavirus newsletters.

— erin mccann | (@mccanner) March 3, 2020

Sign up for my newsletter about the spread of coronavirus newsletters.

— Meg Marco (@meghann) March 3, 2020

A (necessarily partial) list:

Yesterday, CNN launched Coronavirus: Fact vs. Fiction, a free daily podcast hosted by chief medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta. In the first episode, Gupta addresses some of the most common questions about the virus. Today’s episode is about the effectiveness of face masks in reducing spread of the virus.

Quartz’s newsletter Coronavirus: Need to Know is also free and will inform subscribers about how the virus is affecting the global economy a few times a week. The first edition is expected to go out today.

The Coronavirus Newsletter by BuzzFeed News breaks down the number of cases in the U.S. and around the world and provides one update a week, including a “tip of the day.” The first one: Don’t go shopping for face masks because they don’t prevent infection. (Another tip: Click on the tweet below to see the payoff at the bottom of the image.)

Awkward email cut-off point for @BuzzFeedNews' new coronavirus newsletter pic.twitter.com/31K68ByR3w

— Rob Price (@robaeprice) March 2, 2020

Morning Consult, which specializes in survey research and polling, is now updating its weekly consumer confidence indices every day to track consumer responses to the virus.

Viral: Coronavirus, a weekly podcast from the studio Three Uncanny Four, launched yesterday with a 28-minute primer on what the virus is, why this virus has a specific name, and the effects it’s had on the market.

The Washington Post’s To Your Health: Coronavirus newsletter is a takeover of the regular To Your Health newsletter and is focused on general interest coronavirus news, with bullet-point updates on major stories and links to other reporting by the Post on the virus.

NEW: We launched the @washingtonpost's special coronavirus newsletter today, which I'll be authoring with @ReisThebault. As long as virus dominates the news, we'll deliver the latest straight to your inbox.

Sign up here — then wash your hands. https://t.co/5A0lI8EhgO pic.twitter.com/NCXCKlqI6N

— Angela Fritz (@angelafritz) March 2, 2020

The New York Times’ Coronavirus Briefing daily newsletter sums up the day’s major developments and offers tips on what you need to know after reading the updates. It also includes an FAQ at the bottom of the newsletter with answers to basic questions about the virus.

sorry to tell you this, but you should probably sign up for the Coronavirus Briefing, a new @nytimes newsletter that will send you non-hysterical updates every night. sorry. https://t.co/xnU8oZHM5p

— Sam Dolnick (@samdolnick) February 26, 2020

The NYT's pop-up coronavirus newsletter. You can print it out and use it as a facemask. https://t.co/JwJxW7ofiO

— Neal Freyman (@Neal_Freyman) February 26, 2020

USA Today has launched its own Coronavirus Watch newsletter, which includes answering questions from readers. (“Gary in Victorville, Calif., wants to know: Are medical masks effective in preventing infection?”)

In local news, The Dallas Morning News will send out breaking news updates in a newsletter starting tomorrow about “the latest on the coronavirus and how it’s affecting Texans locally, across in the U.S., and internationally.” The DMN’s homepage also lists “Coronavirus Updates” as the top issue under its “What Matters” section.

We're launching a #coronavirus popup newsletter. Sign up here to get the latest on how the disease is affecting us in D-FW — for free — straight to your inbox. https://t.co/e4Y9CUs2BS

— Jesus Jiménez (@jesus_jimz) March 2, 2020

In the Pacific Northwest, the region of the U.S. hardest hit thus far, The Oregonian is publishing Oregon Coronavirus News each day at 1 p.m. PT, starting out with local updates then spreading out to news from the region, country, and world.

KUOW in Seattle has live blog updates in English and Spanish on its website as there have been 17 confirmed cases of the virus in Washington.

Stephen Stirling, the project editor for Columbia Journalism Investigations, started his own daily newsletter Coronaviral on updates in the tri-state area of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut (and Pennsylvania, depending what you include in tri-state). Stirling wants to track the fluctuation of people wearing surgical masks on the subway compared to major news updates and asks for submissions.

Tired of the coronavirus info firehose? I started a free, evening coronavirus newsletter for the NYC metro.

Sourced, local data and info. Apolitical. If we're all gonna die, you might as well have a handle on why.

Sign up here: https://t.co/S4oGGK3HIn

— Stephen Stirling (@SStirling) March 3, 2020

McClatchy launched a daily update newsletter called Coronavirus: Latest News that rounds up coverage from all of its 29 properties and goes out at 5 p.m. ET. Some of its local newspapers will send out the same daily newsletter to its subscribers while other properties on the west coast will be more locally focused.

And all of that isn’t even counting the various Substack newsletters and podcasts coming from non-media sources, even random citizens. (Searching your favorite podcast app will turn up dozens of shows, a number of them seemingly from people just looking to ride the wave of interest.)

these coronavirus podcast episodes are so bleak guys

— Amy Pedulla (@amypedulla) March 2, 2020

No thank you. I don't want to watch your coronavirus webinar, listen to your coronavirus podcast, read your coronavirus blog, newsletter or special report, subscribe to your coronavirus text alerts or participate in your coronavirus roundtable discussion 1/

— Joar (@JoarGarrosh) March 3, 2020

So if you’re sitting in your newsroom right now and wondering if you should jump on this train, here are some tips from the Asian American Journalists Association on how you shouldn’t report on coronavirus.

We urge media to be mindful of photos, context and word choice surrounding #coronavirus.

We warn against usage of:

-images of people wearing face masks without proper context
-generic images of Chinatown if unrelated to story
-the term “Wuhan virus”https://t.co/5pEN7WT0i0

— AAJA National (@aaja) March 3, 2020

Now wash your hands.

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 third ripple effect has to do with Apple. Yep, took me over a thousand words to get to my first mention of Apple in this year-end column, and that’s kind of the point. By doing what it did, Spotify has fundamentally redefined the story we’ve been telling all this time. I think it’s safe to say that podcasting, once a community that owed its health to Apple’s impartial stewardship, is now distinctly a two-horse race. (Or, depending on your disposition, a community stuck between a rock and a hard place.)

Despite everything, it’s remarkable (yet, weirdly, still unsurprising) that we haven’t seen any overt or direct response from Apple with regard to the increased Swedish competition over podcast listening. There is, of course, the Bloomberg report from the summer stating that Apple has begun meeting with various podcast publishers to discuss exclusive content deals, which I have consistently been told is something that is indeed happening, but I’m still struck by a lack of…oh, I don’t know, hunger.

I’m going to hold my position on this until we get to see the full shape of whatever Apple Podcasts’ official next move is supposed to be. If the Bloomberg report is right (again, I haven’t been told otherwise), what kinds of publishers is Apple approaching? What is the driving strategy and how will it differentiate Apple’s new podcast order from the podcast world Spotify wants to build? More to the point, what will Apple stand for? To state the blindingly banal Silicon Valley truism: execution matters, and there are more than a few ways that a potential Apple Originals/Exclusives strategy could succeed or fail.

Not that the prospect of Apple matching Spotify pound for pound with an exclusives/originals strategy is something that should be universally embraced, of course. There are more than a few podcast folk who feel weary about a Balkanized future, given podcasting’s historical relationship with openness. I, for one, am one such weary-wort. For what it’s worth, I subscribe to the perspective that Apple doesn’t have to match Spotify pound for pound in order to preserve its influence over the space. (To the extent that it wants to, which still seems like an open question.) Apple can, and should, match Spotify on other stuff — like being accessible on smart speakers or, you know, improving on its horrendous app — but I do sincerely believe there is a future where Apple can maintain its commitment to the open ecosystem and hold the line against Spotify.

However things shake out, it seems that the road ahead will be a rocky one for independents. The year ahead is rich with unknowns, but the one thing we do know is that there will be more money and corporate-owned entities flowing into the ecosystem, which will translate to more competition and almost certainly a more difficult operating environment for podcasters who’d rather not align with anybody right out of the gate.

On the flip side, my sense is that Spotify truly believes that it will have positive impacts on both big publishers and independent podcasters, the idea being that the company’s various exclusive programs are meant to get its users through the podcasting door after which they can discover the wider universe of shows, from big and small providers, via the numerous recommendation features that will be thrown their way. And sure, there remains the possibility that Apple will, indeed, muster up the interest to double down on open podcasting and consciously facilitate a space where big publishers and independents can exist on equal footing.

But if I were a podcaster intent on preserving independent self-ownership, I don’t think I’d be confident enough to bet on either of those outcomes. There’s just too much power in caprice. I’d probably be better off betting on myself, which would mean betting on various tools, partners, and philosophies that could help me bet on myself, whether it’s an alternative/non-advertising business model (Patreon, Supporting Cast, etc. etc.) or an operating ideology that focuses on being small and niche.

I don’t want this column to sound entirely skeptical about the way things are going, because that isn’t completely accurate. I’m not so much of an ideologue that I dismiss the upsides of the changes we’ve seen over the past year or so, whether it’s the fact there’s more money now that can potentially be spent on producers and native talent, or whether it’s the fact that the growing participation of older media companies in the space means more stable jobs for those who’d rather not live with the instabilities of running their own shop. But I still burn the candle for indie podcasts and media, because independence is one of podcasting’s original promises.

For what it’s worth, I’m still the type of idealistic dolt who believes the trend toward a certain kind of big-ness — accelerated by Spotify, deepened by corporate interest, potentially tempered by a matching Apple response — opens up a gap that can be filled by nonprofit entities, in particular the public media system. As it stands, there’s a slice of public radio that’s responded to the podcast boom by building analogous businesses able to tap into the financial value that’s being created here. (Quick reminder that NPR’s podcast sponsorship revenue is projected to beat broadcast sponsorship next year.) But there’s an opportunity for the public radio system as a whole to fashion itself as the home, and advocate, for independent and open podcasting. This would be a public media system that sees itself only partly as a content publisher, and more holistically as the facilitator of a wider system of publishing.

That’s all pie in the sky stuff for now. I bring up that possibility, though, to raise a broader point: Spotify may be at the center of the podcasting narrative right now, but it isn’t the whole story. That’s still being written.

2019 in Review: Choice and the Year of Freaking Out [by Caroline Crampton]. When I think back over the past twelve months, it’s the freakouts that stand out to me. A lot has happened this year, between the acquisitions and the consolidations and the sheer volume of new episodes cascading into feeds. But it’s not the actual happenings themselves that I remember most clearly — it’s the messages piling up in my inbox afterward. That feeling that there’s a wave of nerves headed in my direction that I can’t stave off.

This was the year of anxiety. Both in the world more broadly, but also in our little corner that’s concerned with podcasts. To give you an example of what I mean: for everyone who wasn’t directly involved in Spotify’s acquisition of Gimlet — which is to say, almost everyone — the seemingly out-of-the-blue movement of a big corporation to acquire a major player in a small industry came as a brutal shock.

Whether you work with audio at a broadcaster, an independent production company, a sales house, a network, or completely by yourself, the inevitable next question is: “What does this mean for me and my work?” And there weren’t many definitive answers in the months that followed. In an uncertain environment, it’s natural and reasonable to feel unsettled. “Let’s wait and see” isn’t a very comfortable position to be in.

The nature of the podcasting space to date has also contributed to this atmosphere of unease. There are so many overlapping and competing interests involved, from public radio to venture-backed studios to ambitious networks, and each has a different set of priorities. Entities slide into a greater involvement with audio, entering sideways or stopping and restarting their efforts. Sometimes it feels wrong even to talk about “a podcast industry,” since we’re not all facing in the same direction most of the time, but I’m not really sure how else we can do this.

Overwhelmingly, it was the smaller providers and individuals who reached out to express their anxiety this year. Creators who aren’t inking big advertising deals but who are making a living (or some of one) from their audio, now concerned about how the models they have painstakingly constructed will be buffeted by the new norms…whatever those turn out to be.

It began to feel cyclical to me. Every few weeks, Spotify or another big corporation would make a big announcement concerning podcasting, and the “what does this all mean?” posts and messages would start to appear. While I do think that many of the developments we’ve seen this year will change podcasting in the long term, I also think that our chances of accurately unpacking what that will look like in the first 24 or 48 hours are very low. Which isn’t very helpful when you’re freaking out, I know.

The trend toward greater corporatization in podcasting is undoubtedly here to stay. But is there hope, or are we stuck in this cycle of anxiety forever? I’m not going to pretend that we’re all headed for the sunlit uplands in 2020 and beyond. But there is one trend from 2019 that I want to mention in relation to this, and that is the expanding choice on offer to podcasters working on all scales.

An individual or a team with a great idea for a show now has more alternatives than ever for where they can take it. There are more networks and platforms to pitch, with more money to spend. Direct monetization options are opening up all over the place too — I’ve written about some of them this year already.

If you don’t want to explore advertising, it’s no longer the case that you just have to stick a PayPal “donate” button in the sidebar of your website and hope for the best. Products like Supporting Cast, Glow, and others open up premium feeds and payment processing mechanisms beyond just large publishers. There’s still a long way to go in this area (there’s too much friction for podcasts wanting to offer paying listeners paywalled or bonus material) but substantial progress has been made already.

However, just because there is more choice of how to monetize a podcast, it doesn’t necessarily follow that more people can be properly compensated for their work. There are more contracts floating around, but also more potential for creators without the means to pay for legal advice on risk. For every amply Patreon-supported show out there, there are a dozen pages where goals aren’t met and the pledges aren’t into three figures. There are podcatchers that now allow you to accept donations directly, but that doesn’t mean the money will come flooding in.

All of which is to say, I think more choice for podcasters is an excellent thing, but I’ll never stop being skeptical about how much money it might make them. The freakouts won’t stop; things are changing and it won’t all be for the better, because nothing ever is. But if I could leave anything behind in 2019, it would be that background hum of anxiety about the state of podcasting I’ve felt for most of the year. An attitude of inquisitive curiosity is what I’m going for instead. Asking the right questions will matter more than ever, as this thing shifts and changes again in the months to come.

Et Cetera

Before we wrap things up for the year — with respect to the Tuesday newsletter, anyway — I’d like to highlight three more 2019 stories I thought were interesting, plus a couple more.

(1) The apocalyptic launch. I walked into 2019 thinking that we’re going to have to do a ton of reckoning with Luminary, the spendy paid podcast platform. Turned out, not so much. Instead, we saw one of the more bizarre roll-outs in the business, which also happened to catalyze a clear-cut case of an industry flexing its collective power to enforce its norms.

On paper, Luminary had a lot going for it…well, maybe it just had the one thing: money, and lots of it. That resource afforded the company the opportunity to get into a position where it could set up a pipeline of deals that could potentially reshape the on-demand audio business as we knew it. As it turns out, though, money can only get you so much.

Luminary’s April rollout was ultimately derailed by miscommunication, miscomprehension, and misalignment. Also: the app simply isn’t good, which, you know, table stakes. The whole episode displayed a fundamental lack of understanding of how the ecosystem works, how to build goodwill in a community (let’s not even talk about the Sign Bunny fracas), and how to create a market with tangible value. In November, the company reshuffled its executive ranks, bringing in a new CEO — a former president of HBO — while benching its founder.

What should we make of Luminary’s grand misadventure? Is it some proof that people don’t actually want to pay for podcasts? Nope. The biggest lesson from this debacle is simple: if you’re going to do something, do it right.

(2) The rise of the West. In the summer of 2017, the New York City Mayor’s Office for Media and Entertainment published a report declaring the city to be “podcasting capital of the world,” pointing to the growth of podcasting businesses within city limits. And for a while, the claim may have been somewhat true, given the prominence of long-standing New York-based audio giants (WNYC, This American Life, etc.) and the seeding of several companies that would become the face of this podcast phase (Gimlet Media, Panoply, etc.).

But by the end of 2019, there has been enough movement to suggest that the focal point of the podcast ~industry~ has swung westward, toward Los Angeles. I’m almost completely basing this on the fact that podcasting’s larger-scale business activities are now increasingly intertwined with the broader entertainment industry clustered around LA.

(3) Dialectic consolidation. Three subplots from the year that collectively amount to a trend: Entercom’s acquisition of Cadence13 and Pineapple Street, iHeartMedia’s ongoing efforts to bill itself as a notable podcasting concern, and Sony Music’s investments in Three Uncanny Four, Broccoli Content, and most recently, Neon Hum Media. If you can’t build ‘em, buy ‘em.

(4) Some other stories we’re still thinking about:

• Caroline’s three-part series on burnout. Here, here, and here.
• The unionization effort at Gimlet. Here.
• Sketchy contracts. Here.
• I will friggin’ die on my little “let’s technologically invert NPR” hill. Here.
• The push for global podcasting businesses, between Podfront UK and all the international stuff Spotify is cooking up.
• Podcasting in China isn’t what you think it is. Here.

All right. That’s all folks. Just one last quick note of gratitude — thank you so much for reading Hot Pod. See you next year.

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

There’s been much written about podcasts in general — but less about news podcasts and the creative and commercial opportunities for publishers. That’s the focus of my new research (with Nathan Gallo), using podcast production data from five markets (U.K., U.S., Australia, France, and Sweden) along with interviews with around 30 leading publishers and broadcasters.

Daily news podcasts on the rise

One striking finding: the impressive performance of daily news podcasts, most of which have only launched in the past 18 months. The segment leader, The New York Times’ The Daily, has an audience of around 2 million people a day and appears at the top of Podtrac’s October podcast ranking, just ahead of NPR’s rival Up First. “We are thrilled to have 25 minutes a day with people that we didn’t have before,” says Erik Borenstein, director of audio at The New York Times (and a former Knight-Nieman Visiting Fellow). “We really think of The Daily as the new front page.”

Meanwhile, data from The Economist shows that The Intelligence, which is less than a year old, reaches 1.5 million people each month, with the average listener downloading three to four episodes each week. These are substantial audiences, even if they are not yet on a par with the most popular radio news shows in the U.S.

In the U.K., numbers are smaller but still substantial. In less than a year, The Guardian has built a bigger audience for its Today in Focus podcast than it has for its print newspaper. “It’s hundreds of thousands every day,” says The Guardian’s head of audio Christian Bennett, who notes that the podcast attracts a younger audience and features an 80 percent completion rate.

Our research found 60 different native news podcasts across our five countries (excluding daily catch-up radio shows), with many publishers telling us they were inspired by the success of The Daily. Le Parisien and Les Echos in France (Code Source and La Story respectively), Aftonbladet Daily in Sweden, The Guardian’s Today in Focus, and Schwartz Media’s 7am in Australia all follow a similar “one big story” format aimed at morning commuters. Other podcasts take a different approach with a wider mix of stories, such as Post Reports from The Washington Post and The Leader from the Evening Standard, both aimed at the early evening.

Publishers are making significant investments in news podcasts, hoping to attract younger audiences, build audience habits, and bring in additional revenue. Publishers say that blue-chip advertisers are now showing strong interest in podcasts, changing the economics. “There has been so much demand for sponsorship that it more than pays for itself,” said Tom Standage, who helped make the case for The Economist’s daily news podcast. “The big change is commercial, which is that we had advertisers who started to come to us last year and say, ‘We are only going to buy two kinds of ad next year, print and podcast. What have you got?'” But this optimism is not reflected in European markets like France or Sweden, where audiences are smaller and the ad market is not yet fully developed.

Production and editorial strategies

The New York Times employs around 15 dedicated people on The Daily. The Guardian employs 10 for Today in Focus and The Economist eight. At the other end of the scale, Schwartz Media, Le Parisien, and Les Echos each produce their daily podcasts with four or five — a more typical number for smaller publications starting out. The skillset tends to include one or two hosts, an executive producer, one or two producers, and a sound engineer/sound designer.

But news podcasts aren’t all about deep dives into a single story. Our research identified three sub-categories of daily news podcasts:

• Microbulletins, between 1 and 5 minutes, aimed at voice devices and new platforms like Spotify Drive (example: BBC Minute)
• News roundups, between 6 and 15 minutes (example: NPR’s Up First)
• Deep dives, between 15 and 30 minutes (example: The Daily)

Our report finds publishers from print or digital-born backgrounds focusing more on deep dives, playing to their strengths in analysis and explanation. By contrast, many broadcasters have focused on producing micro-bulletins and redistributing existing radio news programs as podcasts. Where they have commissioned digital-born podcasts, they’ve often been aimed at younger and more diverse audiences that they find hard to reach through linear channels.

Other opportunities for publishers

Outside daily news podcasts, we found publishers pursuing unscripted talk and interview formats. A number of the most successful are personality-led, such as The Ezra Klein Show (Vox) and Giles Coren Has No Idea (The Times of London). These are often relatively cheap to produce and reuse existing newsroom talent. By contrast, radio broadcasters have looked to leverage their skills in documentaries and audio production by creating one-off series. All the main broadcasters of the countries studied have invested in serialized podcasts. These include Death In Ice Valley — a true-crime podcast produced by the BBC and Norway’s NRK — and Russia If You’re Listening, a landmark series from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation about the Mueller Report and Russian interference in democracies.

News podcasts in the wider ecosystem

News podcasts make up only a small share of all podcasts — 6 percent, as Apple categorizes the 770,000 in its catalog — but the general appeal and stickiness of news content mean that the category outperforms other types of content in terms of consumption. News makes up 21 percent of the most popular episodes in the United States’ Apple Podcasts charts, according to the analytics company Chartable. It’s a similar picture in other countries, with 34 percent of the top podcast episodes in France categorized, as well as 18 percent in Sweden and Australia and 16 pertcent in the U.K. Across all genres, the number of new podcasts is growing at a rate of more than 200,000 a year, though that growth has started to slow a little.

Future prospects

New platforms are shaking up the podcast market, bringing new ideas and extra investment. Apple still accounts for the majority of podcast use, but music services are helping to popularise content, with Spotify doubling its market share in the past year. A number of podcast-specific paid content providers are commissioning original content and offering significant sums for the production of exclusive content. This opens up new opportunities for publishers around comedy, sport, lifestyle, and high-quality narrative series. In the United States, new platforms like Luminary and Stitcher Premium are trying to build a new business model based on premium subscriptions, while in Europe, we’re seeing the emergence of new services like Majelan and Sybel in France, or Podimo in Denmark. All these actors have the ambition to become a “Netflix of podcasting” as they invest in original audio content and try to bring podcasting to a wider public.

But the growing influence of tech companies and other intermediaries is bringing familiar challenges. Many publishers fear they are helping platforms build profitable businesses on the back of their content. Others worry they could lose their direct relationship with audiences, including first-party data, as platforms take the credit for content. Public broadcasters in particular are trying to develop their own destinations for audio content, and a number have started to publish first to their own platforms or are withholding content from third parties altogether.

Most publishers feel there’s still significant room for growth, with new voice-driven interfaces making it easier to access on-demand audio in the home and on the move. But the scale of the opportunity remains unclear, with revenue still relatively modest and increasing competition from platforms and independent producers. Podcasting is attracting younger audiences, but predominantly from the better-educated “latte-drinking” classes. Reaching more mainstream audiences will require a broader range of content and audio formats, better interfaces, and improved distribution. These changes are likely to take some time.

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.

“It is a pity to lose projects with which we share the objective of exploring and connecting Latin America through rigorous journalism. The emptiness is going to be felt; we need more media covering our region, our conflicts, our identities,” he wrote, in Spanish. (Many “Nooooos” ensued.)

This was posted in Club de Podcast Radio Ambulante, a virtual group fostering many IRL connections for the audience of the narrative podcast chronicling Latin American life around the world. Caraballo is a growth editor there and one of the administrators of the group. The New York Times ended NYT en Español because it couldn’t figure out how to build an audience loyal enough to convert or otherwise monetize. Radio Ambulante, distributed by NPR and taking a different format and approach than NYT en Español, has built its own loyal following through listener clubs to connect around stories of the Latin American experience. And yes, the team just launched a membership component to see if folks can chip in financially, as well.

1/ Hoy inauguramos un programa de membresías para oyentes de Radio Ambulante. Con el apoyo de ustedes podremos seguir creciendo y contando historias que acercan a Latinoamérica. https://t.co/FHcLGM9s9s

— Radio Ambulante (@radioambulante) September 16, 2019

Listening clubs are like a book club — but for podcast episodes. (The New York Times profiled music-focused listening clubs in London three years ago; NPR has experimented with listening parties for its millennial vertical Generation Listen. And, of course, the social and communal experience of group listening has been part of terrestrial radio since the beginning.) “That [Facebook] group became big and we saw that there was a need to go back to the basics and say ‘we’re talking about the stories — you want to discuss them, this is something you care about, it’s touching you permanently. It’s not just journalism that is informative to you; it’s stories but it’s also creating the opportunity to connect with others,” Caraballo told me. They decided “let’s go back to the first place and do this but offline. We don’t want to have Facebook in between you and other listeners.”

Funded by the News Integrity Initiative, Caraballo and community and memberships coordinator Gaby Brenes started in November to build out the (tame) infrastructure for a remote network of people who want to gather, listen to Radio Ambulante’s work, and discuss it together. They didn’t necessarily need Amazon Web Services or a ton of marketing given their Facebook group’s already substantial size. All they needed, really, was some space and people who wanted to show up, but they gave them some supporting resources (and snacks!) as well.

From February to May, they had hosted 20 pilot club meetups and officially opened up the listening clubs in the summer. (Caraballo and Brenes put together a very helpful guide for anyone to put together a listening club, either a passionate Radio Ambulante listener or someone from another podcast it for themselves, as part of the NII grant.) About 15 to 20 people showed up per club to meet at 6:30 or 7:30 in the evening — the organizers prepare for them to not be on time, though. They’d spend two hours together — getting to know each other, listening to a 30 to 40 minute long episode, discussing the episode with Radio Ambulante-provided guidelines, and then taking a group picture to mark the occasion. And it’s working: In surveys taken at the end of the meet-ups, 91 percent of participants said they felt they are communicating with the club in more powerful and efficient ways than on social media and 84 percent said it’s a conversation that they could not have in other places. (Another fun fact: Nearly 70 percent of the clubs have been organized by women, Brenes said.)

The team’s remote work culture definitely came in handy for this, with its 21-person staff spread across eight cities in Latin America. “It was easier to have someone we trust host the clubs in different cities,” Brenes said, though post-pilot they’ve branched out to include avid listeners as hosts beyond those eight places. (She’s based in Costa Rica.) “We worked with them to find a space that would allow people to feel welcomed and included. We really wanted to privilege conversation and it wasn’t about the luxury of the event.”

The conversation included snacks, as mentioned, but also materials to occupy people instead of their phones during the episode listening. Brenes designed worksheets and illustrations to increase engagement with the content of the episode. The discussion guidelines for moderators were designed for engagement, too: a first set for icebreaking and setting the conversational mood, a second set for exploring specific themes and topics mentioned in the episode, and a third “boomerang” group: “With Radio Ambulante, our audience has the potential to be global,” Brenes said. “We wanted people to be able to connect and bring that situation back to their cities.”

In one club meeting that Caraballo hosted in Colombia, the podcast episode focused on Venezuelan migration to Colombia and Brazil. They began the discussion after listening, and then someone raised her hand and explained she was just like the people in the episode: “She said…‘What you’re describing in the episode is what I’ve lived and what my family has experienced,'” he said. “She started sharing her experience. That completely changes the mood, the direction of the conversation.”

In addition to bridging borders, the clubs help bridge the generational gap in podcast listeners: “Latin America has this super rich tradition of radio journalism. The [generational] gap of adopting podcasts is still there and it’s still large and evident,” Brenes said. So she brought her parents to a meeting to help them get a sense of podcasts beyond that app in your phone.

Now, the listening clubs are out there in the world, both out of the pilot and spanning the globe. Radio Ambulante’s ninth season launched September 10 and Brenes and Caraballo made a push to organize a few more groups. “We had more than 75 organizers sign up to host a club,” Brenes said, noting they now have branches in 19 countries including Uganda, Belarus, and Australia. “It’s fascinating to think they not only listen to the podcast but were able to find five to six more people to have a conversation about it.” But that scale has also been a challenge, trying to sort through requests in the group from people looking for more listeners in their area, Caraballo said.

“We feel very proud and inspired to see that journalism can trigger these conversations. This can happen around cultural products, like movie clubs and book clubs,” he said. “But using journalism to connect people offline and be able to have these meaningful interactions can work very well.”

The latest vows column is a whopper. https://t.co/8TpFYff0J8

— Laura June (@laura_june) September 25, 2019

The photo made me think they got married? Which I guess they kinda did? It’s super Vows-looking. Congratulations. https://t.co/GaUMezD3XE

— Lisa Tozzi (@lisatozzi) September 25, 2019

Congratulations to @Vox and @NYMag on their wedding, tastefully chronicled in the NYT Vows section oh wait https://t.co/HrwRIniqPe

— Christine Emba (@ChristineEmba) September 25, 2019

Looks like a photo for a Vows column. https://t.co/ehuoupcjdh

— katie rosman (@katierosman) September 25, 2019

(That reaction is a not-so-subtle reminder of how unusual it still is to see a 41-year-old woman leading the sort of high-profile company whose acquisition would be deemed worth a business-section story.)

Vox Media is, of course, one of the largest and most successful digital-native publishers, the autocomplete that pops up if you type “buzzfeed vice” anywhere on the Internet. Built out of sports site SB Nation and later expanded to include The Verge, Vox, Eater, and more, Vox Media has historically thought of itself as the Condé Nast of the Internet: a collection of premium, subject-specific media brands that can do high-gloss editorial and attract high-end audiences, but with the technology and product chops that come from growing up online. It’s the most print-like of the big digitals; you can see the DNA of magazine layout in some of its designs, and its mix of both editorial big swings and webbier front-of-book content brings along some print editorial values.

New York is, of course, the storied magazine that grew out of the late New York Herald Tribune under the guidance of editorial legend Clay Felker. It’s a city magazine in name and attitude. But like its peers at The New Yorker and The New York Times — it both reflects New York and uses it as a jumping-off point for writing smartly about anything and everything. And like the Times and New Yorker, that has given it the ability to adapt its identity to the Internet in ways most local print outlets can’t. Under the editorial leadership of Adam Moss, it launched a series of digital editorial brands with no explicit connection to New York but which took advantage of the magazine’s strengths — most notably the culture site Vulture and the fashion/style site The Cut, which for my money is the smartest “women’s” site online. (Its readers’ median household income? $186,797.) As long ago as 2010, David Carr could describe New York as “fast becoming a digital enterprise with a magazine attached.” It’s probably the webbiest of the major print-born media companies.

So the most print-like digital publisher is joining up with the most digital of print publishers. While this is being framed as an acquisition (with no dollar amounts released), it’s not hard to see why it might look like…a happy marriage. Substantial audience overlap, similar editorial values, strong reputations for quality — these crazy kids might pull it off!

You can see how the two sides are framing the meet-cute here (with a photo that even meets the Vows rule about even eye levels):

We have long admired (and often envied) each other’s businesses, which revealed themselves to be uniquely complementary as we quickly moved from exploratory conversations, through diligence, to an agreement. Sharing values, we found our capabilities — each excelling in different areas, with little overlap — naturally and seamlessly fitting together. New York Media is an exemplar of groundbreaking journalism, with a smart, trenchant voice, that has turned a 51-year-old print magazine into an inventive multiplatform company that punches well above its weight. Vox Media’s authority, spirit of innovation, and foundation in technology and communities, together with its visionary approach to expansion, diversification, and growth, have set it apart from other media companies that have risen in the past decade.

Let’s take a look at this pairing — what works and what might not.

Distinct paywall models. Just like everyone else, both companies are chasing direct revenue from readers, but they’ve had different approaches. Vox Media has been relatively cautious, experimenting with things like the Vox Video Lab. Bankoff said this spring there would be some further membership/paywall moves “later this year.”

Meanwhile, New York went all-in on a metered paywall late last year, at $5 a month. Interestingly, it’s a subscription that cuts across all of New York’s verticals — even though there are dedicated Vulture readers who have no interest in The Cut, Grub Street partisans with no time for Intelligencer, and so on.

I enjoy a lot of New York content, but I confess I haven’t ponied up those five bucks. As I wrote last year, it’s harder for magazine and magazine-like digital properties to make a subscription pitch, given that they are often a news consumer’s second read after the Times, the Post, or some other more full-service publisher. But a subscription that includes not only those New York sites…but also Vox, The Verge, SB Nation, et cetera? That’s a stronger pitch, even if it means divvying up the money among more sites. (Wasserstein said today that one of the areas of “new potential” she’s most interested in is “subscription businesses across this entire portfolio.”)

Think for a minute of the nascent streaming wars — Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu being joined by Apple TV+, Disney+, Peacock, HBO Max, ad infinitum. Knowing that consumers are unlikely to pay for lots of individual channels piecemeal, each company is trying to recreate the old cable bundle in its own way. (Are Marvel movies not enough to get you to sign up for Disney+? Well then, how about Toy Story? Or The Simpsons? National Geographic? Frozen? Yoda? Do you like Yoda? You seem like someone who’d like Yoda. What if we threw in ESPN+ and Hulu too?) They know that, given the sea of free content available and the incumbents’ advantage, it’ll take a diverse catalog of content to get people to pony up for access to the whole package.

When the digital publishing business was mostly about advertising, the purpose of moar scale was primarily about cutting backend costs and being able to do deals with a higher grade of advertiser. But as it shifts more toward subscription, moar scale is also about assembling a big-enough and diverse-enough bundle of content to appeal to a bigger audience. Sites have gotten pretty good at getting their superfans to buy a digital subscription. But there aren’t enough superfans. Yes, there are people who loooooooove The Cut. But there are probably more who only like The Cut — and also like Vox and The Verge and Vulture.

That’s an opportunity mergers like this can provide. This is a critical distinction from the print-era Condé Nast, where a Vogue subscriber had no reason to care that the same company published Golf Digest and GQ. Magazine-style content, but newspaper-style bundle.

(Side note: Vox Media and New York were two of only a handful of digital publishers who agreed to be part of the premium Apple News Plus bundle, in which they get some infinitesimal cut of Apple’s subscription revenue. Better to build the bundle than to be bundled by someone else.)

I like this deal. I like both companies involved and how they fit together. I like that there’s a legitimate growth story to be told, not just a cut-until-you-hit-profit one — which is the narrative most American newspapers are facing, unfortunately.

I’m sure roadblocks will pop up along the way, at all levels of the new operation. But I think these two have a real shot at making it work — maybe even growing old together. And the kids will probably be cute.

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.