Postgame is one of the times when The Athletic’s live rooms shine. The writer-hosted live rooms — which sometimes get called “live podcasting” because the finished results are often posted to podcast feeds — are a two-way audio platform for Athletic beat reporters to have conversations with subscribers. If you’re a longtime sports fan who has turned an AM/FM dial or two in your day, the format might feel familiar.

“Technology is cyclical in a lot of ways,” Will Bartlett, The Athletic’s senior audio development specialist, acknowledged. “It feels like we’ve just reinvented sports talk radio, just making it a little bit more accessible to people in the 21st century.”

“We try to encourage writers to do it around Moments with a capital ‘m,’” Bartlett added. “So when, you know, the Celtics lose on a last-second shot from James Harden and the Sixers, let’s try and get on there as quickly as possible. People are going to be on edge and wanting to vent to [The Athletic’s Celtics reporter] Jay King the way they would want to vent to [Boston-area sports radio] WEEI or something like that.” (Boston sports fans on edge? Can’t imagine it!)

The live rooms I’ve joined do replicate the fun ephemerality of sports radio and — more recently — certain struggling social audio apps. The Athletic’s live rooms are recycled into specific team podcasts and league-level feeds, but most are not exactly evergreen content. Anyone can listen in, but only subscribers can ask questions using the chat-like text box or being invited to speak by one of the hosts. Non-subscribers run into The Athletic’s paywall after clicking on one article, so live rooms are one of the only ways readers can sample the outlet’s content before getting their wallet out.

The Athletic’s first live room took place in September 2021. By January 2022, they’d done 100. Today, they’re closing in on 1,000 live rooms. Most have between 50 and 250 listeners. They tend to follow a similar format: the beat writer(s) give a “State of the Union”-like update about the team before opening the floor to questions, comments, and provocations from listeners.

“It’s sort of an in-app version of Twitter Spaces for us,” Bartlett said.

But, unlike Twitter Spaces, the live rooms exist on The Athletic’s app. With prominent cautionary tales about what relying on social media platforms can do to a newsroom ringing in our ears, The Athletic’s choice to build on its own turf makes plenty of sense.

The Athletic prompts all subscribers to follow a team or league and uses these preferences to build a user’s homepage — and to send push notifications when a live room begins. A user who has followed tags for football’s Cincinnati Bengals and the NFL at large, for example, might get pinged for a live room about Cincinnati’s draft picks as well as league-wide news like quarterback Aaron Rodgers being traded to the New York Jets — even if the breaking story discussed in the live room isn’t about their local team.

The majority of listeners make their way to the live rooms through those push notifications from the newsroom’s app, Bartlett said. Others find them through organic discovery (i.e. clicking around in the app) and social media.

If looking to kill time and fill your brain with even more #Bengals draft theories and rumors, @JayMorrisonATH & I are doing a live room on @TheAthletic app at noon today.

Anyone can listen, subscribers can ask questions. Come on over. https://t.co/rNhRwlWtxI

— Paul Dehner Jr. (@pauldehnerjr) April 27, 2023

No podcast today because @thrace and I are gonna hang out in a live room on @TheAthletic tomorrow to discuss #NWSLChallengeCup and anything else y’all want to talk about!

2 ET. Bring snacks and questions. (And if you miss it live, it will be a podcast episode right after!) pic.twitter.com/LbxqdBxA6d

— Meg Linehan (@itsmeglinehan) March 17, 2022

Scheduled off day for the #STLCards today, but still plenty of things to talk about!

Let’s do a one-hour trade deadline live room at 12 pm CT. You don’t need to be a subscriber to @TheAthletic to join, but you do need to subscribe to ask questions.

Link posted here at 12.

— Katie Woo (@katiejwoo) August 1, 2022

When going live postgame, journalists and fans rehash missed opportunities, on-the-field celebrations, and more. During the offseason or in pregame coverage, the group can prognosticate and predict to their hearts’ content. The whole time, both writers and those invited to speak can assume they’re among fellow diehard fans. In my corner of the sports world, that means Jay King might feel free to mention the Kornet contest — a goofy vertical leap a certain Boston bench player attempts even when half a court away from the shooting player — one moment and, the next, dive into bigger-picture narratives like how two of the team’s brightest stars work together or how All-NBA selections could shape the team’s future.

There aren’t strict requirements or quotas for Athletic reporters around the live rooms. (“Our writers are writers first and foremost,” Bartlett said. “We want these to be something that writers want to do. There’s never going to be a mandate around these.”) But for new hosts looking for guidance, Bartlett encourages them to slot something in between 8 a.m. and 10 a.m. or between 4 and 6 p.m. local time. Noon has also proven to be a popular option, presumably because listeners are tuning in during lunch breaks.

“We’ve definitely seen our highest rates of engagement around times that you would see in traditional sports radio, including those commuting times,” Bartlett said. “One advantage that we do have over traditional sports talk radio is the ability to send push notifications to all of our followers at different times.”

The largest audiences haven’t always been for rooms about teams in the largest cities. The beat writers who cover the Cincinnati Bengals host a popular live room every Monday at noon. Live rooms from a writer who covers NHL’s Minnesota Wild team were popular enough to break the app a couple of times. The beat writer for the St. Louis Cardinals also tends to draw a crowd.

“Not a lot of those [locations] are super-saturated markets in terms of news coverage,” Bartlett said. “This is a way for us to serve some of the markets [that] don’t have national writers living there or ESPN there every day — but we happen to have a very well-plugged-in writer in that spot.”

Katie Woo, the staff writer for The Athletic who covers the St. Louis Cardinals, said she likes being able to drop information and ideas she might not use in a story in live rooms.

“It’s a great way to make fans and subscribers feel connected to their teams,” Woo said. “Being able to have people call in and actually ask their questions in real time to a real voice, instead of debating online, has led, in my opinion, to productive conversations.”

A lot of listener questions are hypotheticals, “usually pertaining to roster moves, trades, or free-agent signings,” Woo said. She occasionally gets story ideas from the conversations, she added, “but the main reason I use the rooms is [that] it helps me feel more connected to the subscribers. Hopefully they feel the same.”

Saad Yousuf, who covers the Dallas Stars for The Athletic, recently held his first live room. (He has a side gig hosting a weekly radio show in Dallas, so he’s not exactly new to audio.) He described the live two-way audio form as a “great supplemental tool” for his written coverage.

“The fans who joined the live room are subscribers who read my work routinely, which differentiates it from something like Twitter Spaces, where anybody can join, even if they aren’t subscribers,” he said. The rooms help him “get a pulse” on which topics readers feel most strongly about, and which questions he should make sure to answer in his next article.

Bartlett said the live rooms can be a type of training ground — an opportunity to get some audio reps in — for writers who may eventually launch a podcast or earn a hosting gig on an existing show with The Athletic. “It’s one way for us to identify talent down the road,” he said.

With more than 800 live rooms completed, The Athletic has had roughly 2,000 people get “on stage” to ask questions live. Hosts have moderation tools, similar to the ones Twitter Spaces offers, but Bartlett says said they’ve had “zero trolls” thus far. From what I’ve heard, plenty of subscribers “call in” with a question-that’s-more-of-a-colorful-rant that brings legendary sports radio meltdowns to mind but, overall, there’s less casual racism and sexism.

“It’s one of the more positive places on the internet, for the most part,” Bartlett said. “People are just there to talk sports.”

Publishers were alerted to the coming change in December, and subscribers were notified last week. (If you have any of these subscriptions, you can see the timing for how they’ll be phased out; you won’t lose money.)

The Kindle was once seen as a possible savior for digital journalism (though Nieman Lab was always skeptical). In 2009, then–New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger appeared on stage with Jeff Bezos to introduce the larger-screened Kindle DX, saying, “We’ve known for more than a decade that one day an e-reader product would offer the same satisfying experience as the reading of a printed newspaper.” From 2011 until 2020, people who subscribed to the Times on the Kindle got free access to NYTimes.com, too.

Amazon hasn’t shared its exact reason for the change (the company’s statement to publishers is here), but one obvious explanation is that relatively few people are buying these subscriptions and it doesn’t make financial sense to continue to support them. Instead, Amazon wants publishers to add their content to its $9.99/month digital subscription program, Kindle Unlimited, which includes a bunch of magazines and access to one newspaper that I saw — USA TODAY.

Anyway, while this all feels very 2011, news publishers in particular should check out some of the comments on last week’s Reddit thread, where customers talk about why they liked reading newspapers on Kindle, and why they’re sorry to lose the subscriptions — and it still has to do with the “satisfying reading experience” Sulzberger talked about more than a decade ago.

Very disappointing. I had only recently discovered that I actually enjoy reading my local newspaper when it’s on the Kindle as opposed to the paper’s poorly designed website and frequently broken app.

In addition to the sheer legibility/readability of the Kindle screen display, I liked the Kindle editions for the Table of Contents feature and other navigational aids. These made it easy to skim, particularly in large issues of a pub like the daily New York Times…

I currently subscribe via Kindle Newsstand to the publications below. It will be a hassle to manage the subscriptions separately now, for each publisher, via their websites. This mirrors the mess that streaming television has become, fragmented into many different providers with their own payment schedules, subscriptions costs, log-in credentials, Terms of Service, etc. etc.

I have:

The New York Times – Daily Edition for Kindle
The New Yorker
Foreign Affairs
New Republic
The New York Review of Books
New York Magazine

Woke up to the email and I’m pretty pissed. Loved having a few magazines and newspapers on my Kindle. Much easier on the eyes than a phone/tablet, better battery life, and things just worked (some of the apps reload and you lose your place between sessions).

Very disappointing. I’ve subscribed to many newspapers and magazines via my kindle for many years and prefer its layout to most crappy apps. At this point, i have been only using my kindle to read newspapers and magazines (usually use the app for books).

This is hugely disappointing. I have been a NYT subscriber on the Kindle for so many years…more than 10. One of my fondest memories is on a trip to Greece, staying in a hotel on the side of a cliff, and barely getting enough 3G signal to download the Sunday Edition. During the summer, I wake up every day and sit on my deck and read the NYT while I drink a cup of coffee. I subscribe to the paper edition on the weekends but I actually prefer the Kindle edition in a lot of ways because it’s ad-free and easy to navigate.

I was mad enough about dropping support for 3G but this might be the end of my relationship with Kindle. I’ll switch brands to whatever I can get NYT on, or I’ll just skip the Kindle entirely. And I was hoping to upgrade soon… Kindle probably just lost a customer.

If you like reading news sites on Kindle, here’s a hack to keep you going.

This murder story we’ve been working on, it’s captivated all of us at Serial for a year. Once we started looking into it, we realized the story was so much messier and more complicated — and more interesting — than what the jury got to hear. We hope you’ll get sucked in the way we have.

Serial launched as a spinoff of This American Life, and its first episode aired in that show’s radio slot. “For us, that it’s a podcast is so liberating,” Koenig told Nieman Lab at the time. “We can tell it as long as we need to tell it, and we don’t have to worry about it.”

They also expected the audience for Serial to be small. “It will be interesting, once we start podcasting more, if the audience feels different than the audience we have for This American Life right now,” executive producer Julie Snyder told us back then. “I’m not sure — it will certainly be much smaller.”

It was not much smaller. Serial topped the iTunes charts even before its launch. On November 23, 2014, David Carr wrote in The New York Times:

To call something the most popular podcast might seem a little like identifying the tallest leprechaun, but the numbers are impressive for any media platform. “Serial” has been downloaded or streamed on iTunes more than five million times — at a cost of nothing — and averages over 1.5 million listeners an episode. That is as many people as watch an episode of “Louie,” the buzzed-about comedy on FX. Ira Glass, the host of “This American Life,” told me his show took four years to reach one million listeners. “Serial” raced past that in a month.

Serial spawned a Saturday Night Live skit, a bestselling book and four-part HBO documentary series, and a wave of true crime podcasts that still hasn’t abated. “Only Murders in the Building,” which just wrapped up its second season on Hulu, follows three Upper West Side neighbors who start a true crime podcast after their neighbor is murdered.

The show also came in for criticism, especially from those who argued that Koenig overlooked major elements of the story involving racial prejudice, Islamophobia, social justice, and the failure of the criminal justice system. “What happens when a white journalist stomps around in a cold case involving people from two distinctly separate immigrant communities? Does she get it right? (Spoilers ahead.),” Jay Caspian King wrote in The Awl in December 2014, in a post entitled “White Reporter Privilege.” Rabia Chaudry — Adnan Syed’s childhood friend, who first brought the story to Sarah Koenig and who went on to write that bestselling book, produce that HBO series, and launch a criminal justice podcast — told King:

“You have an urban jury in Baltimore city, mostly African American, maybe people who identify with Jay [an African-American friend of Syed’s who is the state’s seemingly unreliable star witness] more than Adnan, who is represented by a community in headscarves and men in beards. The visuals of the courtroom itself leaves an impression and there’s no escaping the racial implications there. […]

I don’t know to what extent someone who hasn’t grown up in a culture can really understand that culture. I think Sarah tried to get it, but I don’t know if she ever really did. I explained to her that anti-Muslim sentiment was involved in framing the motive in this case, and that Muslims can pick up on it, whereas someone like her, who hasn’t experienced this kind of bigotry, doesn’t quite get it. Until you’ve experienced it, you don’t really know it or pick up on it.”

In 2015, Ira Glass acquired full control of This American Life. Later that year, the show’s second season, about the disappearance of U.S. solder Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl in Afghanistan, was released. A wildly successful spinoff podcast, S-Town, came out in March 2017. In 2020, The New York Times acquired Serial Productions: “For the people who love Serial — and there are millions of them,” the Times’ Sam Dolnick told Nick Quah, “the idea here is to have more Serials.”

Through the years, Adnan Syed’s case continued to wind through the courts. He maintained that he was innocent. This month, prosecutors asked a judge to overturn overturn the 2000 murder conviction and release Syed, which Baltimore judge on Monday did on Monday. Prosecutors have 30 days to proceed with a new trial or drop his conviction.

The murder of Hae Min Lee remains unsolved. “This is not a podcast for me. It’s real life that will never end — it’s been 20-plus years,” her brother, Young Lee, told the judge via Zoom call on Monday.

Sarah Koenig told The New York Times on Tuesday that she was “shocked” to hear that prosecutors wanted Syed released and that it was “like the city prosecutor’s office suddenly pulled off a rubber mask and underneath was a scowling defense attorney.” Serial was once again the top show on Apple Podcasts on Tuesday, with the release of a new episode: S01E13, “Adnan Is Out.” The intro music is the same as it was in 2014, but there are no Mailkimp ads this time around (Update: One of our readers did hear a Mailkimp ad when streaming the episode on Serial’s website!)

“The prosecutors today are not saying Adnan is innocent. They stopped short of exonerating him,” Koenig says in the episode. “Instead they’re saying that ‘Back in 1999, we didn’t investigate this case thoroughly enough. We relied on evidence we shouldn’t have. And we broke the rules when we prosecuted. This wasn’t an honest conviction.’ According to the prosecutor’s office, they didn’t set out to pick apart Adnan’s case — their own case, mind you. They say it just kind of crumpled once they took a hard look. [pause] I know.”

Fascinating to hear a Serial update on Adnan Syed’s release that’s so bare-bones, similar to the rundowns that other media are offering. It’s not like I expected them to produce a season of reflection on their own role in a day, but there’s probably a season of reflecting to do.

— Linda Holmes (@lindaholmes) September 20, 2022

Today’s episode of Serial is…fine. There’s *plenty* more that could have been in there, more things “we didn’t get to the bottom of” or got wrong. But Serial-only listeners will, at the very least, find out what happened yesterday. https://t.co/saihkTQH7V

— Rebecca Lavoie (@reblavoie) September 20, 2022

Whoa. Was not prepared for the wave of nostalgia when Serial’s theme came on this morning. https://t.co/QAjIQD5woX

— Brandy Zadrozny (@BrandyZadrozny) September 20, 2022

I wrote this 8 years ago and my main regret is how conciliatory I was https://t.co/d5b6m3S3J7

— josie duffy rice (@jduffyrice) September 19, 2022

Ppl keep telling me we wouldn’t be here who @Serial – true but here’s the best analogy I can come up with about it.

Imagine you ask someone to help renovate your house. Instead they set fire to it. The story about the fire brings thousands to your aid that rebuild your house. https://t.co/Jln5j6u4gd pic.twitter.com/OnEaMhTQmB

— rabia O'chaudry (@rabiasquared) September 16, 2022

The chasm between the version of Adnan Syed’s conviction as @serial told it and as @rabiasquared and @reblavoie tell it is deep and troubling. Embarrassed to say I knew nothing of the difference between them until a few days ago https://t.co/pu6ROI5t1u

— Dan Box (@DanBox10) September 19, 2022

i have a lot of well-documented and justified loathing for true crime media but i do think serial is a rare example of how the medium can be used for actual good in the lives of people victimised by a system that cares more about case closure rates than actual justice https://t.co/AWOIWU27yg

— adrie rose (@adrierising) September 19, 2022

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.

That combination of features has led it to be blamed, at least in part, for a variety of incitement-related sins: lynch mobs in India, lockdown panics in Australia, and people burned alive in Mexico.

WhatsApp has taken a variety of steps to tamp down these problems, usually after a particular outrage has gotten the world’s attention. Perhaps the most emblematic country is Brazil, where WhatsApp usage is near universal (80% of adults use it, more than any other platform) and its recent history is troubled. It was a huge platform for misinformation in Brazil’s 2018 presidential election, won by the fringe candidate Jair Bolsonaro. Polling showed Bolsonaro supporters were nearly twice as likely to use WhatsApp for news than his opponent’s. And the messages surging through the platform had a decided slant:

False rumors, manipulated photos, decontextualized videos and audio hoaxes have become campaign ammunition, going viral on the platform with no way to monitor their origin or full reach.

Many of the fakes portray Haddad as a communist whose Workers Party would turn Brazil into another Cuba, convert children to homosexuality and plans to rig voting machines.

Here’s what one academic study found:

From a sample of more than 100,000 political images that circulated in those 347 [public WhatsApp] groups, we selected the 50 most widely shared. They were reviewed by Agência Lupa, which is Brazil’s leading fact-checking platform.

Eight of those 50 photos and images were considered completely false; 16 were real pictures but used out of their original context or related to distorted data; four were unsubstantiated claims, not based on a trustworthy public source. This means that 56 percent of the most-shared images were misleading.

Only 8 percent of the 50 most widely shared images were considered fully truthful.

The vast majority of false information shared on WhatsApp in Brazil during the presidential election favoured the far-right winner, Jair Bolsonaro, a Guardian analysis of data suggests…

In a sample of 11,957 viral messages shared across 296 group chats on the instant-messaging platform in the campaign period, approximately 42% of rightwing items contained information found to be false by factcheckers. Less than 3% of the leftwing messages analysed in the study contained externally verified falsehoods.

The figures suggest the spread of fake news was highly asymmetrical, accounting for much of the content being spread by and to Bolsonaro supporters on WhatsApp.

Nearly half of the right-wing posts flagged by fact-checkers “mentioned a fictional plot to fraudulently manipulate the electronic ballot system, echoing conspiracy theories promoted by Bolsonaro’s team and casting suspicion on the democratic process.” (Sound familiar, Americans?)

How did WhatsApp respond? By limiting the amount of message forwarding that Brazilian WhatsApp users can do. Initially, users could forward a message to up to 256 groups at once; that number was cut to 20 in 2018 and 5 in 2019, a move first tested in the wake of the Indian mob violence. In 2020, the limit dropped to 1, but only for messages that had already been forwarded five or more times.

All these moves limited an individual’s ability to spam a single message out to many communities — and it seems to have worked in reducing misinformation. By 2020, WhatsApp could announce, based on internal data, that the spread of “highly forwarded” messages was down 70%.

(Of course, because they’re encrypted, there’s no way to know that “highly forwarded” messages are misinformation or not. Some JPEGs of perfectly truthful kittens were no doubt constrained in the process, too. But, as WhatsApp PR put it: “Is all forwarding bad? Certainly not…However, we’ve seen a significant increase in the amount of forwarding which users have told us can feel overwhelming and can contribute to the spread of misinformation. We believe it’s important to slow the spread of these messages down to keep WhatsApp a place for personal conversation.”)

And now, the restrictions are apparently growing tighter still. The WhatsApp-covering news site WABetaInfo — there are niche markets everywhere! — noticed it over the weekend in the beta version released for iOS, after previously spotting it in an Android beta.

As you can see in this screenshot, it is no longer possible to forward forwarded messages to more than one group chat at a time and this is an additional way to limit spam and misinformation. New rules for forwarding messages only apply to already forwarded messages.

That would mean the restrictions previously placed on “highly forwarded” messages would now apply to any previously forwarded messages.

This is, of course, only a beta, meaning the feature could change (or vanish) before reaching the full user base. (I reached out to WhatsApp to ask for any further info, and a spokesperson said that it has nothing to share about beta features.) But I’d expect this restriction to have an effect similar to previous ones, reducing forwards and thus misinformation (as well as videos of cute cats).

Note that this change doesn’t limit someone’s ability to forward the message to lots of different groups. It just makes it harder, forcing you to forward to each one individually rather than all with a single tap. It adds friction.

Most of the internet’s glories have been about reducing. You could go to your local library to find out how tall the Empire State Building is, but it’s so much easier to check Wikipedia. (Roof height 1,250 feet, 1,454 if you count antennas.) You could find out who your middle school crush ended up marrying, but Facebook make it simple. You could express your thoughts on politics to a potential mass audience, but it typically required buying a printing press or getting interviewed on TV. Blogs and then social media made it nearly friction-free.

But it’s remarkable how many of the attempts to deal with misinformation (and to improve civic information more broadly) are about intentionally increasing friction. Want to tell your Facebook friends about how Dr. Fauci is a crypto-nazi bent on murdering all your kids? Facebook might now pop up a warning that lets you know that what you believe is incorrect. It might still let you post it, but it will add the friction of not showing it to as many of your friends as usual.2 Want to quote-tweet an article you haven’t read yet? Twitter might gently ask if you’d like to click the link first — though it won’t stop you if you don’t.

Of course there will be arguments about which are the right frictions to add and which ones might be too onerous or too restrictive of particular opinions or actions. And not all frictions work as well as you’d hope, requiring lots of testing and data. But restrictions like WhatsApp have the benefit of being content-neutral while also aligning with the app’s DNA as a more personal, less broadcast-y platform for chat. Amid all the debates over deplatforming — which tend to involve individual users, often with their own fan bases — it’s good to also make room for more structural changes within a platform that can approach the problem from a different angle.

1. Still not ready to say Meta.
2. At least that’s how it’s supposed to work!

We’ve seen a bombardment of “imposter content” circulating — including fake news reports and deepfake videos – while Ukrainians and the rest of the world have scrambled to find ways to tell the real story of the invasion.

A deepfake of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky calling on his soldiers to lay down their weapons was reportedly uploaded to a hacked Ukrainian news website today, per @Shayan86 pic.twitter.com/tXLrYECGY4

— Mikael Thalen (@MikaelThalen) March 16, 2022

The instant messaging app Telegram has surfaced as one of the most important channels through which to do so. But what is it about Telegram that has millions flocking to it amid the chaos?

What is Telegram?

Telegram is one of the most popular social apps in Ukraine and Russia, and has been since before the invasion began. It’s a free cloud-based app that allows users to send and receive messages, calls, photos, videos, audio and other files.

The platform was first created in 2013 by Russian-born tech entrepreneur Pavel Durov — a figure who has butted heads with the increasingly authoritarian Russian state on numerous occasions.

Now Telegram is providing some clarity in a foggy environment of (mostly Russian) disinformation. It has even been a go-to point of contact for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

How does it work?

Telegram has several key features that make it an appealing option for communications relating to the war.

It facilitates public and private groups of up to 200,000 users (where individuals can send messages and interact), and channels (which allow one-way broadcasting to channel subscribers).

Through these groups and channels, organizations can reach hundreds of thousands of people with messages and audio/video live streaming — all of which is encrypted and stored on the Telegram “cloud”.

However, while both public and private communications on Telegram are encrypted, the default encryption setting is not end-to-end encryption, and instead happens on a client/server basis.

The data is stored (albeit in an encrypted form) on the cloud, and distributed across multiple data centers throughout the world. These centers are controlled by legal entities in various jurisdictions, and subject to the laws of those jurisdictions. This data could be decrypted, although doing so would be difficult.

But Telegram does offer another layer of security through its “secret chat” feature. When this is enabled, the communication between two users becomes end-to-end encrypted.

This data isn’t stored anywhere apart from the sender’s and receiver’s device. Not even Telegram can access it. Users can also set a “self-destruct” timer on secret chats. Once the timer ends, the communication disappears forever.

Telegram claims to be even more secure than similar apps such as WhatsApp and Line.

We've no issue with formalities, but not a single byte of private data will ever be shared with any government https://t.co/HZl5b4kWPt

— Pavel Durov (@durov) June 28, 2017

One feature that differentiates it from WhatsApp is anonymous forwarding. When this is enabled, any message forwarded by a user is no longer traceable back to them. The message includes their display name in plain, unlinked text, but this display name can easily be changed or deleted.

Also, while users do need a phone number to create a Telegram account, the number doesn’t have to remain linked to the account (whereas a phone number will always remains linked to a WhatsApp account).

Telegram meets politics (once again)

Telegram has a history of being leveraged as a protest tool in times of conflict and oppression.

In 2020, people in Belarus opposing the Russian-supported authoritarian leader Alexander Lukashenko used the platform to organize a mass protest of around 100,000 people.

It’s likely similar actions have taken place in the context of the war on Ukraine. President Zelensky has openly used Telegram to urge men to take up arms and resist the invasion.

Many Russians have also turned to the app for independent information, following the Kremlin’s clamp down on free media. Russian journalist Ilya Varlamov used Telegram to live stream the invasion, and has acquired 1.3 million subscribers since the war began.

According to Time, there has been a 48% increase in the number of Russian subscribers on Telegram since February 24 when Russia’s invasion began. Presumably the bulk of these people are looking for independent news. Western outlets including The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post have also joined.

Very happy to say that we have relaunched the @washingtonpost's Telegram channel today to focus on the latest from the war in Ukraine.

It'll have reporting from our journalist on the ground, 24/7 coverage from our global newsrooms and exclusive footage. https://t.co/GRNdxPe1qP pic.twitter.com/xyARrW8CNp

— Sofia Diogo Mateus (@sofiadmateus) March 15, 2022

Telegram is also valuable for Ukraine’s military, as it can help circumvent Russian surveillance and conduct intelligence operations. Russia’s penetration of Ukraine’s telecommunication networks has been pervasive during the invasion.

The double-edged sword

As is the case with any powerful technology, the privacy afforded by Telegram is also a problem in the wrong hands.

The Russian government is running Telegram channels for state-affiliated media, including Sputnik and RT news, and has encouraged users to turn to the app for pro-Kremlin content.

Meanwhile, Russian bot accounts are spreading disinformation, often by posing as fake “war correspondents” supporting the Kremlin’s narrative.

Historically, Telegram has been profiled for all the wrong reasons. End-to-end encryption has enabled illegal activity on the app (including by extremist groups such as the Islamic State).

One study found the number of Telegram groups or channels shared in darkweb cybercrime and hacking forums increased from 172,035 in 2020, to more than one million in 2021.

Telegram provides criminals and hackers the same opportunities as the Darknet, VPNs and proxy servers: all of these tools make it difficult to trace the location of a cybercriminal, and therefore hinder efforts to gather intelligence.

For example, the private Telegram channel “combolist” – on which hackers sold and circulated large amounts of stolen data – had more than 47,000 users before it was taken down.

And last year, a US non-profit group sued Apple and demanded it remove Telegram from its app store (just as it removed Parler) for failing to prevent violent content spreading after the January 6 2021 Capitol attack. Telegram remains available on both the Apple and Google app stores.

Pressure is mounting

Telegram has a record of refusing calls to moderate content (perhaps due to Durov’s libertarian view of how such technologies should be governed).

And even those limitations we do have are forced on us by the mobile platforms which threaten to kick @telegram from AppStore/Google Play every once in a while for being too libertarian. Realistically, you can't have more freedom than on @telegram in a mobile app for iOS/Android.

— Pavel Durov (@durov) December 30, 2017

Moreover, the way the platform is built means there is a limit to how much it can be moderated. In many cases, Telegram won’t be aware of illegal activity until it is notified.

And with end-to-end encryption, it’s difficult to know just how much harmful content is making the rounds. Telegram can only intervene in a limited number of cases, and with narrow capacity.

Still, it seems mounting threats and legal concerns have started to chip away at Durov’s resolve.

A ban on Telegram was enacted by Brazil’s Supreme Court on Friday, in a bid to stop fake news spreading ahead of Brazil’s October elections.

The ban was lifted two days later, after Durov took actions to comply with the court’s requirements. He deleted posts by Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, removed one supporter account and promised the monitoring of others.

Similarly, Germany threatened to shut down Telegram in February to prevent “hate and incitement” from far-right groups and COVID conspiracists. It’s reported more than 60 channels were removed in response.

It seems Telegram finds itself between a rock and a hard place. It’s limited, by design, in how much it can filter content. Yet despite the social and enforcement challenges, it continues to be a lifeline for those resisting the Russian invasion.

One benefit for Substack writers, the announcement blog post noted, is “instant, reliable delivery (no more Promotions folder!), multiple media formats in a single package, and another way for readers to connect with you and your work.” In other words, their subscribers can read their newsletters in the app, adding to that sweet open rate, rather than digging through email and possibly missing an issue. (Disclosure: I write a Substack newsletter.)

On the other hand, “Once you turn on app notifications, the app lets you turn off emails,” Adam Tinworth noted at One Man & His Blog:

That’s a huge paradigm shift — and a big gamble for Substack. We all go to our email inboxes regularly, even if we don’t really want to. But this option turns your Substack-based newsletters into yet another app competing for your attention. Not everyone will turn this on. Not everyone will download the app. But, for the regular newsletter reader, it’s a seductive option.

Substack’s app is part of the rebundling. Will be a balance between the Substack brand and newsletter brands. The default setting is for app users to not get emails. https://t.co/SfwGtM1QZ1 pic.twitter.com/Ywx2H7WDuL

— Brian Morrissey (@bmorrissey) March 9, 2022

Substack isn’t shy about describing Substack Reader as somewhat revolutionary, “an app for deep relationships, an alternative to the mindless scrolling and cheap dopamine hits that lie behind other home screen icons,” and “an important piece of this puzzle” in “an alternative media ecosystem based on different laws of physics, where writers are rewarded with direct payments from readers, and where readers have total control over what they read,” “a way back, and then further forward than we’ve been before.”

People have longed for the return of not just the RSS reader but the bloggy Google Reader-era internet basically since Google Reader shut down in 2013. Most years, Nieman Lab’s prediction package includes at least one prediction about a return of blogging, a return to better blogs, or a renewed embrace of RSS. A lot of companies have tried. Maybe this time, our attention won’t be too shot, and the content firehose will slow to a trickle, and it’ll work.

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.”

But much of the internet is designed for an English-speaking audience, Jani Pasha, one of the co-founders of the hyperlocal information app Lokal, told me.

That’s why Lokal, an Android app that has been downloaded more than seven million times, is available in Tamil and Telugu, two of India’s most widely spoken languages. It already offered citizen journalism that users could share, but now it’s branching out into replicating other services that newspapers in India offer.

In particular, Pasha and co-founder Vipul Chaudhary are optimizing and monetizing shoutouts. People often pay for billboards, banners, and newspaper ads to announce milestones, greet visitors, and post jobs or matrimonial ads.

In these pictures, people are wishing others in town on a festive event, friends of Anji & Shyam are wishing them on their retirement. They are doing this on a banner advertisement placed in the town center. pic.twitter.com/WlWkvKlHGP

— Jani (@Janilokal) March 4, 2021

Pasha and Chaudhary first launched an app in 2016 that provided automated news feeds, thinking it could combat the misinformation problem in the country. But when no one was using it, they conducted some user research to figure out what people’s needs were. They found that lots of communities heavily relied on their local newspapers in their local languages for news they couldn’t get anywhere else.

Our users are paying about INR 2000 -5000 Rs to wish their friends/family members and show this to thousands in their town on the Lokal app. In comparison, Hotstar subscription is INR 999 per year pic.twitter.com/kUtna7iqut

— Jani (@Janilokal) March 4, 2021

In February, Lokal brought in $50,000 worth of ad revenue; in March, that amount increased to $60,000.

“Apart from the shoutouts, it’s about needs,” Pasha said. If a business posts a job opening in a newspaper, he said, the job might take 30 days to fill. On Lokal, “it’s happening in less than seven days.”

Pasha compared Lokal to something like NextDoor in the United States, in that the app not only connects neighbors but also uses a verification process to ensure that the people using it are who they say they are.

“Whoever is creating content has to give information about themselves, like their government ID, and also has to belong to that physical location, town, or district to create content about the town or district,” Pasha said. “We have a community manager who takes care of community moderation. The community can report any content that is objectionable and our community manager acts on it. We’re not Facebook that has millions of pieces of content created every day. The local town level gets between 200 and 250 content pieces a day, so it’s easy for us to respond and act on the content that gets reported.”

He also described it as “a hyperlocal Tinder,” because it cuts out the middleman (a matchmaker) as people start to look for spouses — again cutting down on the time between an ad being posted and meetings being set up.

Matrimonial profiles are being created on Lokal. After getting the profile verified, they can immediately connect with 3 relevant profiles. Users are paying us a subscription fee of INR 999 to connect with more people. pic.twitter.com/ASAdDORQlk

— Jani (@Janilokal) March 11, 2021

Lokal is currently an Android-only application and available in 63 locations in four states in India. Over the next year, Pasha said he wants to bump that up to 150 locations, and be in 500 locations in the next two or three years.

“If there were no internet today, newspapers still would have been great large businesses because there is no other way for you to stay updated or get things done,” he said. “Once you have the superior experience getting going in a location, the revenue happens. The revenue is essentially the measure of value that you’re providing. The value is great, so people will pay.”

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

But here’s the interesting thing. Yahoo News (which has long been one of the most-used online news brands in the U.S. and around the world, even if you don’t know anyone who uses it) isn’t just on TikTok — it’s one of the most popular news organizations on the platform. The Yahoo News account now has 1.1 million followers, including many, presumably, who are encountering the brand for the first time. Launched one year ago this month, Yahoo News is outpacing CBS News (947,000 followers), USA Today (895,000), The Washington Post (894,000), NBC News (644,000), and plenty of others. (It’s behind NowThis News, which has 2.5 million followers, and The Daily Mail, with 1.5 million.)

The account — started and run by Yahoo News special projects editor Julia Munslow — isn’t afraid to embrace humor, starting with a tongue-in-cheek bio: “Yes, we still exist.”

The content leans on fairly straightforward news coverage and service journalism geared toward the platform’s younger audience. In recent days, for example, there have been posts about the Covid-19 stimulus bill, a “360” look at raising the federal minimum wage, and early career advice pegged to Women’s History Month.

I wanted to know more, so I talked to Munslow and Joanna Lambert, head of consumer at Verizon Media, about why Yahoo News joined TikTok in the first place, combating news fatigue, and what they think Gen Z wants from a news organization.

What’s the big-picture strategy?

Yahoo News maintains a newsroom of about 40 and also aggregates news from more than 100 partner sites. It does not have a subscription product and the homepage is a fairly straightforward list of news stories with ads interspersed. (On a recent weekday, the top ones were “Conjoined twins share appalling news after nine years,” “Food you shouldn’t buy under any circumstances,” and “Hilarious tattoo fails (#12 may never be employed).”) The company, naturally, pays close attention to traffic trends, starting with the fact that more and more web traffic has been coming from people using mobile devices.

“We realized the way news is consumed has changed dramatically and we needed to evolve the way we meet new customers, and especially to meet them where they are,” said Joanna Lambert, head of consumer at Verizon Media. “In 2020, we put an intentional strategy in place to think about how to be mobile-forward and how to be on new platforms that could be more engaging with audiences. A key part of that strategy has been around TikTok.”

2020, of course, wound up being an outlier year. There was an unexpected uptick in desktop usage as many people stopped commuting or straying far from home during the pandemic. Still, Yahoo saw a 24% increase in mobile web and app users compared to 2019. It wasn’t the only good news for Verizon, which owns Yahoo News as well as sister sites like Yahoo Finance. In January, Verizon reported its first quarter of revenue growth since acquiring Yahoo for $4.48 billion in 2017, fueled by a 25% increase in ad revenue compared to the previous year and an 11% increase in daily active users for its news products.

After years of cutbacks and the highlight at quarterly meetings being that the “declines are declining,” the company feels like it’s found a workable strategy. “We expect the evolution to continue to be on mobile,” Lambert said. “That’s where we’re investing our resources now.”

Lambert, for her corporate title and 30,000-foot view, sincerely seems to appreciate the cheekiness of the account, even when it touches on Yahoo’s reputation as something of a digital dinosaur. “I actually love the ‘Yes, we still exist’ line. It’s fun, and it takes a dig at the fact we’ve been around for a long time,” she said. “It says we’re committed to staying relevant today and into the future.”

“For Gen Z, by Gen Z”

Munslow, previously an intern and associate editor at Yahoo, had recently returned to the company following a year teaching in Malaysia. Her students introduced her to TikTok and she saw firsthand that, in addition to being a low-stakes way to practice conversational English, the platform was accessible, flexible, and, importantly, fun to use. “I think we have to get on TikTok,” she told her manager on her first day back.

Yahoo knew its TikTok strategy had to be more than a copy-and-paste job from its website, but the team wanted to make sure it was introducing itself as a nonpartisan (“Yahoo purple” was mentioned), fact-based provider of news to users who may be encountering it for the first time.

“I think we’ve been very successful building our brand and audience on TikTok because we’ve been very authentic with the audience about who we are and what we offer,” Lambert said. “We didn’t take our Yahoo News content and just sort of transport it to a different platform. On TikTok, we are news for Gen Z delivered by Gen Z from the trusted Yahoo newsroom. What we’ve been able to do is provide that fact-based news, but inject an element of fun and engagement into it.”

The Yahoo News TikTok account ended up launching on Super Tuesday after a late night brainstorming the best way to promote the newsroom’s election coverage to new audiences. But before the launch, Munslow said she logged hours looking at what other news organizations were doing on the platform and immersing herself in the larger TikTok community.

It was important to Munslow — who, at 24 years old, qualifies as a member of Gen Z — that Yahoo’s voice on the platform was both highly accessible and primarily journalistic.

“We really wanted to focus on delivering the news in a trusted, but conversational, way,” she said. “We wanted to break down the news in a way that matters to them. We’ve honed in on the topics we know they care about and we’re delivering the news in a way that feels accessible to Gen Z.”

So what are the topics that Gen Z cares about?

Research indicates they’re more politically engaged but less bound by party labels than preceding generations and Munslow said that in terms of hard news coverage on TikTok, nothing beats politics. Yahoo’s coverage of the presidential inauguration and a two-parter on Biden’s “Day 1” actions, for example, pushed its account over the one million mark, earning it 92,000 new followers in 24 hours.

@yahoonewsHere’s what Biden did on Day 1 in office, part 2. @juliamunslow #news #politics #biden #yahoonews♬ original sound – Yahoo News

TikTok videos that touch on topics like climate change, social justice, student loan debt, and personal finance do well, too. Munslow said witnessing multiple recessions has made Gen Z interested in budgeting, investing, and money more generally.

“In the 2008 recession, they watched parents lose jobs, and their family friends lose jobs. And now, we’re in a pandemic that has brought another huge blow to the U.S. economy,” Munslow said. “Personal finance is huge on TikTok. We know they really care about that.”

The account doesn’t shy away from heavy material. Yahoo News has posted more than 30 videos covering the violent riot at the Capitol in early January. Its on-the-ground reporting in D.C. included the clip of “Elizabeth from Knoxville” that has been viewed upwards of 31 million times.

To combat news fatigue and anxiety, it’s also put “mental health breaks” in its timeline that encourage users to breathe, take walks, and periodically tune out. In a related series, Yahoo editor Gabrielle Sorto does soothing activities — takes a coffee break, paints a vase, bakes cookies — while recapping some feel-good headlines.

But, also? It’s not that serious.

“TikTok is a place for fun and for creativity,” Munslow said. The Yahoo News account doesn’t go in for dance videos. “Part of that is because I’m not, uh, the world’s strongest dancer,” Munslow says. But it’ll join in other trends.

Different content appears each user’s “For You” page. You might get more vegetarian cooking content, while someone else sees more Jayson Tatum highlights. To get the full picture, the team relies on a Slack channel where Yahoo News staffers active on TikTok drop trends and other ideas for the account.

When videos using hypothetical group chats starting popping up everywhere, for example, the team used the format to explain where various Republican leaders stood on impeachment.

@yahoonewsHow Republicans generally stand on impeachment, explained through a hypothetical group chat. #politics #impeachment #news #groupchat #yahoonews♬ original sound – Yahoo News

TikTok makes it easy to reuse sounds, or music, from other videos. (Think of the sea shanties that went viral earlier this year.) Incorporating a trending clip is another way that Yahoo News finds new audiences. They recently used music (“The Juice by Mr Fingers“) that’s been featured in nearly 27,000 videos in a TikTok following a journalist taking her mother to get a Covid-19 vaccine.

@yahoonewsCome with me as I take my mom to get her COVID-19 vaccine in California! @angelaishere #news #covid19 #vaccine #covidvaccine #yahoonews♬ The JUICE by MR FINGERS – Han

Every TikTok, no matter how playful, goes through a formal editorial process.

Munslow typically starts the day reviewing footage available to use through partnerships and what’s produced by the Yahoo News newsroom. She compiles a list of topics or articles that could be turned into TikToks. Once selections have been made and footage has been edited, Munslow or another editor will screen record the draft in TikTok, including captions, hash tags, title, and the video itself. That recording winds up back in the dedicated Slack channel where editors check facts and ensure the caption and subtitles are typo-free.

If the team is creating an original video — like for the Yahoo 360 videos representing “every side” of an argument — the script goes through an editing process before they’re recorded.

@yahoonewsShould the minimum wage be raised to $15? Here’s a look from every angle, with a 360. ##minimumwage ##yahoonews360##yahoonews##politics##news##jobs♬ original sound – Yahoo News

One other tip? Munslow highly recommends using subtitles and captions.

“It makes it easier for your audiences to understand what happening in the video and makes the video more accessible for all audiences,” she said. “Subtitling has proven to really help us when we’re going through the editing process and making sure our content is accurate.”

Rethinking engagement — and continuing to experiment

Yahoo News — like a number of other news organizations — has done away with its comments section. That was not a particularly popular move. (The first several pages on Yahoo News’ feedback forum show users comments’ return.) But, on TikTok, Munslow says she prioritizes engagement and encourages comments and questions.

“We look at our comments a lot, and we try to comment back to them as much as possible, whether it’s to answer a question they have about a news topic or something more fun and light and conversational.” She has clarified what’s in a particular piece of legislation and, when asked, named her favorite cookie (“white chocolate macadamia”). “It shows we’re humans, we care about their lives, and what’s relevant to their lives,” Munslow said.

Ultimately, reaching more than one million followers within a year has meant trial and error, Munslow said. What resulted in a viral TikTok this week might not work the following week — or for a different account. Sometimes videos — like a series that answered questions about Trump’s second impeachment — don’t do as well as she expected. It’s all part of the process.

Besides trying to keep videos under 30 seconds, Munslow said she has no fool-proof tips for news organizations that would work better than testing different videos and formats themselves.

“I have been trying to figure out the algorithm since we got on,” she said. “I think the biggest pieces of advice I can give to any organization, even outside of news, trying to get on TikTok is to experiment.”

From the Texas Tribune‘s executive editor Ross Ramsey:

Texas got close to the brink this week, as bad weather, inadequate preparation and weak leadership left millions without electricity and water, endangered in a prosperous state that ought to know better.

The toll has been awful. At one point, more than 4 million households were without power, and as many as 13 million people were in places on Thursday afternoon where tap water, if it was even available, wasn’t safe until it was boiled for two minutes. Unlike a summer peak in energy demand, electrical generators were competing for natural gas with regular folks, many of whom use gas to heat their homes. And the public health effect — the number of people hurt, sickened or killed by the storm, hasn’t been measured.

Not sure what we’re going to eat today, but at least I can see my own breath in my apartment. pic.twitter.com/Tcj5ElB4J5

— Dom DiFurio (@DomDiFurio) February 15, 2021

Have watched many a Texas city / state officials press conference this week. When asked “what should we do”, the response consistently has been: 1) try mutual aid
2) Google for resources

— stacy-marie ishmael (@s_m_i) February 18, 2021

Many Texas journalists are facing the same challenges as the audiences they cover. In an effort to get people information, on Thursday the Texas Tribune and the Austin American-Statesman both launched texting services that allow readers to receive SMS updates on power outages, water conservation, and more. Subscribers can also text back and ask the journalists questions.

The texting campaigns are powered by Subtext, a subscription messaging platform that allows organizations to text with their audiences. Subtext CEO and cofounder Mike Donoghue said that after the Tribune and the Statesman reached out about launching campaigns, they were able to get set up and texting within 24 hours.

SMS updates in this situation are smart for a few reasons. Refreshing websites, incessant application push notifications, checking social media platforms, and even iMessage require a certain internet signal strength and use up data. Power has been going in and out in Texas for days, and not everyone has an unlimited data plan. All of those things can also drain phone batteries. SMS, on the other hand, only requires access to the cell phone’s network (though some providers were struggling with outages in Texas earlier this week).

Here’s what texts from The Texas Tribune look like (I signed up for alerts but am not texting in questions, so as to not overload them):

The Austin American-Statesman, which also offers SMS updates in Spanish:

The Dallas Morning News had been using Subtext before the winter storm began and is making use of its existing campaigns to share information with subscribers.

hello if you’re in D-FW and would like weather-related text updates, my team @dallasnews has been sending the latest news and resources to readers through our daily roundups

here’s how to sign up: https://t.co/TFFeFrjW3X https://t.co/o3nrcfUPqs

— mallorie sullivan (@malloriesullivn) February 19, 2021

Austonia, a new local news startup covering Austin, prompts users to sign up for Subtext on its homepage. The Dallas Free Press, which covers the neighborhoods of South and West Dallas, offers a Subtext campaign for South Dallas, an English-language campaign for West Dallas, and a Spanish-language campaign for West Dallas.

Texas Public Radio reporter María Méndez is threading the publications offering SMS updates here:

1/ So glad Texas newsrooms are offering text message updates as we continue to see cold weather and lots of trouble in the state.

For statewide updates, you can text the @TexasTribune:https://t.co/9jNpCwgRxs

— María Méndez (@anxious_maria) February 19, 2021

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.

But what exactly should we expect from Vice’s beefed up audio team?

Kate Osborn is the person with the answers. We’ve featured Osborn in Hot Pod before, through a Career Spotlight segment that ran back in December, and she’s probably one of the more interesting people you’d meet in this business. A documentarian at heart, her work has spanned a wide number of roles, companies, and media, including stints at The Rachel Maddow Show, WBUR, and HuffPost. She joined Vice Media over a year ago to work on its revamped audio efforts, and today, she holds the title of VP of Audio.

Osborn tells me that the decision to staff up in this manner came out of an intent to expand sustainably. Coming off of the successes of its previous podcast projects, Vice had wanted to do more audio, but it also began to sense that it needed more flexibility in the way it conceptualized and executed on show ideas. “Something that came up a ton was the fact that there were so many great stories we wanted to pursue, but not all of them are meant to be full eight-to-twelve episode seasons,” said Osborn. A flagship platform like the Vice News Reports podcast could be a home to those different show variations, but staffing up on a project-by-project basis, then, wasn’t a feasible way to solve that particular problem, so the decision was made to bring in a sizable team that could be reconfigured in a bunch of different ways to accommodate different kinds of projects.

There were also benefits to hiring all at once, instead of gradually scaling up. “I wanted to bring in a cohort, because I think that’s the best way to have a really intentional work environment for collaboration,” said Osborn. She also purposefully sought to assemble a team with mixed experience levels, hence the layering of people with significant news experiences and people without, long-time freelancers and folks in their first years on the job, and so on. The pandemic made the hiring process a little difficult, as you would expect, but in the end, Osborn felt like she built the team she wanted. “I don’t know how other people feel when they do hiring, but every single person [we’ve hired] is such an incredible force,” she said. “All of these people combined are 10 million times better than me, and that’s really exciting. I don’t want to disappoint them.”

One core value driving Osborn, along with the Vice audio division, is a desire to tell truly “borderless” stories, and many of the podcasts being developed at the moment reflect that sensibility. Beyond Vice News Reports, the division has plans to launch three other podcasts that will originate from the team based here in the U.S. One will be a seasonal show centered on the global climate crisis, which will see the team trying to connect the dots across the experiences of several different countries. Another will adopt an anthological format to tell stories that explore authoritarianism as a philosophical, sociological, and psychological concept, refracting its various facets through different stories that stem from different places. The third show will be an experimental project, as Osborn puts it, with the goal of telling recent or unfolding events primarily through user-generated content.

Projects are also being developed by teams based in other countries. When we spoke, Osborn briefly talked about a podcast that she’s been building with a team in Japan, which will be meant for the “Japanese-understanding” market. That’s how she phrased that effort, and it’s an effective way to illustrate how she thinks about the possibilities of making audio shows on a global level. She sees audiences not as geographically defined, but linguistically defined.

“I encourage us to very much think of things in terms of an ‘English-speaking’ or ‘Japanese-understanding’ audience, because we’re talking about listeners that share language understanding regardless of geographic location,” she said. “In some ways, when we think about the ‘U.S. market’ or the ‘U.K. market,’ it can be pretty arbitrary, and though, yes, there is increasing geofencing practices and things like that, but for the most part, we should understand them to be global audiences.”

Osborn also talked about her broader intent to build longer-term relationships and infrastructure with producers in other countries — whether it’s Mexico, the Philippines, or Singapore — such that we’ll be able to see the creation of audio productions that can be truly run through the point of view of those producers. There remain tricky logistical problems to solve in this ambition, including, but not limited to, monetization. But she suspects that part of the solution would involve interfacing with a given country’s specific audio distribution and monetization system, which is a reflection both of the fact that podcasting isn’t the same everywhere (despite its open nature) and that podcasting is just one type of audio.

That’s the bigger, longer-term picture. For now, here in the States, Vice Media has a new audio team, an upcoming flagship podcast, and fresh intentions. It will be interesting to see what it will bring to the table, and how many new ideas it can inject into the news and documentary podcast genre.

Follow-up to PRX. Quick update on last week’s story on a departing PRX staffer, Palace Shaw, drawing attention to systemic racism at the organization: Two other employees, Eric Dhan and Se’era Spragley Ricks, have written an open letter pushing back against CEO Kerri Hoffman’s internal memo on the matter that was publicly circulated over Medium last week.

They wrote:

The letter from our CEO does not reflect the views of all staff members at PRX. It is not easy to openly disagree with the head of our company, and we write this message with no intention to “burn the house down.” We are dedicated to the values and mission at PRX; we believe in openness, trust, and empathy, and we strive to increase the diversity of voices in public media. We are committed stakeholders who care deeply about the wellbeing of our organization, and we want to do our part to hold our leadership accountable and ensure that PRX can live up to the values that drew us to work here in the first place.

The letter, which also listed named support from 10 other PRX employees and affiliated individuals, also laid out a series of specific next steps that they believe should be taken to ensure necessary changes to the organizations. Those steps include a direct apology to Shaw, the determination and distribution of back pay to employees who have left the organization in part due to structural pay disparities, and increased transparency mechanisms in the recruitment and hiring process for the new director of diversity and inclusion.

You can find the full letter, which was published as a Google Doc, here.

Race, diversity, and the BBC [by Caroline Crampton]. Like many big legacy broadcasters — and many other types of big organizations — the BBC is currently grappling with its legacy and responsibilities on race. The global protests over racial injustice, catalyzed by the murder of George Floyd, have intensified these discussions, certainly, but within the context of the BBC, there have been long-standing efforts, far predating this moment, by campaigners like Lenny Henry, Marcus Ryder, and many others to improve the BBC’s internal culture.

Writers like Afua Hirsch have been highlighting the racial inequality in compensation for journalists and presenters at the BBC for years, freelance and staff producers have worked tirelessly behind the scenes to highlight racism and inequality, and parliamentary committees have also tried repeatedly to hold the corporation to account on everything from inadequate grievance processes to slow progress on promoting more Black people and people of color to senior leadership.

The BBC has acknowledged the problem itself. Back in 2018, the BBC Career Progression and Culture Report admitted that “it’s taking too long to see the change that we expect within our workforce.” It also promised significant change. That report, incidentally, was authored by Tim Davie, then CEO of BBC Studios, who will take over as director general of the entire BBC in September. Yet, despite this admission, staff, contributors, and viewers still feel considerable frustration.

In the last month, two moments that really put the BBC’s problems with race in perspective for me. These aren’t the only events relevant to this topic, by any means, but I think these instances in particular highlight the gap between the corporation’s external statements and its internal actions, and show how much more work there is to be done.

The first moment came on July 22, when the BBC Radio and Music division made the welcome announcement that it was “boosting its commitments to diversity and inclusion” and reallocating £12 million of its existing commissioning budget over the next three years toward “diverse and existing content.” In addition, we were told that later this year would see the launch of something called the BBC Sounds Lab, a new and “more accessible” route to a BBC podcast commission, along with a new commitment to only working with independent production companies that “meet a 20% diversity target in their team.” This all came, I should note, in the wake of BBC Radio signing up to the Equality in Audio Pact pioneered by Broccoli Content’s Renay Richardson.

It was the last element of this that most caught my attention. The BBC has a substantial role to play in the U.K. audio industry as a major commissioner of programs and podcasts from independent production companies. If it does indeed only choose to work with companies that have diverse staffs, that would force a major change in hiring practices in the industry. At the moment, I can only think of a small handful of providers that would meet this requirement. However, when I asked for more detail about how this would be enforced — both back in July and again while writing this piece — I was told that the full details were still being worked out, so nothing has been enacted yet. The same goes for questions of intellectual property and ownership: it’s not yet clear whether there will be any change to the status quo that would allow creators to keep ownership of their own shows even if they are picked up by BBC Sounds.

The second moment I want to consider in relation to this concerns a story on the July 28 edition of “Points West,” the BBC regional news program, which was repeated on the national BBC news channel the following morning. In it, correspondent Fiona Lamdin, who is white, used the N-word when reporting on the abuse hurled during a racially aggravated hit and run attack on K-Dogg, a musician and NHS worker, in Bristol.

Despite the outcry from viewers, the BBC initially defended the decision to include the word in the report, saying in a statement, “We believe we gave adequate warnings that upsetting images and language would be used and we will continue to pursue this story.” It went on to say that the decision to repeat the slur had been made after consultation with the victim’s family, who wanted viewers to understand the severity of the attack.

On August 8, BBC Radio 1Xtra host Sideman (aka David Whitely) published an Instagram video in which he announced that he was resigning from all work for the corporation, including his weekly radio show, with immediate effect. “This is an error in judgment where I can’t just smile with you through the process and act like everything is OK,” he said. “The action and the defense of the action feels like a slap in the face of our community.”

The next day, BBC director general Tony Hall overturned the decision to defend the use of the slur and personally apologized for the report. “The BBC now accepts that we should have taken a different approach at the time of broadcast and we are very sorry for that. We will now be strengthening our guidance on offensive language across our output,” he said. “Every organization should be able to acknowledge when it has made a mistake. We made one here.”

The BBC reportedly received over 18,000 complaints from members of the public about the uncensored use of the slur. For many BBC staff, however, this incident didn’t happen in isolation, and is simply yet another example of how the organization culturally possesses an inadequate understanding of race and racism.

These two instances appear very different on the surface, but the more I’ve been thinking about them, the more they seem to me to be two reflections of the same thing. The attitude that led the BBC to announce a major change to how it will work with suppliers on radio and podcast commissioning without first nailing down its practicalities is the same impulse that requires there to be a major host resignation and 18,000 complaints about the use of a slur before an apology is issued. It’s reactive, not proactive, and regardless of intention it communicates that these matters are not given total priority. And while that is the case, I can’t see that this is the route to lasting institutional change.

Freakonomics Radio expands as a publisher. Freakonomics Radio, the audio program that explores the “hidden side of everything” based on the popular book franchise by the journalist Stephen Dubner and the economist Steven Levitt, launched as a WNYC program back in 2009 and quickly became something of an early archetypal podcast hit. You could perhaps detect some of its DNA in shows like Invisibilia and Hidden Brain, which privilege popular science and social science as fertile land from which stories can be harvested, and these days, you can even thread it out to some extent to Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast work via “Revisionist History” and the expanding Pushkin Industries, which has been hammering down the author-to-podcaster pipeline.

As an entrepreneurial venture, Freakonomics Radio also has the distinction of being a prominent example of a public radio-originated program that eventually broke off to establish itself as an independent publisher. In 2018, the show left WNYC Studios to take up a partnership with Stitcher, though it continues to retain a partnership with WNYC for public radio syndication. That gambit — to break off and split distributional alliances — has inspired similar moves. Just last week, Hidden Brain, the NPR-originated audio program about the “unconscious patterns driving human behavior,” announced that it is following almost the exact same route: it’s spinning out as an independent company, Hidden Brain Media, with a Stitcher partnership in hand, a retained public radio syndication partnership with NPR, and designs for further cross-media expansion.

Later this week will see another step forward for Freakonomics Radio. This Friday, the show will launch a new spin-off called People I (Mostly) Admire, which the official press release regards as Steven Levitt’s solo podcast debut. (As a point of clarification, Stephen Dubner is designated as the sole host of Freakonomics Radio, with Levitt popping up as a recurring guest.) It should be noted that People I (Mostly) Admire is not the first Freakonomics Radio spin-off. That honor goes to No Stupid Questions, hosted by Dubner and the social scientist Angela Duckworth (you might know Duckworth as the author of Grit), which launched back in May.

But the upcoming launch of People I (Mostly) Admire will mark the establishment of a new podcast publishing shingle formed around Freakonomics Radio, which will be called (generically enough) the Freakonomics Radio Network. From the sounds of it, the entity appears to be a bid to go after a more specialized social scientist-to-podcast pipeline, which in my mind probably brings more competition to Pushkin Industries’ turf. There are plans to launch new programming through 2021, with at least one or two more pilot programs to show up in the fall. Ideas in development are said to include a book club and another show built around a “prominent sociologist.”

As a matter of process, I’m told that the network favors a soft-launch approach to piloting shows, dropping a test episode in the flagship Freakonomics Radio feed — which has come to drive millions of downloads — to get a sense of listener appetite. If the feedback is positive, those episode get spun out into full shows, as was the case with No Stupid Questions and the upcoming People I (Mostly) Admire. If not, at the very least listeners were treated to a fun experiment.

Interesting stuff. Seems like Stitcher is really profiting off these public radio branch-offs. Wonder if we’ll see more of this.

In other news…

• The New York Times is officially relaunching the “Modern Love” podcast in the fall. The podcast will now be completely produced by the Times’s audio division — it was previously a co-production with WBUR, and was primarily made by the Boston public radio station — and its new iteration is said to feature a completely new sound.
• RedCircle, a podcast monetization startup we’ve written about before, has launched an “automated ad insertion platform.” Sounds like a programmatic-ish ad exchange.
• Spotify has partnered with C-SPAN to distribute the speeches from both the Democratic National Convention and the Republican National Convention over the platform. Also, Daily Sports playlists.
• For Vulture, I wrote about the Michelle Obama podcast.

On Servant of Pod. In tomorrow’s episode, I talk with ESPN Daily’s Pablo Torre and Eve Troeh about making a daily sports podcast when sports is… you know, super weird right now.

Some background: ESPN Daily first rolled out last October — remember October? Geez — where it was positioned as the sports media giant’s flagship podcast. That framing has always been sorta interesting to me, given that ESPN already had a fairly robust podcast portfolio to begin with, one that’s rich with a mix of popular broadcast repackages and an assortment of more interesting nichier stuff. (Shout-out to the Lowe Post, the Woj Pod, and the amazing 30 for 30 podcast team.) The introduction of ESPN Daily, then, has projects a feel of going after a sense of prestige, or at least the creation of a focal point to concentrate the way people might think about ESPN’s on-demand audio machinations separate from its formidable radio presence.

There’s been some reshuffling with ESPN Daily of late. It originally launched with Mina Kimes behind the mic, but she recently left the production to serve as ESPN’s new NFL analyst, which is said to be her dream job. She was ultimately replaced by Pablo Torre, who was just coming off the cancellation of High Noon, the afternoon sports talk show he hosted with Bomani Jones. (An aside: I was actually a big fan of High Noon, though if I were to be honest, I wasn’t surprised that it got cancelled. There was something about its deliberate, thoughtful nature that didn’t seem like a good structural fit for the broadcast context. A streaming service, perhaps. Maybe a podcast?)

But the production has retained a strong sense of continuity, due in no small part to Eve Troeh, the show’s senior editorial producer and constant variable. She’s shepherded the podcast through its opening innings, the great sports shut-down — which kicked off in earnest shortly after the NBA ceased operations when Jazz player Rudy Gobert tested positive for the coronavirus on March 11 — and now, the erratic high-wire attempt to rebuild the sports world in the shadow of a pandemic.

I had a particularly good time speaking with Torre (whose work I’ve followed for years) and Troeh (whose name I’ve heard tossed around, also, for years), not least because I’m a fairly ardent sports nut. Additionally, it’s always fun for me to talk to a Very Public Asian, of which there simply aren’t enough.

You can find Servant of Pod on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or the great assortment of third-party podcast apps that are hooked up to the open publishing ecosystem. Desktop listening is also recommended. Share, leave a review, and so on.

Gumball, of course, is perhaps the only truly venture capital-friendly component of the business, given its opportunity as a scalable advertising marketplace. As such, news of this investment shouldn’t be particularly surprising. Furthermore, Union Square Ventures, the storied VC firm that has invested in household names like Twitter and Stack Overflow, has already expressed strong interest in podcasting, having invested in Meet Cute, the “short-form romantic audio company” founded by USV alum Naomi Shah.

There’s some discussion in USV’s official blog post on the investment about the firm’s interest in vertically integrated media companies, which is worth noting. Here’s the pertinent part of the write-up:

This powerful three-part structure — owned content, distributed content network, ad marketplace — creates meaningful network effects. More unique content makes the platform more valuable to listeners, and user growth in turn boosts desirability for creators to join. This is true for most content networks. For Headgum, there is an added network effect between creators and brands. Better shows lead to cross-pollinated ad audiences which generate better ad opportunities within the network. We believe these effects, in tandem, are a formidable mechanism for building a trusted brand at scale.

One way we thought about Headgum’s unique model is as a vertically-integrated media company. Just as a vertically-integrated D2C brand owns IP, manufacturing, and distribution, Headgum unlocks creation, distribution, and monetization through its combined studio, network and marketplace. The benefits created by this full-stack approach for defensibility and scale got us excited about Headgum’s potential not only as a media company but as a venture-backable one.

It’s perhaps clearer to argue that the content side of businesses primarily functions as a top-of-the-funnel marketing opportunity for the Gumball marketplace, which can go on to participate in the current land-grab competition between various programmatically inclined hosting platforms like Art19 and Megaphone.

This week in Spotify. Let’s do a little bit of Kremlinology.

Last week, Spotify officially rolled out support for video podcasts, initially limiting the experience to a small number of shows. This comes after a period of testing around Zane and Heath: Unfiltered, a podcast fronted by two YouTube stars, originally announced in early May.

The initial batch of video-enabled podcasts include: The Ringer’s The Book of Basketball 2.0 and Higher Learning with Van Lathan and Rachel Lindsay, along with The Misfits Podcast, H3 Podcast, and The Rooster Teeth Podcast, among others. In other words, it’s a mix of Spotify-owned shows and podcasts that already have some sort of video presence established over YouTube. (One imagines that The Joe Rogan Experience, which commands considerable viewership over YouTube, is part of this conversation.)

I thought the way Spotify framed the rollout in the official blog post was somewhat noteworthy: “Spotify fans can better connect to creators with new video podcasts.” Centralizing the notion of “creators” in the value proposition strikes me as the tell here — this might be a quick-trigger experimental move, but the intent seems to be laying down the foundation for Spotify to swerve into the highly lucrative influencer lane. In addition to working with Zane and Heath: Unfiltered, the company has already moved to sign a few YouTube stars to exclusive podcasts, putting it in competition with efforts from operations like Studio71 and Cadence13.

This marks a semi-interesting loop back into history. Podcasting as we currently know it is overwhelmingly associated with audio, but there was a point in the earlier days of the technology when the distributional premise was evenly split between audio and video. This lane isn’t entirely new, and what we’re seeing here seems to be an attempt by Spotify to reorient and control it within a new context.

For what it’s worth, I’m not a big consumer of repackaged podcasts over YouTube, though I understand there are very many people who are. (That said, I am, admittedly, a massive YouTube consumer in general. You may or may not be surprised to learn that I’m mostly a travel and food vlog kinda guy. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.)

In any case, there’s an interesting friction point to think through: not everybody is good on video or audio, and an even smaller number of people are good at both, which means that this feature is likely only suitable for a small percentage of podcast makers on the platform. That probably doesn’t matter much for the platform over the long run, though: all it needs is a few major hits on the product, and the means to control the value extraction from those hits.

One more Spotify thing… From The Wall Street Journal:

Money could soon be flowing from labels back into Spotify Technology SA’s coffers, thanks to a new deal struck with the world’s largest record company.

Spotify reached a new licensing agreement with Vivendi SA’s Universal Music Group that secures its massive catalog for streaming and signs the label giant onto Spotify’s “two-sided marketplace.”

Given that one of the bigger factors driving Spotify toward diversification (and into podcasting) is the nature of its relations with the big labels, it’s worth keeping an eye on how that pressure point is shifting.

Where credit is due. Last week, Amanda Seales — the actor, singer, and celebrity, whose credits include Issa Rae’s Insecure — officially launched a new network, called the Smart Funny & Black Podcast Network, that springboards out of her popular show Small Doses with Amanda Seales.

But the launch announcement came with a declaration that rubbed some the wrong way:

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IT'S HERE! The Smart Funny & Black Podcast Network is launching with our first podcast @adventuresinblackcinema hosted by @desmondthorne ! AVAILABLE EVERYWHERE! SUBSCRIBE TODAY! @applepodcasts @spotify @stitcherpodcasts @pandora & more! #sfbpodcastnetwork

A post shared by amandaseales (@amandaseales) on Jul 23, 2020 at 9:24am PDT

The SFB Podcast Network isn’t the first podcast network owned and operated by a Black woman, and the claim has since received pushback criticizing it as a form of erasure.

As Twila Dang, who founded Matriarch Digital Media — a podcast network and online community — in 2017, told me over email:

What’s frustrating and sad about this situation is Amanda has basically erased the hard work of Black women who came before her. We are part of a community that has had to fight for our voices to be heard in every aspect of the media (and society at large). To ignore us and pretend that she was the first Black woman to start a podcast network is an insult to a community that would have opened our arms to support her. We know how difficult creating a footprint in this industry can be. We help each other gain ground by sharing our knowledge and amplifying one another with our platforms. We show up for each other.

There has been a lot of discussion lately of the ways that marginalized communities are not included in the stories of our history. When we are erased, it makes it easier to exclude us, to deny our importance and to silence our voices. We remain an invisible “other” that is less worthy of care and consideration. Podcasting has a history too. I am a proud part of it along with a lot of amazing, hard-working Black women. And honestly, it hurts more watching a fellow Black woman dismiss us and our contributions so easily.

Dang also posted a Twitter thread listing out the other podcast operations owned and operated by Black women.

I’ve reached out to the SFB Podcast Network for comment, but did not hear back in time for publication.

And for those curious: Small Doses with Amanda Seales comes out of a relationship between Seales and Starburns Audio, in which the latter works with Seales to produce and distribute the show. I’m told that Starburns Audio has no involvement with the SFB Podcast Network.

From Digiday: “Podcast creators mull raising their ad loads while preserving high listener engagement.”

This has been happening for a while, of course, though it’s interesting to see it formalized in a general trade pub. To phrase things with excessive drama, ad loads are the key variable in differentiating between the podcast experience and the radio experience.

Eh, I reckon we’ll see more than a few publishers crank up that dial soon enough. Check out the piece.

Oh, and by the way: I’m the guest on the Digiday Podcast this week.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation is losing its managing editor of podcasts, Kellie Riordan. She’s been with the organization for 18 years and has headed up its podcast unit, ABC Audio Studios, for the past three.

No word yet on what’s next for Riordan, though she did note: “I’m looking forward to exploring some new opportunities in the global podcast space, which is fast expanding right now.”

Open publishing. I’ve been thinking a lot about this fascinating Politico piece, written by Shen Lu, that profiles a cohort of progressive Mandarin-language podcasts that have emerged recently.

Independently created and distributed over the open architecture for a transnational audience, these shows might be relatively small in the industrial scale of things — one example, In-Betweenness, was noted as having brought in about 17,000 downloads since launching on June 21 — but that’s beside the point: they were formed to open up a front of discourse that might not naturally exist within any conventional context.

From the Politico write-up:

A wave of independent Chinese-language media platforms, based mostly outside of China — podcasts like In-Betweenness, as well as blogs, newsletters and video series — has sprung up in recent years to cover America and the world for a Chinese-speaking audience. Most of the audience are educated millennials living in cities in China and abroad, and most of the platforms can be accessed anywhere in the world, including China. Even if some episodes are removed by government censors from podcast stores in China, people can still access it by subscribing to RSS feeds.

In a way, these podcasts embody the original ideological promise of the medium. More than serving as a space for new entrepreneurial opportunity (and the creation of new multimillionaires), podcasting was largely carved out to allow the facilitation of proper alternatives to mainstream media. This is perhaps most cleanly represented by Open Source, one of the earliest podcasts, which came out of a collaboration between former Times journalist Christopher Lydon and RSS technologist Dave Winer. (That show is still ongoing, currently distributed by Hub & Spoke). According to the origin story, Open Source started out of frustration with the way the news media handled the run-up to the Iraq War in the early 2000s as well as the corporatization of news more generally.

The political sensibility has been somewhat lost in the contemporary framings of podcasting’s open-publishing merits: the “anybody can publish” proposition tends to be mostly talked about in terms of creative and entrepreneurial opportunity, but it’s equally — if not more — about political and ideological opportunity. (And there are some corners of the podcast universe that view the very notion of monetizing podcasts as antithetical to their founding purpose in the first place.)

Anyway, this emerging cluster of podcasts reminds me of the cluster of transnationally Asian digital publications recently profiled by Tammy Kim over at the Columbia Journalism Review:

New Naratif, New Bloom, and Lausan focus on Southeast Asia, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, respectively, but in ways that avoid the biases of foreign correspondents and policy wonks or the narrow concerns of in-country English-language newspapers. Their orientation is not so much postcolonial as anti-nationalist and internationalist, meaning that they’re keener to explore what’s shared between working people in say, Taipei and Los Angeles, or Bangkok and Davao City, than to ask whether Canada or Vietnam has the more capable government — a temptation of traditional journalism.

As mentioned in the piece, these publications tend to not be all that financially viable, but again, that’s somewhat besides the point. Instead, the value of those publications is to build a structure that gives these ideas and ideologies a discrete home, that gives them for potential visibility, and that helps the formation of these identities with the accelerative support of the internet.

(Kim, by the way, also co-hosts a relatively new podcast called Time To Say Goodbye, which similarly offers transnationally Asian discussions on Asia, Asian-Americans, the coronavirus pandemic, and more recently, the protest movements that are grounded in the experiences of the three hosts, all of whom reside in America. I’m an avid listener.)

I don’t really think I have a particularly novel or thought-out point to make about this thread, other than to feel strongly (albeit amorphously) about the whole thing, speaking as a transnational Asian myself. (Despite passing as having assimilated well, I remain a foreigner in America.)

But I suppose I can say that the promise held by these Mandarin podcasts should be considered pertinent to any ongoing discourse about where the RSS feed goes from here — whether open podcasting will “die” or “wither away,” whether it will be superseded by closed profit-seeking platforms controlled by companies that can be pressured by certain governments, and what we gain and lose in any of those futures.

On a somewhat related note… Not podcast-specific but podcast-related, but there’s a curious Substack-within-a-Substack effort called “Discontents,” which seeks to establish an on-platform collective organized around “writers and podcasters on the left.” In other words, it’s an effort to create a bundle around atomized independent publishing efforts of shared beliefs, which may or may not be a natural counter-balancing outcome of this trend that sees all these writers branching out on their own.

Not that anybody asked, but I don’t think the whole “everybody’s going to be their independent writer/publisher/media operation and that’s the future of news and media and journalism” discourse is very smart, or sufficiently nuanced, or all that honest, frankly. This life ain’t for everybody, and there are distinct limitations to an environment of extreme individualism, which is probably why we’re going to see a lot more of this kinda thing — i.e. a recreation of the bundle, in some form or another — moving forward.

Rando question: Has anybody settled on a Goodreads for pods that they like?

Show notes.

• I’ve been checking out a few episodes of The Believer Magazine’s Constellation Prize, hosted by Bianca Giaever, and it scratches a zine-esque itch, if you’re in the mood for that kind of thing. Fun fact: The Believer used to be published by McSweeney’s, which also produces the similarly zine-esque KCRW podcast The Organist. The magazine moved over to the Beverly Rogers, Carol C. Harter Black Mountain Institute at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in 2017.
• Marketplace has launched a new podcast for kids, Million Bazillion, meant to tackle questions from kids about money. (Listen, whenever I have a kid, that child will know about home loans long before they hit middle school.) The project comes out of a collaboration with Brains On!, whose co-creator, Molly Bloom, was a guest on a recent episode of Servant of Pod.
• You know what? It’s pretty cool to read a theater critic writing about a radio play that’s also distributed as a podcast. In this case, that play is Richard II, as produced by WNYC.
Photo of a Boston public school hallway in 1973 by City of Boston used under a Creative Commons license.

The course’s aim is to teach people about the tactics and techniques of disinformation, and help them talk to family and friends, said First Draft’s Claire Wardle. While the course will ultimately be translated into multiple languages, it’s being tested in English first. When you sign up, you choose the time of day you want to receive the messages and whether you want to get them via SMS, Facebook Messenger, or WhatsApp.

So because everyone is utterly zoomed out, and most people don't love training in the traditional way, we're trying out a new format. A 14-day text message course. Name a time & a message appears every day with extra links etc https://t.co/eT6RbYzVdd pic.twitter.com/kbOYEMAXOv

— Claire Wardle (@cward1e) July 9, 2020

First Draft will be looking at ways to test the effectiveness of the course, Wardle said. If it works, other companies might follow suit — and who knows, there just might be fewer Zooms in your future.

“It’s an opportunity for us to get our journalism in front of people who probably see ’60 Minutes’ when they are giving their mother and father a kiss and going out to see their friends,” the executive producer of the show, told Variety in June.“Let’s reach them where they are.”

But…are they at Quibi?

That’s the question raised by an in-depth look published in New York Magazine (“Is anyone watching Quibi?”), among heaps of schadenfreude-inflected coverage in recent weeks. (Quibi raised an inconceivable $1.7 billion and its name is short for “Quick Bites” because all of its content, meant to be watched “on the go,” is less than 10 minutes long.)

The “60 in 6” program — as in “60 Minutes in 6 minutes,” though episodes range from six to nine minutes long — is an original news show produced weekly. It features four dedicated correspondents with strong news credentials, including Wesley Lowery, who arrived from The Washington Post, where he’d won a Pulitzer Prize winner for his coverage of protests in Ferguson, Missouri. For the first “60 in 6” episode (9 minutes, 55 seconds), Lowery traveled to Minneapolis to cover the protests that erupted after George Floyd’s murder and to interview Floyd’s brother.

Other news programs on Quibi — which appear on a mix of news and entertainment known as Daily Essentials — include thrice-daily reports from NBC News, Around the World with BBC News, Pulso News from Telemundo, The Reply by ESPN, and two shows from Canada’s CTV News. Interest in the news programming segments has been minimal, according to Quibi co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg. (“The Daily Essentials are not that essential,” Katzenberg told The New York Times in May.)

For New York, Benjamin Wallace chronicled some of Quibi’s miscalculations about its digital-native audience:

In its zeal to control how its content is seen — one of Quibi’s arguments to advertisers is that it’s a “brand-safe environment” — Quibi didn’t allow screenshotting, which makes it harder, or at least less fun, to talk about its shows on social media, the de facto watercooler in an officeless era …

To combat the idea that Quibi would be providing something that already existed, Katzenberg leaned into making Quibi seem different. To emphasize that this wasn’t just TV on your phone, he declared that Quibi wouldn’t even be available on your TV when the app launched …

Some of Quibi’s own ads in the run-up to launch seemed ego driven. Why was an app aimed at 25-to-35-year-olds being advertised on the Oscars broadcast, which has a median viewer age north of 56? Quibi’s marketing pushed the platform rather than the shows on it.

Quibi has worked to reverse some of these decisions; it’s now castable to TVs and working on allowing screenshots. But how did these missteps happen in the first place? Wallace, again, with the devastating anecdotes:

People have wondered why Katzenberg and Whitman, in their late and early 60s, respectively, and not very active on social media, would believe they have uniquely penetrating insight into the unacknowledged desires of young people. When I ask Whitman what TV shows she watches, she responds, “I’m not sure I’d classify myself as an entertainment enthusiast.” But any particular shows she likes? “Grant,” she offered. “On the History Channel. It’s about President Grant.”

Katzenberg is on his phone all the time, but he is also among the moguls of his generation who have their emails printed out (and vertically folded, for some reason) by an assistant. In enthusing about what a show could mean for Quibi, Katzenberg would repeatedly invoke the same handful of musty touchstones — America’s Funniest Home Videos, Siskel and Ebert, and Jane Fonda’s exercise tapes.

The Quibi app reached No. 3 in Apple’s App Store on its launch day but dropped to No.  284  in June and to No. 1,477 when marketing efforts paused during Black Lives Matter protests. As of early July, the app has been downloaded more than 5 million times, including users who took advantage of the free three-month trial. Once that trial expires, Quibi will learn exactly how many are willing to pay $5 (with ads) or $8 (without) per month for content that has largely received mixed reviews or — possibly worse — no attention at all.

“If [the industry conversion rate around 33 percent] holds true for Quibi,” Wallace wrote, “it could mean less than 500,000 people would be watching a network that spent hundreds of millions of dollars on brand-new premium content.”

A lot of great stuff in this QUIBI piece but the highlight for me is “In market research following its Oscars and Super Bowl ads, 70 percent of respondents said they thought Quibi was a food-delivery service” https://t.co/RBFjPeIYdP

— Tom Gara (@tomgara) July 6, 2020

at least journalism isn’t the only industry that got utterly suckered by BS video traffic numbers I guess https://t.co/Xg3MaJ4I3Y

— Max J. Rosenthal (@maxjrosenthal) July 6, 2020

The whole article on Quibi is great and only reinforces that media companies are increasingly run by people who don’t actually like the articles/videos they make. https://t.co/iww3QmhZYG

— Aaron W. Gordon (@A_W_Gordon) July 6, 2020

There’s a bunch of news shows from @BBCBreaking @NBC and more. It is all clearly edited for Quibi but also clearly not shot for Quibi. There is a ton of B-roll, wire service photos. Only the hosts seem to have been recorded specifically for this. A bit disappointing.

— Magnus Bjerg (@MagnusBjerg) April 10, 2020

“We’ve got to go where the eyeballs are,” executive producer Bill Owens said, using a description that does not now and may well never describe Quibi https://t.co/KSQ7ni8Esl

— Joshua Benton (@jbenton) October 8, 2019

Remember Quibi?
Did you forget that you downloaded Quibi for a free trial 90 days ago? pic.twitter.com/PC8h9sb5kJ

— Peter Kafka (@pkafka) July 6, 2020

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

Lokal launched in January 2018 as an Android app, then in May 2018 as a WhatsApp Telugu local news feed that kept readers up-to-date with regional topics like local elections by aggregating external news sources. In one week, it had 1,600 people across eight WhatsApp groups — a flop. “Nobody was using it,” explained Pasha. But Pasha and Chaudhary were not deterred. “We built something in a bubble, so we went back to the drawing board, and we started actually interviewing the users.”

A diversity of languages

Today, Lokal is a geographically focused news app with original reporting, present in four languages across 32 districts. Apart from news, it also has a classifieds section with matrimony ads and obituary announcements. It graduated from Y Combinator last year and has raised $3.2 million in funding.

In essence, Lokal is still solving the same problem as before: Most of the existing internet was developed for an English-speaking audience and that limits the scope of local news.

In cities, news can be translated into different languages, but a large part of India’s population still lives outside of its major metro areas (66% of the country’s population is rural). They speak their own languages and have unique happenings that they want to keep track of. “India has 729 districts across 29 states, and every 50 kilometers your dialect, culture, and food habits change,” Pasha explained. “On average, that means there are about 1.8 million people per district.”

Ask the users

To understand what to build, Pasha and his team of interns interviewed 400-500 people across India. “What news do they read? What sources do they read it from? What time do they consume news? Do they have any issues with consuming it?”

Their research unearthed a few insights. First, many small town readers were already being serviced by regional newspapers. “Most people were saying newspapers were their sources,” Pasha explained. “We came to know of an important statistic: India is one of the few countries where the newspaper-reading population is still growing.”

But newspapers lack the instantaneous quality that modern, digital news had taken on, and small town readers who were used to WhatsApp craved the same pace for their news.

Additionally, local news was reported by “stringers” who were like local influencers with followings outside of their newspapers. Many were not getting paid. “These people were doing it for the recognition,” said Pasha. “They wouldn’t even have bylines, they wouldn’t even get credit, but local people knew who was reporting the news.”

Pivoting existing services to digital

One of Lokal’s strategies is to turn these stringers digital. Today, Lokal describes them as “creators.”

“In Uttar Pradesh, in a small district, we met a stringer who was distributing local news in the form of video on WhatsApp,” said Pasha. “He said, pay me 100 rupees [USD $1.30] per year, and I will send a WhatsApp video with the news every evening. He was making 1.7 million rupees [about USD $22,500] every year.”

Using this existing infrastructure of stringers was an important step in Lokal’s pivot. The team hired stringers across cities and paid them to produce original reporting. “We give them a profile and help them get more of a following,” he explained.

Lokal’s feed presents news in both text and video run by a core team of 30 people and a moderation team of about 80 in-house and outsourced moderators.

They also began to realize that to be a trusted local source for a district, they had to offer more than just news.

“We started publishing classifieds, including hiring ads and matrimony ads,” Pasha said. “This is user-generated content.”

Their oldest district, Karimnagar, is also their most active. “It has a population of 1,200,000 with 30% internet penetration,” said Pasha. “360,000 smartphones, and close to 250,000 people have Lokal.”

Revenue opportunities

Roughly 4.5 million people have downloaded Lokal on Android across 30 districts. “Around 1.5 million are using it on a monthly basis,” Pasha added.

Yet Lokal hasn’t monetized its product. Pasha said it will eventually be some combination of ads and paid classifieds, with new opportunities as more users sign on. “Once you’re in 600 to 700 locations, you can do a lot of things where people are using your product and advertising for bigger brands.”

Pasha is confident that these new opportunities will emerge — he said they’re building what he calls an “evolved internet”.

“If you’re a celebrity, as in a politician or another big person, people want to wish him a happy birthday,” said Pasha. “People used to buy ads in newspapers for that, but people have started posting that on our platform.”

Facebook News — which so far is available only via Facebook’s mobile app, and which U.S. users can find by tapping the “more” icon in the lower right corner of the app screen — will feature news from over 200 participating publishers, including local news publishers. Some are being paid high licensing fees, and more are not being paid at all. Facebook’s previous “Today In” section, featuring local news from more than 6,000 towns and cities, has been folded in to News; tap “Local” to see it.) It also includes collections of stories “selected by the Facebook News Team for everyone to see” (i.e., chosen by humans); on Wednesday, if you tapped on “George Floyd Protests,” you were brought to a digest of stories and videos.

There’s also a “Suggested For You” section that, Facebook says, “will suggest stories for you based on things like: Your likes, shares and comments on Facebook; Your interactions on groups and Pages; Your activity on your News Feed.”

And if for some reason you want to see news chosen only by algorithm, you can.

The most notable thing about Facebook News is that it includes almost none of the stories that do well on the rest of Facebook. Here, according to CrowdTangle, were the most popular (measured in terms of total interactions) news stories on Facebook in the U.S. on June 10.

1. “NASCAR bans Confederate flags” (CNN)
2. “Trump says his administration ‘will not even consider’ renaming military bases named for confederates” (Fox News)
3. “NASCAR bans Confederate flag” (NPR)
4. “Charles Barkley dismisses ‘defund police’ movement: ‘Most cops do a fantastic job'” (Daily Wire)
5. “Sister of slain police: ‘Where’s the outrage for a fallen officer who happens to be African American?'” (Sean Hannity)
6. “Bodies found on Chad Daybell’s property belonged to children, prosecutors say” (People)
7. “Hundreds mourn David Dorn, retired St. Louis police captain killed in looting” (Fox News)
8. “NASCAR’s Bubba Wallace wants confederate flags banned from race tracks” (NPR)
9. “NASCAR bans confederate flags at its events” (NBC News via Occupy Democrats)
10. “Hundreds of thousands sign petitions urging the U.S. government to declare KKK a terrorist group” (Newsweek via Occupy Democrats)

That’s five stories about the Confederate flag/Confederate soldiers, three pro-police stories, one dead body story, and one KKK story. In contrast, here were the stories that appeared, in order, on the home screen of my News tab on Wednesday evening. (The stories changed each time I refreshed the screen, though.)

1. “‘It’s a lot of pain’: George Floyd’s brother tearfully demands police reforms during emotional hearing” (NBC News)
2. “Jon Ossoff wins Georgia’s Democratic Senate primary” (NPR)
3. “Trump will return to campaign trail with rally in Tulsa” (New York Times)
4. “Coronavirus is making a comeback in Arizona” (NBC News)
5. “2020 is the summer of the road trip. Unless you’re black.” (New York Times)
6. “Starbucks is closing up to 400 stores in shift to takeout strategy” (CNN)
7. “Amazon bans police from using its facial recognition technology for the next year” (The Verge)
8. “J. K. Rowling doubles down in what some critics call a ‘transphobic manifesto'” (NBC News)
9. “The protests come for ‘Paw Patrol'” (The New York Times)
10. “Upcoming Nintendo Switch exclusive canceled” (ComicBook.com)

That’s a lot of New York Times. In all my sifting, I saw stories from 92 publications (with way more stories from the Times than from any other publisher):

ABC News, AccuWeather, The Atlantic, Autoblog, BET, Billboard, Black Enterprise, Blavity, Bloomberg, BuzzFeed News, Business Insider, CBS News, CBS Sports, Complex, CNBC, CNET, CNN, The Daily Dot, Deadline Hollywood, Delish, E! News, Elle, Engadget, Entertainment Tonight, Entertainment Weekly, Entrepreneur, ESPN, Essence, Fast Company, Forbes, Fox Business, Fox News, Futurism, Gizmodo, Good Morning America, Health, Hollywood Life, HuffPost, IGN, iHeartRadio, Inc. Magazine, IndieWire, Jezebel, Lifehacker, MarketWatch, Mashable, Men’s Health, NBC News, The New York Times, New York Post, The New Yorker, NPR, PBS, PC Gamer, PCMag, People, Pitchfork, Polygon, PopSugar, Quartz, Refinery29, Remezcla, Reuters, Rolling Stone, The Root, Runner’s World, ScienceAlert, Screen Rant, Smithsonian Magazine, Sporting News, Sports Illustrated, The Street, TechRepublic, Teen Vogue, Thrillist, Time, Today Show, The Undefeated, Us Weekly, USA Today, Vanity Fair, Variety, The Verge, Vogue, Vox, Vulture, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Wired, Yahoo, Yahoo Finance, ZDNet.

A few other things I noticed scrolling through:

— There are very, very few politics stories — almost nothing about the Trump/Biden race, for instance. The Fox News headlines I saw were “Kentucky governor wants to ensure health coverage for ‘100 percent’ of black residents” and “Planets that have ‘significant airborne dust’ could be home to alien life, study says.” There are sections for Science & Tech, Health, Business, Entertainment, and Sports — no politics. (The “George Floyd protests” get their own section, too.) Also, no food.

— The stories in my “Suggested For You” tab appeared randomly selected, with no particular relevance to me (though at least they didn’t try to slip any sports stories in). I asked a few friends to send me their “Suggested for You” sections, too, and the stories there also appeared somewhat random.

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.

Last Tuesday, it was announced that Spotify has struck a multi-year licensing agreement with The Joe Rogan Experience, widely understood to be one of the biggest podcasts in the business, that will see the show become exclusive to the Swedish audio streaming platform. The podcast, which previously was not available on the platform, will start appearing on Spotify on September 1, and the exclusivity will kick off at some point later in the year. It will remain free to consume, regardless of whether the listener has a premium subscription or not — they just have to be listening on Spotify.

Some key details to clock. First, the exclusivity will apply to both the audio and video versions of the podcast. This is notable, because video recordings of The Joe Rogan Experience tapings drive significant viewership on YouTube, and it ties in with previous reports about Spotify’s initiative to dip its toes back into the category by focusing on video experiences that primarily complement podcasts. (As opposed to investing in “premium video content,” which was the initial strategy grounding the company’s first video push back in 2016.) I generally think the Spotify vs. YouTube angle is slightly oversold, though I highly recommend checking out Julia Alexander’s excellent piece over at The Verge on what this means for video podcasting on YouTube more broadly.

Second, it’s important to reiterate that the Rogan deal is a licensing agreement, not an acquisition, which means The Joe Rogan Experience retains ownership of the show and full creative control over its output. There’s been some discussion about whether the concept of “full creative control” applies when there’s a possibility Spotify may someday implement its podcast advertising technology, Streaming Ad Insertion (SAI), on the show. Might be awhile before those discussions can be fully borne out; as I reported in the initial news drop last week, the show will maintain its current advertising sales relationship with PMM at this time, and further, it remains to be seen what kind of control publishers distributing over the platform will ultimately have over the SAI-enabled ad experience.

Third, and finally, the Wall Street Journal reported that the deal was worth more than $100 million, in part based on milestone and performance metrics. There’s been some discussion about what motivated Rogan to take the deal, and whether or not it was a smart move for someone who was clearly already making a substantial amount of revenue in his current position, so on and so forth. I don’t particularly care one way or another about these questions, but I suppose I feel compelled to say: the pandemic probably had almost nothing to do with this deal. This kind of thing gets cooked up over a much longer time period. Also: a high level of money guaranteed now probably always looks better than a theoretically higher level of money realized over time, particularly if you’re able to keep as many things the same as possible, which I sense is the case here.

Okay, with all that laid out, let’s think through some things.

First up, a slight correction: when I initially wrote up the news last Tuesday, I characterized The Joe Rogan Experience as being the “last big holdout” for Spotify, as far as the distribution of major third-party podcasts are concerned. This isn’t exactly true, given that Serial is still absent from the platform…though, curiously, you can find S-Town, Serial Productions’ other hit series, up on there. So Serial remains a property to watch, but don’t forget: Serial Productions is said to be in acquisition talks with The New York Times. Possibly relevant: the Rogan deal was announced shortly after This American Life, another industry heavyweight and sister company to Serial Productions, was finally made available on Spotify after a long absence due to a prior streaming exclusivity deal with Pandora.

But Spotify’s addition of The Joe Rogan Experience is arguably significantly more consequential, in part because of the exclusivity, but also because the massive show is unique in its massiveness. You could probably attribute the size to several different factors, including: a general longevity, stemming from an early adoption of the space (it launched back in 2009, and it was one of the few podcasts at the time hosted by someone with exposure in other platforms); its copious publishing volume (with a catalog of over 1400 episodes); its commitment to free speech at all costs that has fueled head-turning controversies (see: past comments that have been condemned as sexist, racist, and/or transphobic as well as the appearances of Alex Jones, the opportunistically vile misinformation-spewing conspiracy theorist); its undeniable currency of political influence, which falls from a politically activated following likely fueled by Rogan’s “I’m just asking questions” radical free speech disposition that feeds into a distinctly modern interpretation of authenticity (Bernie Sanders, Andrew Yang, and Tulsi Gabbard have all appeared on the show, and Rogan’s endorsement of Sanders was significant enough to drive its own cycle of controversy); it has some interesting overlaps with life-hacking media, which is a consistently potent genre (see: mushroom coffee); and Rogan’s genuine talent behind the mic (regardless of the politics, you really can’t deny that consistently holding formidable three-hour-plus interviews is a tremendous skill).

The Joe Rogan Experience is a very specific kind of show that can cultivate supremely sticky followings. Further, it has been constantly described to me as a strong gateway podcast; that is, the kind of show that can bring more listeners into the category. It has also been to said to cut across demographics in vast and unexpected ways. Apologies for using an anecdote instead of actual data (which I can’t find publicly available), but that squares with my own experiences: there are a lot — and I mean a lot — of people in my life whose primary exposure to podcasts is The Joe Rogan Experience, along with This American Life and Radiolab. And they really do run the demographic gamut. It’s frankly wild.

All of which is to underscore: there isn’t any other podcast quite as big, wide-ranging, engaged, and consequential as The Joe Rogan Experience, and this deal shouldn’t be read as anything other than a coup by Spotify. There simply isn’t any other major podcast piece left on the board, I think, not of this scale. I wouldn’t be surprised if the company starts big-game hunting in other territories. (I hear Howard Stern is “open to ideas” regarding his SiriusXM contract, which expires in December.)

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves here: the move comes with risks. The biggest thing to watch is how Spotify will respond when — not if — the show runs into another dust-up over speech, particularly as it relates to hate speech and misinformation. It might come in the form of another Alex Jones appearance, it might come in the form of something else entirely. But it will come.

Keep in mind, Spotify has already had some experiences with such dust-ups. Back in the summer of 2018, during a moment that saw a flurry of platforms — including YouTube, Facebook, Apple Podcasts, and Stitcher — completely remove content from Alex Jones’ Infowars media operation from their services, Spotify opted to remove only a select number of episodes, citing violations of its Hateful Content policy. The company received pushback for only pulling a few episodes, with critics asking whether Spotify did enough.

Around the same time, Spotify also ran into some trouble on the music side over a new policy around hateful content and conduct. That policy, which was initially expressed in the de-listing — but not removal — of music by R. Kelly and XXXTentacion from the platform, drew pushback from the music industry, with critics characterizing the policy as “ill-defined” and effectively a form of censorship. It would eventually be abandoned. (Here’s a good New York Times write-up about the whole affair.)

It’s interesting to look back and get a sense of how Spotify approached those two incidents. Both episodes suggested a sort of tentativeness and fumbling nature to the company’s management of the controversies. The select removals of Infowars episodes were, at best, a half-measure that wasn’t fully responsive to the moment, while its handling of the music side tussle had the feel of being caught unaware. “While we believe our intentions were good, the language was too vague, we created confusion and concern, and didn’t spend enough time getting input from our own team and key partners before sharing new guidelines,” wrote Spotify CEO Daniel Ek in the June 2018 corporate blog post, when the company initially sought to update the hate content and conduct policy in response to the pushback. “We don’t aim to play judge and jury,” he wrote later in the post.

I reckon that Spotify has developed scar tissue from those experiences, and that it’s made at least some preparations for the next time. Further, I have to believe that it knows what it’s getting itself into — how it’s leaning deeper into questions of judge and jury — by securing a multi-year exclusive licensing deal with The Joe Rogan Experience, in effect directly trying itself and some substantial proportion of its non-music content fortunes on the show. So I’m intensely curious to see how Spotify will respond to that first speech-related dust-up. Not to be over dramatic, but I really do think the response will define Spotify for the years to come. It will have bearing on its identity. Will that take the form of a more involved, substantial, and comprehensive approach to hateful content and conduct? Or will it manifest as a harder lean into hands-off distance and not aiming to play judge and jury?

If I were to be cynical about the whole thing, I’d wager that the approach will be somewhere along the lines of “whatever works to preserve the relationship.” Because I don’t know about you, but I see this as a situation where Spotify needs Rogan more than the other way around. Everything thus far — from the acquisitions of Gimlet Media, Parcast, The Ringer, and Anchor, plus its myriad exclusive programming deals, including the one with the Obamas’ production company, Higher Ground, and whatever else they have in the deal making pipeline — strikes me as the accumulation of mid- to long-term assets. “Win later” moves, in sports GM parlance (sorry). Signing Rogan is a “win now” move, a development meant to immediately accelerate a web of interconnected value-creating effects: attracting more podcast listeners onto the platform, luring more advertisers into considering SAI (even as Rogan maintains his existing podcast ad arrangements), and fueling more interest among podcast talent to cut deals and distribute with them. There will almost certainly be more major Spotify announcements to come over the next few weeks — we’re still yet to hear details about projects from Higher Ground, and you can bet they’re eager to keep the narrative momentum going — but the Rogan deal is one that grounds everything together into corporeality, shifting the theoretical into the real.

Of course, there is always the possibility that the deal might not work as well as Spotify thinks it will. I’ve seen some argumentation that platform exclusivity could very well result in listenership declines, as the increased friction of making some listeners switch over to a non-preferred might be too great to overcome. We’ll see, but I doubt it. As discussed, Rogan’s listenership seems uniquely sticky, and a critical mass will almost certainly move over. It’s already off in some respects, between the considerable jump in stock price following the deal’s announcement and the fact that Spotify has completely dominated the podcast narrative. In any case, the risk-reward balance generally tips in favor of Rogan: he’s that much richer right now, and he could always revert back to the open ecosystem when the deal is over. That is, if it continues to be as strong as it is today, which is an open question.

Is Spotify’s complete dominance over the podcast space a fait accompli? Maybe, I don’t know. It sure does seem like they absolutely have all the pieces to maximize their chances of doing so. But after living through the past few years, I’ve become one of those people who doesn’t really believe in the certainty of an outcome until it actually happens. Regardless of whether they do or not, though, one thing’s for sure: they have radically reshaped the power dynamic of the entire podcast ecosystem.

Transplants. Let’s say you’ve been making a podcast for quite some time now, but as it happens, the podcast doesn’t really belong to you or your fellow co-hosts. Instead, it’s owned by the big ol’ media company you worked for when you first started the show. Now let’s say, for whatever reason, you don’t work for that company any more. Maybe you and your co-hosts left for other jobs. Maybe it just felt like the right time to leave. Maybe that original company got taken over by private equity vultures. Who knows? But you still want to keep making the show in some form or another, because y’all really like doing the thing. Is it possible to recreate the same basic framework of the show — the same hosts, the same subject area, the same broad format, hopefully the same audiences, and then some — in another setting?

This is a line of questioning that’s probably been asked many times before, and it will continue to be asked as long as podcast makers bump up against the limitations of making shows for employers without personally owning a piece of the upside. So I thought it would be interesting to sketch out the experiences of one such team that’s trying to make that transition: the fine folks of Triple Click, a recently launched Maximum Fun video game podcast hosted by Kirk Hamilton, Maddy Myers, and Jason Schreier. All three hosts had worked together at Kotaku, the video game site under what is now known as G/O Media, where the trio once made a podcast called Splitscreen. They’ve since left the company, and  recently launched Triple Click to keep doing a show together.

I traded emails with Hamilton a few weeks ago about the rebuilding process, why they decided to roll with Maximum Fun, and what he thinks are best practices when it comes to transplanting existing listeners over to a new property.

You can find the Triple Click podcast here.

WNYC Studios retires Nancy [by Caroline Crampton]. On Friday, WNYC Studios announced that it would not renew Nancy, the podcast focused on stories and conversations about the queer experience today, beyond its current season. The final episode will drop on June 29, and hosts Tobin Low and Kathy Tu, along with sound designer Jeremy S. Bloom, will be joining the team at Radiolab once the show ends. Three other contributors will not have their contracts renewed beyond June.

In an internal announcement, WNYC chief content officer Andrew Golis explained the move, saying that “The show has had an incredible team behind it and has a loyal core community…Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to maintain or grow the show’s audience, or get it on a path to be sustainable.”

Nancy won WNYC’s podcast accelerator in 2015, and has become highly regarded both as a podcast and as a source of queer representation in the audio industry. It’ll be interesting to see how much of the show’s energy and brand remain evident once its hosts are subsumed into the team of a much larger and longer running show.

BBC’s annual plan [by Caroline Crampton]. Last week, the BBC published its annual plan for 2020/21. This is usually a fairly big moment in the UK media year, since whatever the public broadcasting behemoth does tends to impact other publishers, and the corporation also provides work for many suppliers and freelancers beyond its estimated 22,000 employees.

While it’s true that the relationship between the government and the BBC has improved immeasurably in the last couple of months — outgoing director general Tony Hall has sounded very upbeat in interviews recently — there are still going to be cuts to come as the corporation tries to balance the costs against falling income.

The plan is still worth paying attention to as a record of the BBC’s desired direction of travel, no matter what the next few months bring. The commitment to the BBC Sounds app and on demand audio in general remains central to the effort to win younger audiences back to the corporation’s output, and there are plans to reshape the TV offering for the same reason.

The longstanding commitment that BBC Sounds will start bringing podcasts from third party publishers inside its walled garden — which would be a big change for the British audio industry — is restated in this plan, but there is still no word on how licensing and vetting would be handled for this, nor when it might actually happen.

Audible is reportedly going after podcasts again. At least, according to Bloomberg.

I mean, sure. We’ve been here with the audiobook giant before, back in 2015, when it assembled a team to build “not a podcast” podcast-style Audible Originals that would contribute to the value of a subscription, which resulted in some good shit like West Cork, The Butterfly Effect with Jon Ronson, and Esther Perel’s Where Should We Begin. The company laid off that team in the summer of 2018 after a leadership reshuffle, pivoting to a new “we’re going to strike audiobook-first deals with hot authors” like Michael Lewis — who’s now making an actual podcast with Pushkin Industries — along with an assortment of random other stuff, like stand-up recordings and audio-only performances of theatrical plays. Meanwhile, Perel is now building an extended Esther Perel universe that includes a Spotify exclusive; that original team’s leadership, Eric Nuzum and Jesse Baker, has started their own podcast studio, called Magnificent Noise; and the producer who worked with Ronson on The Butterfly Effect, Lina Misitzis, went on to work on a Pulitzer-prize winning story from This American Life.

So yeah, maybe Audible has figured out what it wants with the category now, beyond throwing a bunch of money at people, and maybe it’s figured out how to adequately work with radio/podcast producers. Maybe.

Show notes. You Must Remember This is back with a new season starting today, and it’s built around the unpublished memoirs of Polly Platt, an unsung hero of Hollywood from the seventies to the nineties. The season will also be a treat for fans of Billions — and Mad Men, I suppose — as Longworth casted Maggie Siff to read Platt’s words. Platt died in 2011.

Also, this is neither here nor there, and I didn’t know why it took this long to get into it, but I’m currently plowing through the archives of the Blank Check pod.

ICYMI. I interviewed Bill Simmons about selling The Ringer to Spotify, the future of pods, and making stuff for a world without sports for Vulture, and that piece dropped last week. Check it out.

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.

The whole thing continues to feel like a Quibi in miniature, and unsurprisingly, it continues to be one of the bigger drivers of conversation in my mailbox. There are three kinds of questions that pops up most in these emails.

1. Did Luminary’s big pre-launch fundraise ever make sense? There’s an argument to be made, sure. I’ve spoken to a few people who’ve posited that raising a buttload of money at the outset was a necessary step if the opening gambit was to secure big names that could drive big numbers on launch day, and you can’t come close to getting any of them if you don’t already have a strong war chest in hand.

I suppose I broadly agree with this assessment, but through that framework, it would seem that Luminary’s fundamental problem is that it didn’t end up signing anybody who had a powerful enough pull to drive that many paid listeners. Sure, it assembled a catalog of interesting stuff, but it doesn’t have a world-building Howard Stern/Bill Simmons-level asset, plain and simple.

Of course, it has a bunch of other problems as well, including a still barely manageable user experience and a relationship with the broader podcast community that needs mending. But I’m inclined to think that these are things that exacerbate the core vulnerability, as opposed to being fatal all by themselves. Going big is a high-risk proposition that leaves little room for error. And there were errors.

2. Does Luminary still have a viable path forward? Sure, why not. Vanishing odds, though, and again, it comes down to securing shows with strong enough pull to make the bets pay off according to a reasonable accounting timeline.

In my opinion, the most interesting factor to watch is how the uncertain economic conditions sparked by the pandemic change the deal-making equation for all sides. Back-of-the-envelope math suggests that Luminary still has deal-making money in the bank — a position presumably bolstered by the fundraising, along with human trauma-inducing layoffs and other cost-cutting measures — and one could theoretically argue that while the company will be slapped hard by this economic environment, everybody else will also be slapped too. Under these conditions, it’s entirely possible that there’s a big show out there that could be amenable to cutting an exclusive deal with the startup instead of weathering the storm.

Two counterarguments, though. First, as we’ve observed over the past few weeks, there has been some suggestion that bigger shows have been less adversely affected by the pandemic. Second, even if there was a big show out there willing to cut a deal, you also have to consider the presence of Spotify in the wings, capable not only of out-spending Luminary but also of providing clear and identifiable value with its infrastructure.

I should say, there’s a quick mention in the Bloomberg report about Luminary working to “secure distribution deals with phone and media companies” as part of its effort to grow its audience and value…but I mean, come on.

3. Why would anybody still put money into this thing? No idea. Listen, I am but a mere simpleton with a newsletter and a barely existent retirement account, so I cannot speak to the logic of the moneyed classes.

If I were to hazard a guess, though, I’d say it has to do with the recent changes to the Luminary C-suite. Simon Sutton, who replaced Matt Sacks as CEO last fall, and Richard Plepler, who invested in the company and joined its board shortly after, are both former HBO execs — when Luminary pitched itself as the “HBO of Podcasts,” I guess they literally meant it — and I reckon they continue to carry a lot of clout.

Meanwhile, two-time NBA all star Baron Davis weighed in.

Wow!! This is crazy. If we raised 30m for our media platform we would be making money. Hella money with DOPE ShOWs. How can you burn 4m on podcast network. Lawd!!!!! Who wants to invest in a winner lol. @Spotify @amazon @iHeartRadio @ApplePodcasts https://t.co/knGfSwxfLS

— Baron Davis (@BaronDavis) May 13, 2020

Tough to come back from a dunk that hard, honestly.

On a somewhat related note… Will there ever be talk about Clubhouse in these pages? I don’t know, man.

The Paid Podcast Stack continues to be a hotly contested area. On Monday, Memberful, the Patreon-owned membership facilitation platform, rolled out a new feature that enables publishers using its infrastructure to add podcasts into the pool of exclusive products that they can offer to paid subscribers.

In doing so, Memberful joins an increasingly crowded pool of private podcast RSS feed providers that also includes Supporting Cast, Supercast, Substack, RedCircle, and even its parent company, Patreon. It’s an area of podcast tech that’s become increasingly active as more podcast makers grapple with the importance of diversifying away from purely relying on advertising, a state of affairs that’s only been intensified by the economic effects of the pandemic.

I should note: I use Memberful to manage paid subscriptions for this newsletter. However, I don’t produce a members-only podcast to test the feature with — though I will be launching a public radio podcast with LAist next month, more on that in a future issue — so I couldn’t really try out Memberful’s new podcast feature, or anybody else’s, for that matter. But flipping through the implementation doc, it strikes me as a pretty simple and straightforward affair: you can layer the feature onto an existing Memberful assemblage, including a close integration with an existing WordPress site and a relative ease when it comes to adding private podcast RSS feeds to existing subscription packages. Again, I don’t publish a paid subscribers-only podcast, but I imagine that if I did, it wouldn’t be too hard to get that set up on top of the existing Hot Pod business.

That said, Memberful’s paid podcast feature strikes me as not being terribly differentiated from many of its other competitors’, which, in turn, haven’t really turned out to be terribly differentiated from each other. You have the same fundamental approach to the flow, the same kinds of awkwardness when it comes to listener implementation. Occasionally, you’d get an interesting innovation here and there, as with the case of letting listeners subscribe to the private RSS feed via scanning a QR code, which is present in the new Memberful podcast feature, but I think was originally deployed by Stratechery’s Ben Thompson a few months ago as part of his emerging efforts with independently facilitated paid podcasts.

Speaking of Stratechery, it’s been interesting to watch what Ben Thompson’s been doing with the category, which, at this point, includes distributing audio versions of his paid subscribers-only Daily Update newsletters as well as a whole new three-times-a-week paywalled podcast called Dithering, which he makes with Daring Fireball’s John Gruber. My understanding is that he designed and commissioned the development of the subscription back-end himself, building around the specific needs of his vision. The result is something that doesn’t feel like a round peg squished into a square hole.

Anyway, I’m having trouble seeing the pathways for differentiation, and therefore the possible arc of how the competition for podcast paid subscription tech dominance might play out. Of course, to some extent, we’re talking about some advancements in overall user experience, and my gut instinct is to assume that much of this is going to come down to a crude battle over signing podcast publishers, which means that we might have to think about these companies in terms of the strength of their respective slices of the podcast ecosystem that they end up supporting. But is there any path forward for a real leap in innovation within this category?

One last wrinkle in this area that stands out has to do with Spotify, which still doesn’t allow listeners to add custom RSS feeds and therefore can’t serve as a listening platform for paid-only podcasts. Not sure if it’ll move on that any time soon, but it sure seems like an interesting frontier to think about.

Meanwhile, on the video podcast front. Following last week’s write-up about Spotify’s efforts around podcasting and complementary video (vodcasting?), here’s a news bite with interesting timing: Zane and Heath: Unfiltered, the first named podcast that’s part of Spotify video-podcast experiments, has signed with The Roost, the podcast network with strong video orientations built around Rooster Teeth, which I had flagged as a likely beneficiary of expansions in vodcasting. Here’s the Tubefilter write-up on that development.

Technicalities. Quickly flagging this webinar that’s happening Tuesday at 12 ET for folks interested in the really wonky stuff: “The Public Media Stack is a new report that has detailed profiles of over 100 software products used in the workflow for digital public media. We’ve analyzed the products to identify key strategic, technological, ethical and financial risks for public media orgs, and published detailed analysis for every individual product.”

The webinar will be hosted by the Tow Center’s Emily Bell, and you can register for the thing here.

What’s going on here? I’m still trying to wrap my head around what appears to be a saga that’s been happening over at Barstool Sports, which touches on stuff like contracts, intellectual property ownership, and the power dynamic between talent and media companies. Start with this write-up by the New York Post — which, by the way, seems to lean heavy into Barstool Sports coverage — and then hit this episode of the podcast in question, Call Her Daddy, which was also written up by the NY Post.

This general area of the podcast universe is typically not my jam, but there’s a lot in here to think through.

Show Notes.

• The Death, Sex, and Money team is kicking off a three-week financial therapy special series, featuring the financial therapist Amanda Clayman. Why yes, yes indeed.
• This Science Magazine profile about a German podcast called Coronavirus Update, which made its virologist host a cult figure in the country, is super interesting.
• On balance, The Last Dance was just all right, but the extended Last Dance content universe remains interesting. Quick nod to Pushin’ Thru: After The Last Dance, with BJ Armstrong and Tate Frazier.
• Decent amount of chatter around the latest episode of NPR’s Rough Translation, called Hotel Corona.
• WELCOME TO LA RETURNS TOMORROW.

Ready to Roll: RPG podcasts and accessibility [by Caroline Crampton]. I think we all have them, no matter how deeply involved we are in this industry: the areas of podcasting where no matter how much we might appreciate their popularity on an academic level, we just don’t spend much personal time.

For a long time, role playing games (RPG) podcasts fulfilled this role for me. Sure, I’ve enjoyed the odd game of Dungeons & Dragons at a house party, and I’ve even been to a couple of live episodes in this genre when I’ve happened to be at a podcast festival, but I’ve never dug into the subgenre at any more depth.

Then I was alerted to the existence of this report about the state of this report about the state and status of RPG podcasts. It was put together by Tess Cocchio, who created the RPG Casts directory, and I was really intrigued by some of her findings. Her work was based on the 520 shows that had submitted to the directory by the end of 2019, but she theorizes that’s a large enough sample to be considered representative.

Before we go any further, take these key stats from her report: Approximately two-thirds of RPG shows fall into the “actual play” subcategory, meaning that they feature a group of players playing through a table top game like D&D, often with a serialized, multi-episode structure with recurring characters that encompasses an entire campaign in the game. A further 19 percent were discussion shows that look at behind-the-scenes aspects of gaming, with the remainder “one shots” that tend to move between different gaming systems on the same feed.

Over half, or 53 percent, of the shows that Cocchio looked at featured D&D, with the rest divided among 41 other games. Like any other in podcasting, this sector has its big hitter shows, such as the McElroy Brothers’ The Adventure Zone on Maximum Fun or the livestream-podcast hybrid Critical Role (which in 2019 raised a staggering $11 million to make an animated series based on one of its campaigns; from what I’ve been able to find, this makes it one of the most-funded Kickstarters ever).

Looking beyond that, though, the space is pretty diverse, according to Cocchio’s findings. Almost half — specifically, 45 percent — of shows have some LGBTQIA+ representation, 25 percent feature people of color, and 15 percent have non-binary players. The report highlights that there is a big gap when it comes to accessibility, though, with only 4.4 percent of shows having any kind of episode transcript available.

This all confirmed my own sense from tentatively dipping a toe into the RPG podcast world: there’s a great variety of stuff out there, but it isn’t always necessarily reaching out beyond the already initiated. I reached out to Cocchio to find out more about her report, and to get her assessment of the challenges facing this space.

“RPG podcast fans tend not to listen to only one RPG podcast. Most of us have a dozen or more shows that we love and support,” she told me over email. “The barrier isn’t necessarily finding more listeners — there are always more listeners. I think the barrier is discoverability in the sense of letting the listeners find them.”

I tested this hypothesis via the highly scientific method of “asking my friends who play a lot of D&D what they think,” and got some similar responses back. One even admitted that although she had played for a total of ten hours over Zoom last weekend and enjoys podcasts in other genres, she still found navigating the world of D&D podcasts a bit tricky, since the episodes tend to be pretty long, they aren’t often recommended by app curators, and it’s hard to quickly sift through a lot of similar options to find what exactly you like.

While there’s surely the broader context of that much-discussed podcast discoverability problem at work here, Cocchio said that she thinks there’s something specific to RPG podcasts that’s compounding the issue. “I think RPG podcasters could do a better job at making themselves findable,” she said. “In some ways, the RPG podcasting community falls behind other types of podcast communities. It’s rare to find press kits or, on Twitter for example, pinned posts linking to all the places you can find/listen to a show and interact with them.” That’s why she launched her directory, which lets you browse both by type of play and type of host — there, you can seek out shows with women or non-binary players specifically, for instance — and why she generally encourages RPG podcasters to make their shows more available for recommendation and discovery.

As I’ve written about before, a really helpful way a podcast can be more accessible is by providing transcripts. Having text alongside the audio means that people who are hard of hearing or have auditory processing issues can still enjoy the show, as can those who aren’t fluent in the original broadcast language. But, as Cocchio pointed out, there are certain intrinsic aspects of RPG podcasts that make this a more time-consuming process than your average show. “Most RPG podcasts are largely improvised — there are no scripts — with often anywhere from three to six cast members all improvising, so that is a lot of voices to track,” she explained.

The average episode tends to be anywhere from 45 to 90 minutes long, which is a lot of transcription to do from scratch. And there are also factors that make AI transcription less helpful in this genre. “With the nature of RPGs being out of the realm of ‘modern’ or ‘normal,’ you’ve got all sorts of names and places and creatures that an AI doesn’t know how to transcribe. Both human and AI transcription options take more time and, of course, money. A lot of RPG podcasts are made from a place of love, and are either breaking even or losing money. None of these are excuses for not being accessible — I think it’s more that when you consider all of those things, creators likely find it daunting to transcribe even a single episode.”

Even providing timestamps with content warnings and summaries can help, though, Cocchio said — transcripts aren’t the only route to greater accessibility and discoverability. There are RPG shows baking this stuff in, too, such as Join the Party from Multitude Productions, which has full transcripts for each campaign installment as well as behind-the-scenes episodes about how to play.

Improving accessibility matters for opening up the RPG podcasting subgenre to more people, Cocchio said. “The common misconception from outside the RPG podcasting community is that our community generally isn’t professional, doesn’t have good quality shows or high production, or has ‘only a couple’ of decent shows,” she said. “All of these are just so untrue.” RPG podcasters are adapting very well to coronavirus restrictions, she added, since many play online and record remotely anyway. Perhaps this is their moment to shine for a wider audience, as the world pivots toward forms of entertainment that can keep up a regular schedule regardless.

Fortunately, the new tools designed by the Journal’s product and news strategy teams — which include a clickthrough module to quickly catch readers up on political news, redesigned live update presentations for election nights and debates, and Q&A features — have proven adaptable.

When I spoke to Louise Story, the Journal’s chief news strategist and chief product and technology officer, last week, the paper had already launched a version of the new live Q&A tool — it was just for reporters to answer readers’ coronavirus questions, not their political ones.

This week, after a few more head-spinning news cycles, the election catch-up module on the homepage has been converted to coronavirus information. And the live coverage that’s outside the paywall? That’s where you can find highlights and to-the-minute updates like “Walmart sends corporate staff home” or “Police plan to meet Tesla factory management over compliance with coronavirus health order.”

“All of these things are based on the needs of our audience — they’re all reusable,” Story said. “We’re building things that have really neat uses during the election, but that benefit our products broadly too.”

The election-turned-coronavirus news products are just the latest iteration of the Journal’s longstanding strategy to retain existing subscribers and convert occasional readers of The Wall Street Journal into paying members by encouraging regular engagement. Last month, it announced it had passed 2 million paying subscribers, a number only The New York Times can top among American newspapers. But the fact that its paywall is harder than most of its competitors — not to mention its high sticker price for a digital sub, $39/month — means it has to be more creative than its peers in both attracting and converting new readers.

Last spring, the Journal took a deep dive into user behavior and surfaced with data on actions that boost retention and the likelihood a reader will become a paid subscriber. Then they set out to promote those actions to their member base and occasional readers through what they called “Project Habit.” (We published a breakdown of the process by The Wall Street Journal team that led the effort.)

Data clearly shows that the best way to reduce churn is to increase engagement — but the path to driving product use and building loyalty amongst members has not always been as obvious.

Over the past year, a cross-functional group here at the Journal has worked together to identify retention-driving actions and reinvent the way we promote those habits to our member base. We call it Project Habit.

We’ve known for some time that if a member downloads our mobile app or signs up for an email newsletter, they’re more likely to stay with the Journal.

The key engagement metric was active days, the group concluded. So while the news products like the catch-up module and live Q&As were designed to meet reader needs — Story said their research showed readers wanted to be able to get “caught up” on the news quickly and that some appreciated the opportunity to feel “connected and involved” with the Journal’s political coverage — the team also recognized that the tools could drive retention-friendly habits such as returning to the homepage regularly for updates.

Only paying subscribers — members, in Journal parlance — can submit questions, but anyone can tune in to see them answered. The catch-up module and the live coverage pages can also be viewed without running into the Journal’s paywall.

Each tool had to be optimized and recognizable for both subscribers and nonsubscribers, whether they were reading on their phones, desktop, or through the WSJ app, said Kabir Seth, the Journal’s vice president of product strategy and operations. “We were definitely thinking through the experience as we were building it. How does it feel for a nonmember? How does it feel for a member?” he said. “The graphics team is super important, and there’s a lot of editorial input.”

Live coverage is particularly effective at bringing in new audiences of non-subscribers, Story said. The catch-up module, which can be completed without leaving the homepage, has been performing especially well with occasional readers, a.k.a. the non-news junkies who walk among us.

An example of a catch-up module on the WSJ.com homepage.

The Journal tested the catch-up module at a variety of times (morning, midday, even late Friday afternoons) before settling on weekdays at lunchtime, based on engagement patterns and site traffic. They also found, through testing, that an illustration on the first card drew readers into clicking through the catch-up module better than a photo did — which also helps set it apart from other content on the homepage.

“An interesting thing about making a new story format is that it’s not just the product, technology, and design of it. There’s a different type of content. In this case, it’s short snippets of text that you run through,” Story said. “As we innovate with our products and technology, we also have to innovate with our content and our storytelling.”

In designing the news products, the Journal also hopes to benefit from the relative trust it has across the political spectrum.

A Pew study in January found it was one of only three news outlets (along with PBS and the BBC) that both Democrats and Republicans trust more than distrust. An earlier study found that the Journal’s audience is remarkably evenly distributed across the ideological spectrum. (Among conservatives, the Journal’s news reporting benefits from the paper’s hard-right editorial pages.)

“We’ve found that the Journal is in a great place to be a political news source because we’re so highly trusted on the left and the right. It’s a unique position to be in,” Story said. “That’s part of our thinking around the live Q&A and the other things that have to do with being more transparent and open to questions.”

Story said the process for building new news products is ongoing for her and Seth. Research into how readers think about politics and politics in the media is ongoing.

“It’s very iterative,” she said. “We’re already looking for ways to make our election coverage better.”

That was just last week, and they’ve already found ways to adjust.

But this week’s controversy involving Washington Post reporter Felicia Sonmez (who was subjected to death and rape threats after tweeting an article about Kobe Bryant’s rape accusation) only highlighted what we already know to be true: women, and particularly women of color, bear the brunt of harassment, both online and in person.

According to a 2019 survey of 115 of female and gender-nonconforming journalists by the Committee to Protect Journalists, 70 percent experienced safety issues on the job while 90 percent indicated online harassment as the biggest threat to journalist safety.

Because journalists are often required to have an online presence, Kat Duncan, the interim director of innovation at the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri, thought it was only fitting to design an app that offers support and resources to female journalists in dangerous situations.

Cue JSafe.

Duncan said the idea came out of the Women in Journalism workshop she runs at Mizzou every year. “I had a lot of closed-door discussions about safety, online safety, trolls, and what everyone goes through. The consensus was that it was getting more intense online with bots and trolls,” Duncan said. “The women I was talking to said they wanted a way to log what was happening in a safe way, so that if something were to happen to them, they had proof somewhere.”

She partnered with Mizzou’s College of Engineering to build the app but knew someone else had to run it full-time once it launched. She posted in Riotrrrs Of Journalism, a private Facebook group for women in journalism, to see if anyone would be willing to manage the app. The Coalition of Women in Journalism reached out and said they already offer similar support services and offered to take it over once it launches.

The app is pretty basic. Users can add an incident, include photos and videos, and add a location tag. They can also add a hashtag so that attacks can be sorted. If they mark an incident as “urgent,” it’ll alert the Coalition to follow up with the journalist about resources (about mental health services, attorney information, law enforcement contacts, etc) and next steps. Duncan said the Coalition will also track certain Twitter handles and Facebook accounts so that they can work with the social media platforms to shut down abusive accounts.

Harassment “has always been an issue for women in the field,” Duncan said. “I was a female photographer on the sidelines of football games. You could leave it behind when you got home but now, journalists have to be on Facebook and Twitter and they’re just getting bombarded with trolls. We’d love to help them in these situations.”

Duncan is now looking for 50 beta testers to get feedback on the app and launch it later this spring. You can sign up here.

But if it can’t save journalism, can blockchain still be helpful to journalism, in defined, targeted ways? That was the question raised last July by the News Provenance Project — a project of The New York Times’ R&D team in collaboration with IBM Garage.

Its goal was more straightforward: Can blockchain make it easier for news consumers to understand where the photos they see online came from? There’s a need for it: Pew reported last June that 46 percent of Americans say they find it difficult to recognize when images are false or have been doctored — and that was before Peak Deepfake.

In the months since then, staffers have been doing user research and building prototypes of such a tool — taking advantage of blockchain’s ability to store data immutably and to track its usage over time. Today, the News Provenance Project is releasing some of its initial findings.

To sum up: They learned a lot of interesting things about how news consumers evaluate the images they see online — and how different people value different contextual clues when determining whether or not a photo seems real and trustworthy. They made a proof-of-concept using blockchain to store more metadata for images. But they determined that a lot of things would have to change structurally about how photos work online for any solution to be widespread.

“It’s less about it being a survey about where are people more susceptible to misinformation and more about people who are more likely to be fooled by misinformation,” said Marc Lavallee, executive director of Times’ R&D team. “What we wanted to focus on is: In a situation where if you are susceptible to that, what are the best safeguards to help head that off at the pass?”

Or as News Provenance Project lead Sasha Koren puts it:

Critical information that typically goes into a photo caption, such as time, date, location and the accurate identification of people and events shown doesn’t travel with a photo when it’s posted to social media, where it can be reposted with egregious inaccuracies.

News organizations have this information. With a bit of work and some thoughtful designs, we could use it to help platforms and, more importantly, news consumers avoid inaccurate uses.

The Times conducted in-depth interviews (“qualitative user studies”) with 34 news consumers in three rounds to both understand how people currently process the news images they see and what information would help them gauge a photo’s validity.

• Round 1: Interviews with 15 people about the current state of news and misinformation and their “mental models” of trust in news photos.
• Round 2: Prototype testing with seven people and multiple prototype designs
• Round 3: Prototype testing with 12 people and one design

Interviewees from Round 1 fell pretty evenly into one of four categories; see if you can picture them in your head:

Distrustful news skeptic (low trust, high awareness): Seeking to call out bias in mainstream media, a person in this category may use motivated reasoning to find any evidence to confirm their belief that the media is pushing a particular agenda. Building trust in specific news outlets is difficult in these cases: it may be part of a person’s identity to be skeptical of mainstream media and hyper-alert to perceived cues of bias. Importantly though, this skepticism applied more to the editorial framing of a story than a complete denial of facts, such as when and where a picture was taken.

Confident digital news subscriber (high trust, high awareness): A person in this category is digitally savvy and is comfortable distinguishing between true and false news when provided information from news outlets they trust. They want to avoid appearing uninformed or misinformed about news issues.

Media-jaded localist (low trust, low awareness): This person may feel marginalized by mainstream media and uncritically accept hot takes from unofficial accounts as truths. They want news that feels local and authentic, but they don’t want to be misled by false information intended to deceive. Additionally, they need clearer cues to identify false and misleading content from unofficial accounts that they trust in good faith.

Late-adopter media traditionalist (high trust, low awareness): A person in this category may be more comfortable learning about news through older mediums such as television or newspapers, but less comfortable making sense of news online within the noise of social media. On this front, people need more education on misinformation and disinformation tactics, as well clear cues to more readily distinguish credible content from media sources they already trust.

“What we saw was a tendency to accept almost all images at first glance, regardless of subject area,” Emily Saltz, the project’s UX lead, said. “People were more discerning the more they focused on a post…If someone was at all skeptical of a photo post and rated it as less credible, it tended to be a reaction to the perceived slant of a caption or headline, rather than a belief that it was made up or edited.”

Researchers identified two groups they felt would be most helped by better image provenance information: “those who trust the media, but lack the baseline digital literacy to reliably assess the credibility of posts, and those who are already confident in their abilities to distinguish credible news photography, but would benefit from even more context to factor into their understanding.”

They tested a number of variations on the kinds of context that could be provided with a photo. Among the things they found:

• A checkmark — like the blue one Twitter uses for verified accounts — wasn’t enough to instill confidence about an image’s credibility
• Users preferred the term “sourced” (with the ability to follow up on information) instead of “verified” (which relied on the endorsement of other people)
• Multiple images of an event were more helpful than a single photo’s edit history to convince a news consumer that the event pictured had taken place
• Users want to see the process and to know that there will be oversight and accountability for misinformation.
• Publishing incorrect information with a provenance signal — as might happen with something posted quickly during breaking news — can cause a user not to trust it again.

After the interviews, the team went about building a “proof of concept” with IBM — it looks a lot like a Facebook News Feed or just about any other social platform. (You can see it here.) Here’s an example of how a photo might appear in the feed:

Susie has posted a photo of a horrific fire and said the world was watching it “burn in real time.” But the photo’s provenance information shows not only caption and location information, but also that it was taken 7 years ago. More DVR than real time.

If you clicked on that “More,” this is what you’d see:

More context: an extended caption, credits for the photographer and the news organization, and other photos of the same event. Click on “History of This Photo” and you get its life story, recorded via blockchain:

After showing the feed to users, R&D found that, while provenance does help increase audience confidence, people were more interested in having information and resources related to the news photo: “The people we spoke to were less interested in seeing the history of how publishers used a photo and more interested in having access to other headlines, captions, summaries and links about the event depicted in the photo. This tied back to our earlier findings that interest, more than truth-seeking, drives user behavior on social platforms. People want more context because they are interested in a story, not because they are trying to prove whether a photo is real.”

“We live in a world where the most well-intentioned things — like raising awareness about climate change, or even just that particular natural disaster — can be fueled by unintentional, well-meaning misinformation. What does that mean when people actually try to do this on purpose?” Lavallee said. “We started looking at the technology angle of it and very quickly from there what we realized is: We can build a perfect technology solution, but if it doesn’t actually matter to people, then it’s not going to work.”

Lavallee emphasized that these findings are just the beginning of understanding how journalists and news organizations can start addressing visual misinformation. But effective solutions would require large-scale cooperation and commitment, across several industries. He said the News Provenance Project is also working on an adjacent project called the Content Authenticity Initiative with Adobe and Twitter. One focus of that project is making sure the tools journalists use to capture, edit, publish, and share photos that carry an editing history trail.

In a post about these findings, Koren lays out the players who would be key to a systemic solution:

• Camera makers to help photographers ensure time, date and location settings in cameras are exact.
• Every news publisher to modify their management processes for photo metadata so that they adhere to a common set of standards, such as those maintained by the International Photo Telecommunications Council (IPTC).
• All platforms such as Google, Facebook, Twitter and Apple, as well as chat apps like WhatsApp and Signal, to ensure the consistent display of this information.

That’s a big ask. As Koren acknowledges, within “this big and complex endeavor, a proof of concept is a small drop in a very big, complicated bucket.”

What’s next for the News Provenance Project? The Times says its next phase “will shift from exploration to execution to show how an end-to-end solution can help users share trusted news with confidence. The team will explore other potential solutions in emerging technology and work across newsrooms and industry to imagine what a better internet might look like.”

Whatever progress can be made, it will be essential to make it workable not only for the big guys — the Timeses, Posts, and Journals of the world — but for local outlets and small publishers too.

“We do not succeed if we end up creating a two-tier information ecosystem where only large publishers have these added veracity signals, implicitly casting more scrutiny on smaller outlets,” Lavallee said. “From a technical perspective, the solution needs to be as easy to install and use as something like WordPress. From a workflow and best practices perspective, it needs to be as easy and common sense as writing web-friendly headlines for articles.

“The work ahead is making sure that metadata is captured in a consistent way, and made available to other organizations, like social platforms, to use it responsibly.”

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.

But now, with a new mobile app, it’s aiming for a different, less-monied crowd: consumers. People who don’t necessarily need (or even want) to know every industry twist and turn but who do want to stay updated on major tech news.

Over the past six years, “tech has become an everything story,” Jessica Lessin, The Information’s founder and CEO, told me. “We hear from our friends from all corners of our lives who want to know things like: What is Alexa doing with my data? What does WeWork’s collapse mean for how I work in my business? We realized our team in the newsroom can help inform a much broader group of people about the most important tech stories.” (The “team in the newsroom” is a differentiator here; these small pieces are all written by Information staffers and feature a heavy dose of their analysis and context, even when they’re about stories that have been broken elsewhere.)

The Tech Top 10 app (available for iOS and Android now) is for “consumers who want to be plugged into the big tech stories without searching through Twitter or watered-down general news sites,” and it costs $2.99 per month or $29.99 per year. (The Information’s next cheapest product is a $199/year “Young Professionals” plan for people under 30 — but they also offer an “All-Access” subscription guaranteed to get you into Information events and conference calls for $749.)

Tech Top 10 is, in essence, the same product as The Information’s Briefing, which is mostly consumed as a nightly email to subscribers that summarizes and analyzes a mix of the day’s tech stories — most of them pointing to other sites’ coverage of them, but also some original to The Information but not worth a full story. They’re “quick briefs that just tell you what’s important,” Lessin said.

The 10 stories in the app today are all Briefing pieces from the past 24 hours, and as a result they still peer through The Information’s editorial lens. For example, you get “Sequoia Raises Two More Massive Funds,” “SoftBank-Backed Katerra to Close Phoenix Factory,” “Postmates Exits Mexico City, Cuts Staff,” and “Bird, Lime Lose D.C. Scooter Permit Contest” as top stories — quite different from the editorial mix you’d get from TechCrunch, The Verge, Axios, Ars Technica, Wired, or the tech sections of major newspapers.

3/Now the industry has another problem. Tech news has become SO important to the lives of everyone, not just business professionals. But the choices for following it—really following it—are tough.

— Jessica Lessin (@Jessicalessin) December 4, 2019

It was going to cost $30 a year, but then Apple said we couldn't charge that price (another story for another day :) so $29.99 a year it is! But there is a free trial. I am so excited to see what you think! https://t.co/BNieBHJzJs

— Jessica Lessin (@Jessicalessin) December 4, 2019

TheInformation's is launching today a new app today: Tech Top 10 – it is a continuous summary of what is happening in the tech world. While biased of course, I think the curation and editing makes it the best way to stay up to date. #homescreenhttps://t.co/YcBFNdeY8b https://t.co/HcDhnFQjp7

— sam lessin (@lessin) December 4, 2019

@theinformation just launched our new app, Tech Top 10 — Our first product created for the consumer market. Now, tech enthusiasts have access to our secret weapon of the most essential technology reporting in the industry that CEOs and investors have known for the past six years. https://t.co/dZ87n0KUov

— Chris Bowlby (@chrisrbowlby) December 4, 2019

“Quick briefs” sounds newsletter-esque, but the app allows editors to update (and reorder) stories continuously rather than in a single daily edition, doing Tech Top 10 as an app made more sense; a tech events calendar is also included. Plus, apps for media companies are seemingly hot again, if two makes a trend: The Atlantic recently relaunched its app as an email newsletter–inspired product.

[ The Atlantic’s new app takes a cue from email newsletters ]

Tech Top 10 is free for existing Information subscribers, and it also includes links to all of the site’s full stories, which are still only accessible to full subscribers. (They open up in Safari instead of in-app.) But “what a hedge fund needs to know about tech is very different from what a consumer needs to know,” Lessin said. “I’m super excited to serve everyone from the hedge fund to the consumer.”

The iOS-only app starts off with a “Today” screen, curated and written by humans, which users can scan for free. The newsletter-iness of that section is intentional, said Adrienne LaFrance, executive editor. The text in the Today screen changes according to the time of day; depending on when you’re reading, you’ll be greeted with “Good morning,” “Good afternoon,” “Good evening,” or “Still awake?”

That Today screen is free, but to click through to any of the articles or to read any of the app’s other content, users will have to pay. (The Atlantic’s website, in comparison, has a metered paywall; visitors can read five stories free per month before they have to pay.) Most of the users of The Atlantic’s app are subscribers anyway, said Andrew Phelps, senior director of product (and a Nieman Lab alum): “Our app audience is the most loyal and engaged of any surface where we reach people. Something like three out of four come to the app at least three times a week, and that was to an app that largely just looked like the homepage of The Atlantic. Until now, it hasn’t been terribly different.” But those who aren’t paying yet can subscribe to the app for either $4.99 per month or $49.99 per year.

@TheAtlantic's new iOS app shares a nearly identical UX with the @NewYorker's iOS app. Differences:

Atlantic's home feed = a newsletter whereas TNY is a list of articles

both emphasize consuming "complete" print issues

both prioritize on-demand reading (bookmarks) pic.twitter.com/aGSAN0XrTv

— Noah Chestnut (@noahchestnut) November 12, 2019

a few more …

neither the Atlantic or TNY emphasize asking users to receive push notifications (or even make a case as to why)

both feel a bit cluttered and force the reader to navigate the masthead/org

(bonus) TNY plays up it's cartoons and I love 'em for that pic.twitter.com/TWBbXKCJ8W

— Noah Chestnut (@noahchestnut) November 12, 2019

I'll end on this…

As the design for reading thoroughly & intentionally edited writing starts to all merge into one style… who benefits & who loses?

As a reader I like that things are all pretty easy to read. As a "publisher" it feels like we're ceding everything to iOS

— Noah Chestnut (@noahchestnut) November 12, 2019