Aria Bracci | The Verge

Spotify tests a podcast discovery feed

2022-03-29T09:30:00-04:00

Good morning, dear readers! The temperature went from 55 to 25 overnight, and my sinuses are in so much pain that I’ve been hanging upside down in the dark for relief. Like a bat.

Why podcasts pop up to cover Ukraine

New this morning, I reported a piece for The Verge about why so much coverage of Ukraine has taken the form of pop-up podcasts. The labor required to report out and produce a show isn’t easily condensed to match the breakneck speed of the news cycle, yet NPR, The Telegraph, independent teams, and more have rallied resources toward the medium.

A lot of these teams have reason to believe that this commitment is worth it — and many of them have a lot of the same reasons for thinking so. Many, after all, have quickly started new podcasts before, and some have even been able to repurpose the feeds once they end to help boost future endeavors.

I’d love it if you checked out the article over on the site. It’s an interesting trend, with some historical precedent and some forward-looking predictions.

Spotify shuts down all services in Russia

Late Friday, Spotify announced it would suspend service in Russia because of the country’s new law designed to stifle accurate coverage of its invasion of Ukraine. Spotify expects to complete the shutdown by early April.

“Unfortunately, recently enacted legislation further restricting access to information, eliminating free expression, and criminalizing certain types of news puts the safety of Spotify’s employees and possibly even our listeners at risk,” said a Spotify spokesperson, who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the situation.

Spotify previously suspended paid access to its service in Russia, losing an estimated 1.5 million paying subscribers as a result. But it had kept the broader service online until now, in the name of keeping information free-flowing to residents.

This move is the latest Spotify has taken in response to the invasion, mirroring the general actions of other big tech companies like YouTube and Apple. In early March, Spotify closed its local offices in the country (a move with potential long-term consequences) and removed the Russian state outlets RT and Sputnik from the platform.

Spotify tests a podcast discovery feed

On Friday afternoon, I spotted a change to the Spotify app: an entire podcast tab added to the bottom of the screen. A Spotify spokesperson said that the company routinely tests these sorts of updates — some that stick around and some that don’t — but that they “don’t have any further news to share at this time.”

Well, you’re in luck, ‘cuz I do.

This tab, as it currently stands, is not a place to corral your subscribed shows or downloaded episodes but is instead a pretty sparse page meant to introduce you to new ones. The page lets you swipe vertically through cards of different shows, with no clear order to what shows up next. When an episode is centered on the screen, a clip of its audio starts to play, and the page seems to recommend a mix of episodes from shows you subscribe to and those you don’t. Here’s a screen recording as captured by hashtag inventor Chris Messina, who aptly describes this interface as “TikTok-style.”

As far as actual discovery goes, the episodes that are featured, at least for me, are mostly from shows I currently listen to. Otherwise, they’re ones that already live under the “Popular with Listeners of ____” section on the Home tab.

The feature appears to have come out of Spotify’s acquisition of Podz, a podcast discovery app, which it purchased for around $50 million last year, as noted by TechCrunch.

Since Spotify doesn’t have this kind of TikTok-like counterpart for music discovery — and considering how precious the real estate of the main navigation bar is — this is a significant move, one in line with the company’s pursuit of podcast prominence. It’s also a glimpse at what real-time transcripts could look like on the platform.

While the audio plays, dynamic transcripts flash on screen, which is something that Spotify hasn’t yet made available across shows — and is hopefully a preview of a broader feature to come. Streaming companies, though, have given us reason to expect transcripts to be less than stellar when they do appear, and this is definitely not an exception.

The caption in the screenshot above, which reads “that is a little hot of viewing it is,” is taken from the audio of two speakers. It should read “That is a lot of viewing,” as spoken by one person, and “It is,” as spoken by the other. Instead, it sounds like Yoda.

iHeart and Sirius venture further from radio

Yesterday, we got two more podcast developments from companies that made their name doing something other than podcasts: SiriusXM just announced its first streaming channel dedicated to a podcast, and iHeartMedia announced a whole new podcast company. The two companies continue to push back the edges of their radio reputations, and both these moves are in line with that course.

SiriusXM’s new channel, “Freakonomics Radio Network,” will air both newly released episodes of the podcast Freakonomics Radio and those from its archive, like a podcast feed but shuffled and… always on. The channel will also feature episodes from other shows on the Freakonomics podcast slate, like People I (Mostly) Admire and No Stupid Questions. This differs from other SiriusXM deals that, yes, involve podcast hosts but put them in charge of wholly new shows with more traditional live-radio formats.

iHeartMedia enters its own recent non-radio endeavor with Collab, launching a separate podcast studio called Curativity that’s said to be “creator-centric;” it’ll start with family-friendly material, headed by an established creator. Two existing series, Kids Animal Stories and Kids Short Stories, are the first to be named to Curativity’s network, with a third, the newly announced Spyology Squad, set to premiere next week. All three come from the kids audio personality, Mr. Jim, whom I do not know, but those kiddos sure seem to.

On Being to go independent

And last week, Krista Tippett announced that both she and her long-running show On Being would be leaving public radio, transitioning to an independent model and ramping down from her weekly cadence. The ability to retain a program, take it elsewhere, and change it is akin to the freedom that many public-radio employees have expressed wanting from the field; while this shouldn’t be seen as a representative experience, it’s at least an example.

In a letter to stations that air On Being (almost 400 in total), Tippett wrote that public radio has been intrinsic to the show’s existence and growth ever since it started under a different name almost 20 years ago. “We will always understand ourselves as colleagues and family to you,” she wrote. “Indeed, we would love to find ways to partner with you and your communities through our work beyond this moment, and we will communicate about that with specificity later this year.”

Respect for radio notwithstanding, sometimes folks need to flex their creative muscles — or just take a break. “After hosting 52 weeks of programming a year for close to 20 years, I’m ready to move to a more sustainable rhythm and to open space and time for writing, public engagement, and new extensions of our content in the world that is emerging,” Tippett wrote. Heard that.

Googling “pirate lingo for goodbye” didn’t really yield anything, so I guess that’s not how Aria will be signing off today.

How news podcasts quickly popped up to cover Ukraine

2022-03-29T09:00:00-04:00

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has dominated headlines for the last month, with updates being prioritized across newspapers, TV outlets, and social media. But coverage has also popped up in a space that’s less known for handling breaking news: podcasts. Ukraine-focused podcasts or seasons have launched from places like NPR, the BBC, and CNN, with at least 11 designated series popping up in total. Most incorporate firsthand reporting, many publish daily, and some even update multiple times per day.

A podcast isn’t usually the preferred format for such a quickly moving story since audio shows can be difficult to turn around — or build an audience for — on short notice. But the creators of these series tell The Verge that the process is worth it, as audiences were already coming to their teams for information (often through existing podcast offerings), and they felt that audio as a medium allows can give listeners a personal connection to the story.

“Listeners are looking for both accurate and up-to-date information”

“It’s a quickly evolving situation that changes day by day,” says Theodora Louloudis, head of audio at The Telegraph, “and listeners are looking for both accurate and up-to-date information as well as analysis and insight.”

Past events have spurred news podcasts to come together rapidly — think Donald Trump’s impeachment or the pandemic — yet only certain events create the circumstances for such shows to be possible, given the sometimes Herculean task of starting and maintaining them. What about this moment lends itself to delivering news in such a way?

Producers of these shows say there are several reasons the events in Ukraine are an appropriate circumstance, making pop-up news podcasts not only possible to produce but worth producing. First, the steps leading up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine were being widely reported on, giving their teams an opportunity to trace if and when audiences went looking for more information.

“We’ve seen clearly how deeply audiences have engaged with NPR’s coverage of the Ukraine crisis in many places, including our daily news podcasts Up First and Consider This,” says Neal Carruth, NPR’s senior director for on-demand news programming. This informed the launch in early March of State of Ukraine, a standalone show.

Reporters were ready to respond when the invasion began

Similarly, Louloudis says The Telegraph as a whole was seeing “high subscriber engagement in this fast-moving, unfolding crisis,” thus justifying the launch of a new podcast, Ukraine: The Latest. “There are times of crisis when we rapidly pivot our resources into covering a major global story. COVID was one, the Russia-Ukraine war another.”

When Russia officially invaded Ukraine, reporters were ready to respond to the demand that had been growing, and many already had audio capabilities. Both NPR and The Telegraph leveraged existing reporters on the ground for their audio endeavors, and the shows Ukraine Without Hype and Ukraine World’s Explaining Ukraine — launched in 2020 and 2018, respectively — recently shifted from their general-interest coverage to reports focused on the invasion, in order to provide insights that audiences needed.

Sometimes the insights that audiences need are more personal, which audio is well served to deliver. The shows Fighting For Ukraine, In Ukraine: A Civilian Diary, and Tortoise Media’s Invaded: Voicemails from Ukraine all provide firsthand accounts, at times bringing Ukrainian voices into listeners’ ears multiple times per day.

The shows will end; the RSS feeds won’t

Beyond the labor of production and tight turnarounds, which are characteristic of news podcasts, there’s a challenge faced specifically by those that pop up to cover a singular event: that one day that event will end, and they’ll no longer be needed. But audio teams still stand to benefit from this since they can repurpose the RSS feeds from these shows, as well as the subscribers that they either acquired or converted from other series. As The Verge reported in 2019 regarding impeachment-focused podcasts, once the legal proceedings came to an end, some publications used their slowed or stagnant feeds to promote more general-interest shows. Currently, organizations like NPR are motivated by this ability to pivot.

“We’re proud to be providing a useful service for listeners on a fast-moving global story, as we did two years [ago] when we launched the Coronavirus Daily podcast,” says Carruth, who, in June of 2020, helped facilitate the conversion of Coronavirus Daily into NPR’s now-familiar daily podcast Consider This, all within the same feed.

Shows that focus on historical analysis were already in the habit of shifting topics, and some have viewed this current event as worth focusing their coverage on. In the tradition of Slow Burn, the Axios show How It Happened launched in 2021 and has continuously shifted topics and cover art to unpack different historical events. Naomi Shavin, Axios’ senior producer of podcast narrative and development, says it became clear that their show was the right fit for a Ukraine focus. “Because the conflict has vivid characters, huge stakes, and escalating tension and action that played out across years, it was an obvious choice,” she says.

Relatedly, the podcast Open Source had already teamed up earlier this year with the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft to produce the limited series In Search of Monsters about “how America’s hyper-militarized foreign policy shapes the world we live in today.” They’ve since pivoted to making the show about Russia’s adjacent aggression and current attack on Ukraine as an extension of that original conceit.

Existing audio teams are increasingly finding success in these quick pivots, but the decision continues to be a layered calculation. Are audiences invested enough in a given story? Will they transfer from existing properties to this new one? Is it possible to picture the eventual off-ramp? These questions will likely be asked more frequently going forward, and it seems possible that they’ll also be answered more quickly: Jonathan Aspinwall, senior news editor for BBC’s news podcasts, says their own Ukrainecast transformed “from an idea to a published podcast” in less than 48 hours.

What happened at Stitcher

2022-03-22T10:00:00-04:00

I told you I was gonna sob over that new MUNA song. I didn’t lie.

Now, more non-lies! Aka news!

But first, here’s Jake with something to flag for you all:

What happened at Stitcher

Hi everyone, I’m excited to share with you one more story from Ashley Carman — a piece she spent months reporting out and wrapped up right before she left.

The story is a deep dive into SiriusXM’s acquisition of Stitcher — how it went, where it went awry, and how it speaks to the broader podcasting landscape’s move toward consolidation and scale.

Former employees at Stitcher say SiriusXM lacked a podcast strategy when they were brought onboard, felt like the company didn’t empower them to act on their expertise, and clashed over basic things like cross-promotion and… even mentioning the name “Spotify.” The strategy shift has been particularly evident at the comedy network Earwolf, where fans have noticed a trickle of departing shows and hosts in recent months. Many of the smaller titles that made Earwolf known as a vibrant space for comedy have since left the network, while the studio has prioritized titles with mainstream hit potential, like Office Ladies and Storytime with Seth Rogen.

More than a quarter of Stitcher’s employees at the time of the acquisition have since left, including its CEO, CTO, and others from the C-suite, The Verge found. As Ashley writes, “Combined with the x-factors of a pandemic, a new corporate environment, and growing ways for shows to make it on their own without network support, the moment was right for a talent reckoning.”

There’s a lot more in the piece itself, including details on how some of this tension started before the acquisition. You can read the full story right here.

OK, back to Aria!

Radiolab’s big commitment to accessibility

Earlier this month, I clued Insiders in on a new Radiolab episode — a story told by the writer Elsa Sjunneson about how her life relates to Helen Keller’s — which was being produced in a way that Deaf-blind audiences could access in its entirety.

Radiolab has now put out an accompanying ASL video for the episode, and it’s also published a transcript specially formatted to load into digital Braille readers. I talked to the team about how and why this came together.

It was important to interpret the work in a way that was “linguistically and culturally fluent”

Creating these assets happened in stages and involved a lot of people from both within and beyond WNYC, but once shared, the process becomes replicable. To make a compatible transcript, for example, they hired an external Braille coordinator, Sharon von See, to convert the copy into an official “Braille Ready File” using a computer program. The ASL video, produced by WNYC social media producer Kim Nowacki, took many more steps, including two rounds of translation with outside interpreters April Jackson-Woodard and Eboni Gaytan.

Here’s that process, as explained to me by Radiolab sound designer Jeremy Bloom: he and Gaytan, who is not Deaf, listened through to the episode in 10-minute chunks; as she listened, Gaytan created a signed interpretation of what she heard, passing it along to Jackson-Woodard, who is Deaf; Jackson-Woodard then re-interpreted what she’d received from Gaytan, and it is Jackson-Woodard and her translation that you see in the final video.

As Bloom says, Jackson-Woodard “can interpret the work in a way that is more linguistically and culturally fluent than if we were to use a single hearing interpreter alone.” A third interpreter, Annie Dieckman, was also present to translate between Jackson-Woodard and himself since Bloom doesn’t know ASL. The resulting video was then adjusted to bring the signing into time with the audio, and to convey the true essence of Radiolab, it was also outfitted with specific written descriptions of the music and sound design, courtesy of the artist Shannon Finnegan (whose descriptions can also be read in the transcript).

These components are a big improvement from the existing delivery of this show’s content, but that delivery was actually pretty robust already. Uploading visual counterparts to audio, for example, has been an active practice for the team, who’ve published both closed-captioned videos of episodes and more experimental content, like a recording of a cassette (for an episode about cassettes) that shows you the spools spinning if you choose to watch it (but is fine to minimize into the background if you choose not to).

Taking inspiration from existing creators is one part of Radiolab’s new approach, which I’m told is broadly a result of feedback from the show’s audience; many fans rely on accessibility accommodations, and their experience of the show shouldn’t come at the expense of that. More recently, the team has collaborated directly with various people with disabilities as both paid contributors and expert sources. Looking ahead, I’m told that more ASL videos are on the way and that transcripts will always be available — yes, even if the larger audio industry hasn’t yet caught up.

“Last year, I saw Christine Sun Kim’s incredible Pop-Up Magazine video, and it helped me understand how much lusher sound descriptions in transcripts could be,” says Lulu Miller, one of Radiolab’s co-hosts. In this video, Sun Kim reimagines the way closed captions could be read by writing them herself, combining literal descriptions of feet “slapping” against floor tiles with more abstract descriptions, like “the sound of shampoo scent floating among the fog.”

“Ever since then,” Miller says, “we’ve all been hungry to find a way to step up our game in that area.”

EXCLUSIVE: PRX and Google’s new training program for less-than-new podcasters

Last convening in 2021, the Google Podcasts creator program is beginning its third iteration, with some notable changes.

This international training, co-facilitated by Google and PRX, has previously focused on new podcast producers, at times offering funding to up to 20 recipients at once. This time, only six small teams or individuals will be chosen for the program, which is focused on producers who are at least three years into their audio-making journey and whom the program can help monetize and grow what they’ve started.

“We want to help both podcasts and podcasters evolve.”

With this goal in mind, that means another big change for the program: the funding that each could potentially receive has increased by over 60 percent since the last time it was up for grabs. Stephanie Kuo, director of training at PRX, says an increase in funding was in response to feedback from program alumni.

“The program this year is intended for those looking to take a current podcast and transform it from what may have been a passion project or side hustle into a business with revenue potential, while also continuing to refine creative development skills,” says Kuo. “With a goal to see more successful independent shows in the ecosystem, we want to help both podcasts and podcasters evolve in this way.”

You can find details about submission and eligibility on the program website, or tune into the informational webinar that PRX is hosting today at 2PM ET.

More toys for Apple podcasters

Today, Apple Podcasts announced new capabilities for creators who offer subscription channels while also teasing forthcoming listener metrics for regular ol’ podcasters.

Those who run premium channels can now do things like customize banners from show to show to advertise different paywalled perks. And starting in April, all podcasters’ listening metrics will start to differentiate between the activity of followers and non-followers, meaning those who opt in to be notified about new episodes versus those who don’t. With the latter, the goal is to help identify how many listeners are truly invested in a show (and might then be interested in becoming paying subscribers down the line).

Apple Podcasts Connect, the dashboard in which podcasters can see all these metrics, was revamped last spring; this spring, it seems to be blooming again.

Twitter Spaces increasing shareability (and asynchronous-ity)

Some Apple users now have the ability to share audio snippets from Twitter Spaces, a feature similar to what Clubhouse users gained this past September. With Clubhouse’s version, if clips are captured and posted quickly enough, they can spur people to joining a conversation as it’s happening; Twitter, on the other hand, is limiting the clipping feature to Spaces that have already been recorded, according to the official “Twitter Spaces” Twitter account (why). In that way, this newer feature appeals to people with waning interest in live audio.

The Verge has more details on the announcement, though I’m partial to this News9 write-up since there’s a typo that swaps “clip” for “clop,” and now I can’t stop thinking about horses.

Anna Sorokin joins podcast from jail

Last week, Anna Sorokin (the swindler and subject of the recent Netflix series Inventing Anna who is currently in ICE custody) appeared as a guest on the podcast Call Her Daddy, which I’m pointing out for two reasons, in addition to that just being an absolutely unhinged sentence.

First, it’s deliberately produced and marketed as a video episode, speaking to Spotify’s ongoing efforts to make video happen for its podcasts. The spectacle of having Sorokin beam in from a holding cell can’t exactly be ignored.

And second, this is now at least the second time that Call Her Daddy has produced sound-byte-friendly audio — last month, a quote from Julia Fox’s appearance on the show became viral TikTok audio. I don’t have equally high expectations for the potential of Sorokin’s appearance, mostly because the audio quality isn’t great, but host Alex Cooper did have at least one good line. In response to her guest disagreeing with the idea that, in being a con artist, she’s like a performer, Cooper interjects, “You are. You’re very confusing.” The silence that follows gets me every. single. time.

Hope anyone who’s going in person to Podcast Movement enjoys it! I’m on the East Coast, and I’m freezing.

Virtual podcast events are bringing in six-figure earnings

2022-03-15T10:45:00-04:00

Howdy, team! I’m here, on a Tuesday. And what a day to have a platform, because now I can tell you to go watch / listen to the premiere of MUNA’s new song at 11:45AM ET. May we sob together. (The teaser made the music sound somewhat upbeat, but you really never know.)

EXCLUSIVE: Big $$$ in virtual podcast events

In-person podcast tours have shown that people are willing to pay for something beyond a pre-recorded episode. But virtual versions of those shows? In this climate of Zoom fatigue? Oh yeah, baby. In fact, they’re booming.

Moment House has been live-streaming podcast recordings, called “Moments,” since March 2021, and I’m told that the company has sold 140,000 tickets over the course of the 56 that it’s hosted since then. The streams have averaged six-figure payouts for creators; one even reached as high as $500,000. Creators keep all gross revenue (Moment House makes money from a 10 percent service fee on the customer), with many shows returning to the platform quarterly.

What happened to Zoom fatigue?

These huge payouts come from a combination of tickets, merch, and tips from the audience, as well as meet-and-greet upgrades or after parties, all of which Moment House helps create a contained environment for. The platform has been a success for big names like the McElroy brothers and cult favorites like Morbid: A True Crime Podcast and Buffering The Vampire Slayer, but technically any podcaster can host on the platform.

Moments are livestreamed and interactive, so they’re well suited to improvisational, chatty podcasts with devoted listeners. Bart Coleman, Moment House’s head of comedy, described the events to me as having “‘anything can happen’ energy.” Past Moments have included interactive trivia with audience members and a live merch fundraiser where hosts made a drinking game out of the milestones reached.

Mike Muney, head of creator partnerships, tells us that Moments work considerably well for podcasters, many of whom have the dual goals of making money off of their work and engaging directly with their audiences. (Moment House also hosts concerts and has done so for longer than it’s hosted podcast recordings.) Podcast audiences have shown they’re willing to do their part: common paywalled perks for podcasts are ones that give listeners increased access to podcast hosts, whether through behind-the-scenes episodes or Discord chats. Moment House is a natural extension.

But Moment House isn’t alone in this space. Last spring, Nick wrote about the virtual-performance endeavors of the company FRQNCY. At the time, there was a lot of doubt swirling around about its shelf life: would it last once audiences were able to return to in-person events? Now, it seems like there’s continued to be more desire for location-agnostic events than we could’ve known.

Headgum launches its platform for booking host reads

Last week, the podcast network Headgum publicly launched Gumball, a host-read ad marketplace that the company says is unmatched in being fully automated: brands can walk themselves through transparent booking calendars, playable samples, and audience demographics, then check out; on the other side, podcasters are given tools to manage their own workflow and decision-making (and can apply to join the platform here).

Headgum built Gumball’s tech internally, and for years before the tool’s “debut from stealth,” the company used it to book ads for its own slate of podcasts, then eventually other select shows. CEO Marty Michael tells me he’s excited for even more independent shows to get in on it, especially since they’ve already seen a “halo effect” of sales from the existing relationships that advertisers have with Headgum shows.

“Anything that saves time in this busy world, and in this demanding industry, is hugely helpful”

“It was working so well,” Michael says, “we thought it was time to go out and talk to investors,” which might be how you heard about Gumball in recent days: the platform just closed a $10 million Series A funding round. With that money, the team is bolstering its promotional abilities, as well as Gumball’s technical muscle, to keep scaling. (“We needed to get him an engineering team!” Michael says of Headgum co-founder Andrew Pile, who spearheaded the infrastructure.)

Athletic Greens, a company that some may recognize for its frequent podcast ads, has been using the beta version of Gumball for almost three years. “Anything that saves time in this busy world, and in this demanding industry, is hugely helpful,” says Martha Gallant, Athletic Greens’ senior director of audio partnerships.

Host-read ads tend to be more complicated to place than other types — just check out this example process, as outlined in Sounds Profitable — but Athletic Greens still prioritizes them, says Gallant. For the right type of brand, she says, a host read is “the secret sauce of a podcast ad.”

Spotify podcaster gets questioned, questions why

Yesterday, the writer Damon Young published an op-ed in The Washington Post Magazine, outlining the two choices that he feels he’s facing as a creator of a forthcoming Spotify show, considering that Joe Rogan has caused many creators to question whether to keep aligning with the platform.

First, though, he drives home that the expectation that he, a Black man, take a particular stance against Rogan makes him feel trapped. “Removing my show feels like a loss for me, my staff, my guests, my family, my fans,” writes Young, “and a win for the dummies,” a word that he uses in the piece liberally, but gently, to describe people whose behavior ranges from senseless to discriminatory.

He could, he says, proceed as planned with the show or “remove my upcoming Spotify-owned podcast — which is literally about the funny and messy and thorny collisions of race, sex and money — from Spotify, and trash the 18 months of labor invested in it.” Ultimately, Young is choosing not to abandon what he’s worked on, even with the disproportionate pressure for him to be the one to take the loss. After all, the outcome would be far different than it was for the other Young on Spotify.

A sneaky sound-creation bundle from Spotify

Pivoting to the topic of more explicit, intentional business decisions, Spotify Premium is now available to bundle with Soundtrap, the “cloud-based audio recording platform” and fellow Swedish company that Spotify acquired in late 2017. Of note here is that Soundtrap is not strictly for music production but a more general toolkit that distinguishes offerings for “Music Makers” from those meant for “Storytellers.” In other words, it appeals directly to podcasters.

However, big catch! As pointed out by Engadget, “there’s a big drawback to Soundtrap if you’re planning on also publishing on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher or another podcasting service. Soundtrap won’t generate an RSS feed for each episode, which you will need to publish your podcast outside of Spotify.” That feels on brand.

YouTube kicks election disinformation — and Trump

The hosts of the shouty brocast Full Send recently brought Donald Trump on to discuss… who knows what. But the stuff he ended up talking about amounted to “content that advances false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches changed the outcome of the U.S. 2020 presidential election,” according to YouTube, which prompted the episode’s removal.

YouTube is used to moderating in a way traditional podcast platforms aren’t

I did call it, folks! It’s an election year, public figures were already getting rowdy on podcasts, and Trump seemed like the exact person who’d make headlines at this intersection — it actually already happened, in fact, in an abrupt exit from an NPR interview that I noted a few months back. Here we go again.

As of press time, it looks like the Full Send episode is still playable on other major podcast platforms, so there’s an interesting dynamic playing out. Traditional podcasting platforms have been slower to moderate the open ecosystem of RSS-based shows, but YouTube — which has quietly become a podcasting powerhouse — has a long history of moderating its platform, if somewhat imperfectly. With podcasts, there are several examples to point to even just from recent months, like removing Joe Rogan content for vaccine misinformation and permanently banning Dan Bongino.

And a deal for reVolver and SXM Media

To wrap up, this partnership, which was announced last Thursday, gives SXM Media “exclusive global ad sales rights to reVolver’s extensive lineup of podcasts,” which includes popular Spanish-language shows like El Show de Piolín and Erazno y La Chokolata. All shows from reVolver — “the leading multicultural, audio-on-demand content creator and publisher in the U.S.,” according to the press release — will be distributed and available on all podcast platforms, by way of Stitcher.

Thanks for reading! Hi, mom!

Our biggest takeaways from Hot Pod Summit 2022

2022-03-01T11:00:00-05:00

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Last week, we held Hot Pod Summit 2022, our invite-only event about the future of the podcast industry. It was a day of laughs, gasps, and jabs at all our favorite audio giants.

Ashley helmed nearly all the panels, and at the end of the day, she publicly shared that she’s beginning a new adventure. After more than six years at The Verge and many months in charge of Hot Pod (including weeks spent writing “test runs” before she officially started??), she’s now off to Bloomberg. Hot Pod will be getting someone new soon, but until then, we’re going to take things a little slower to get all our ducks in a row. And also allow our ducks to sleep. I am one of those ducks.

I’m going to be off until next week’s Insider issues, so our editor Jake Kastrenakes will be with you in the meantime.

One more thing: I wanted to thank all of you for being so kind to me this weekend. I’m pretty sure I told every person I spoke to how much I was sweating, but if I didn’t, now I am. I was nervous, and I’m grateful to the staff, volunteers, attendees, and speakers for giving me a sweet environment in which to feel all the things I felt.

Now, the Summit! I want to run through some of the concrete, business-y insights from the summit for folks who couldn’t be there. These are just a few of the day’s takeaways, though — the things our panelists talked about were representative of the walk they walk every day, running their own companies and building out fan perks to monetize their creations. Check them out, ask them questions, work with them! They’re doing a lot, and they’re not letting up.

Existing video platforms boost a pod’s footprint

AJ Feliciano, head of Rooster Teeth’s podcast network, called YouTube “a game of skill.” It’s a platform that podcasters can use to reach a new audience, he said, but only if they optimize their videos for discoverability. And the fact that YouTube’s algorithmic suggestions work for discoverability at all? It leads him to think that a similar setup should “absolutely” come to podcast platforms. (In that vein, TikTok isn’t too shabby, either: fellow panelist Marques Brownlee said that there’s a fan-made TikTok account for his podcast, and even though it’s not officially affiliated with him or his brand, some of the account’s videos have over 1 million views.)

It’s not a shortcoming that important steps are often inefficient — that’s showbiz, baby

Dan Granger, CEO and founder of Oxford Road, maintained that there’s overwhelming benefit to making ads that listeners perceive as personal and authentic; live reads just hit different than third-party spots inserted later on. Responding to an audience suggestion that shows do pre-recorded host-read ads, with the goal of making it easier to swap ads in and out but not compromise their candid quality, Granger called them “faked-ins” (instead of baked-ins) and said that, data-wise, they’re just not the same as true host reads. According to his experience in the ad world, they “never reach the amount of seamless magic.”

The content moderation people are asking for might not come; it might not even be the right thing to ask for

During the Q&A portion of our panel on content moderation, producer Keisha TK Dutes spoke to the experience of Black and BIPOC voices and media being stifled under the guise of content moderation. Then she posed an important question: will any changes actually come out of the recent backlash against discriminatory and harmful speech, considering many relevant figures have historically kept their platforms, especially in radio (and especially when they’re white men)? Panelist Owen Grover, CEO of TrueFire Studios, conceded that the outlook isn’t sunny, saying that ad sellers have continued to be able to find sponsors for dangerous content and that money has maintained the status quo. “Talk radio is the progenitor to this particular set of issues,” he said. Further, panel moderator Casey Newton pointed out the elephant in the room: that the biggest “content moderation” story of the moment — Joe Rogan — actually requires something deeper than moderation. It isn’t happenstance, an uncomfortable accident, that Rogan and his words ended up on Spotify’s platform, and now, oops, he just has to be dealt with. The company paid him to be there.

And a few other notes:

On a panel about running audio companies alongside Big Tech competitors, Juleyka Lantigua, CEO and founder of the production company LWC, drove home a point about professional development: it’s a personal commitment from an employee and requires the support of an employer to evolve in the industry. And, sometimes, growth might be best accessed in a new role at a new company. That’s not a bad thing for the industry, even though it can feel like a large (and sometimes personal) loss for a small team.
Don Albright, co-founder of Tenderfoot TV, explained that it takes time — and chance — for the ownership of IP to yield a payout for creators: “You’ve gotta have 10 things out there working,” he said, both to help the odds work in your favor and to benefit financially on the off chance that something does get picked up. “Banking on funding payroll” with things like licensing fees? Dream on.
And at the open-ended town hall, which rounded out the day, one question carried the whole dang session: are we really at a loss for podcast hits, with the days of culture-defining audio sensations behind us? TL;DR: nope. There are many ways to define the success of a show, and folks had many ways to express that — too many to name here. But hey, even if we do rely on old metrics, another Serial-style hit could still be right around the corner.

Okay yeah, I’m spent. Take such good care, babes.

Now, our aforementioned editor is going to run you through some news this morning, as well as for the next few to follow.

Hi all, Jake here. I’m usually behind the scenes, but I’ve got you covered for news today.

What if a news podcast could update throughout the day?

There’s a new company, with some new tech, helping launch a new podcast. Lots of interesting things to cover here:

Spooler is a new podcast tech company led by some major names in the audio space. That includes James O. Boggs, former head of Apple Podcasts; Andy Bowers, co-founder of Slate Audio and Megaphone; Dan Benjamin, founder of Fireside.fm; and Kerry Donahue, former executive producer at WNYC. Also, Henry Blodget is involved somehow?
The company’s tech allows podcasters to continually update a show. A news show could publish in the morning and then, throughout the day, add new segments, update earlier clips, or swap around the order of the broadcast.
Each update will rebuild the podcast and replace the prior entry on RSS, Bowers told me via a spokesperson. So if you listen in the morning, you could download the show again and skip ahead to hear what happened later in the day.
Listeners will get a better experience through a custom player that lets listeners browse segment by segment. Right now, this only exists on the web.
Insider is the first to use the tech, launching a news show called The Refresh (get it?). The show will publish weekdays with live updates between 7AM and 1PM ET.

This is a clever idea and opens up some fascinating new possibilities for podcasters. That said, my immediate read is that this seems like a lot of work for both podcasters and listeners. Producers need to be on hand to continually record and build out the episodes throughout the day. And listeners need to be mindful of when they last tuned in to make sure they don’t miss out on anything.

Still, with the caliber of names involved, I’m paying attention.

Pandora <3s SoundCloud

Pandora continues to deepen its ties to SoundCloud with the launch of a new station — Digicore by SoundCloud — that’ll be focused on “music from a young, diverse, internet-inspired generation.” Tracks will be picked by SoundCloud’s music team, with most songs coming from at-home producers who are largely unsigned, Erika Montes, VP of artist development and relations, tells me via a spokesperson.

It’s the latest sign of deepening ties between SiriusXM (which owns Pandora) and SoundCloud (which SiriusXM invested $75 million into in 2020). Pandora’s first SoundCloud station, The Lookout by SoundCloud, launched last year based on the hip-hop show of the same name that airs on SiriusXM. The companies are promising more collaborations throughout 2022.

iHeart lets you “talk back” to hosts

A new feature in the iHeartRadio app lets listeners record and send 30-second voice memos to hosts, who can theoretically then use those clips live on air just moments after receiving them. This sounds fun and deeply chaotic — but how many of yall are using this app? iHeart reported having 150 million “registered” users last May, but it didn’t provide numbers on active users.

Saturday Night Live suggests white guys cool it with all the podcasts

In case you were wondering how mainstream the issue of “white guys saying dumb stuff on podcasts” has become, look no further than this John Mulaney sketch from this weekend’s SNL.

That’s all for now — catch you Insiders on Thursday.

Librarians are coming for podcasts

2022-01-18T12:40:00-05:00

Well, hi, everyone! You’ve got Aria. Real excited to be here with y’all.

As a reminder, Ashley’s out this week, so if you have things to share, you can send ‘em my way (aria.bracci@voxmedia.com). In the meantime, I’ll share some things with you, which is my job, to share those things.

P.S. Julie, if you’re reading this, tell your 10-year-old we said hey!

Hot Pod Summit is almost here! We’re hosting the invite-only event on February 24th in Brooklyn, New York, as part of On Air Fest. You can see this year’s On Air Fest lineup and buy tickets here. We’ll have more to share on programming and ticketing for Hot Pod Summit in the coming weeks.

EXCLUSIVE: $100K podcast fund launches for upstart shows

Starting today, budding US-based podcasters can apply to receive money from a new podcast sponsorship fund, which can be used for any purpose, from paying contributors to buying recording equipment. The fund, called Podca$h, will deliver one-time payments between $250 and $5,000 to up to 100 recipients. Eligible applicants include people who’ve never podcasted before, as well as those who’ve received less than $10,000 in total funding or sponsorships for an existing project. Applications are open until March 4th, 2022.

Podca$h was conceived to help more creators make well-known, well-paying podcasts. The two companies funding and operating the program, the short-form audio platform Racket and money-management software Stir, share a mission of supporting homegrown projects and helping them take off. “In podcasting, the rich tend to get richer,” says Racket founder and CEO Austin Petersmith. “We wanted to limit this campaign to people who have yet to make significant revenue for their podcasts. We also didn’t want to exclude those who have been at this for a while and are making, say, a few hundred dollars a month.”

Recipients will be chosen by a panel of judges with fingers on the pulse of digital media — angel investor and podcast host Jason Calacanis, the YouTube-using artist Humble the Poet, and several executives overseeing audience growth and talent.

Podca$h is a sponsorship program, not a scholarship. Recipients will be asked to deliver an ad read for Racket and Stir on the shows they ultimately develop, “but whether they do it or not will be on the honor system,” says Petersmith. Full terms can be found on the official Podca$h website.

An industry so big it needs librarians to organize it

Podchaser, the podcast discovery service, recently hired Norman Chella as a full-time “podcast librarian.” Chella is only the second person I’ve ever heard of to have that job title — and shortly after his role was announced, Ma’ayan Plaut, who’s considered to be the first podcast librarian, welcomed him to the club.

A librarian for podcasts does a lot of the things that a librarian for books would do — add new titles to a collection, organize them so people can find what they’re looking for — which, as the audio landscape gets more crowded, offers a systematic way to find shows. This helps overwhelmed listeners, and it also helps podcasters, for whom making money requires a show to be discoverable, both by audiences and potential advertisers.

As Plaut told me over email, there have been people in the audio industry with “the heart and spirit of a Podcast Librarian” since podcasts emerged. But Plaut and Chella may very well be the only ones who’ve ever been given designated, full-time librarian titles for audio companies. And while there’s a fair amount of similarities between Plaut’s 2016–2019 tenure at RadioPublic and Chella’s new role at Podchaser, the ways that the role has changed in just a few years show how much the podcast industry has changed, too.

“I’m here to provoke every single person in the podcast industry to record their body of work accurately.”

The biggest shift is the increased emphasis on ad sales. While Plaut spent a lot of her time finding, listening to, and recommending shows for curious listeners, Chella knows that companies are increasingly curious, too, and he tells me he’ll be working to ensure that both the stats that are pulled in from streaming platforms (e.g., estimated monthly listens) and the specs that users add themselves (e.g., host bios) are correct. As Chella says, “a misstep in crediting can prevent that one sponsor from reaching out to your podcast for a great deal. You never know!”

Another change is the addition of a “curator” role to Chella’s plate, since there’s plenty of room for error in both the automatic and manual ways of contributing data that I mentioned above. Podchaser’s library may have predated Chella, but it takes a human to monitor such a system, coach people on how to contribute to it, and identify ways it could be better. As Chella says, “I’m here to provoke every single person in the podcast industry to record their body of work accurately.” This includes things like getting folks to credit shows’ contributors using uniform language, an area where Podchaser is trying to establish standard terms. It also includes getting podcasters excited about being documented at all — in Chella’s words, “getting their name etched in podcast history.”

No one took over Plaut’s librarian position when she left RadioPublic three years ago. But times are a’changing, and there’s a lot to do, so it seems likely that we’ll see more of these jobs pop up soon. As Chella puts it, surprisingly calmly, “the mission to document the timeline of every podcast in the world requires someone’s full attention on it.”

YouTube temporarily bars Dan Bongino for COVID misinformation

Conservative talk show host Dan Bongino has had his YouTube account and monetization privileges temporarily suspended after receiving his first “strike” for violating the company’s COVID misinformation policy, according to The Hill. Bongino is a big name in radio — he’s Cumulus Media’s Rush Limbaugh replacement — so YouTube is showing here that moderation rules apply even to a major host.

This stands in contrast to Spotify’s resistance to moderating or removing content from the comparably controversial Joe Rogan. Rogan has also been sharing dangerous information around COVID, enough that hundreds of medical professionals recently petitioned Spotify to enforce a misinformation policy. But Spotify has not responded to calls to take his episodes down.

Enjoying this story? Hot Pod is a newsletter from The Verge that delivers news, analysis, and opinions on the audio industry written by Ashley Carman. The weekly Tuesday issue is free, and you can subscribe to two additional Hot Pod Insider newsletters per week for $7 / month or $70 / year.

BBC funding nearly slashed

It’s a storyline that will sound familiar to US residents: over the weekend, the publicly funded BBC was threatened with the elimination of most of its financial support. This was ultimately walked back and replaced with a less catastrophic change, but it’s one that still deals a blow to the broadcaster.

On Sunday, the UK culture secretary threatened to end the license fee that residents pay to the BBC, which makes up three-fourths of its funding, according to The New York Times. The fee was expected to remain frozen for the next two years, rather than rising proportionately with inflation, then be phased out entirely by 2027. By Monday, the only remaining change was the freeze. Though the longer-term fate of funding is unclear, even the fee freeze will affect BBC’s ability to create programming, necessitating what The Guardian estimates will be “hundreds of millions of pounds” in budget cuts.

Recordings for Spaces for all

Twitter is now letting all Spaces hosts record their sessions on mobile, then access detailed attendance numbers. Users will now be able to differentiate between listeners who tuned in live versus those who watched the replay for up to 30 days after a Space ends.

Excited to see you Insiders on Thursday! And Friday! Aria lives on!

This year, podcasts showed up with a vengeance on TV

2021-12-21T09:15:00-05:00

In the new Chucky series on SyFy, one of the show’s main characters investigates a series of brutal murders by hosting a DIY true-crime podcast — a fact I found out while listening to a podcast myself.

If you listen to podcasts, you may already feel like they’re everywhere, but this year, they really were: podcasts popped up in non-podcast spaces like television time and again in 2021. True-crime podcasts drive both Chucky and the new Hulu show Only Murders in the Building, and Carrie Bradshaw co-hosts a podcast in the revival of Sex and the City. In non-fictional spaces, a certain controversial Spotify host got plenty of broadcast news coverage throughout the year, and Hot Pod even made an appearance on Today. Podcasting abounded within both fictional depictions of our world and the institutions that document it, despite there still being tons of non-listeners out there — and maybe even because of that.

TV’s fictional-but-realistic characters reflect the parts of our world that are prominent enough to capture, and 2021’s media showed that podcasting has made it. It’s a realistic, timely move for relationship columnist Carrie Bradshaw to transition to a newer, digital medium, and it mirrors the real-life media institutions that have added podcasting to their repertoire. It’s also nearly identical to the trajectory of similar real-life columns, like Meredith Goldstein’s Boston Globe column Love Letters, which became a podcast a few years ago, and The New York Times’ column-turned-podcast-turned-TV-series Modern Love.

At the same time, podcasting getting top billing in TV shows may also signal that many people still don’t fully understand it, and it needs longer, sustained plots to make sense. In the first episode of And Just Like That…, the logistics of Carrie’s new gig are very much in focus. We hear the podcast. We see her receive feedback on her recording. We get a glimpse of her writing a rough script at home. In Miranda’s case, the idea of a parent going back to school is commonplace enough to not really need explaining; viewers can instead focus on what it serves to tee up (i.e., the cringey exploits of a white woman navigating a human rights class in 2021).

Maybe this time next year, podcasts will be shouted out even more often, with fewer explainers needed; media with a faster turnaround is already giving a glimpse of what this could look like. This year, Saturday Night Live took at least three stabs at podcasting, first dedicating a whole skit to the dynamic between Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen on the podcast Renegades, then referencing a viral Joe Rogan quote. When they came for Joe Rogan more recently, it was much more subtle. And so it begins.

Podcasts always had instrumental music — now some have singing, too

2021-11-09T08:45:00-05:00

In the podcast series Forever Is a Long Time, listeners hear a man gently ask his relatives about the details of their failed marriages. Then, they hear him sing a song about it.

Host Ian Coss was a musician before he started producing and sound-designing podcasts, and he has long used songwriting to make sense of his life. When he needed to process the messy, emotional topic of divorce, he started by singing. Then, he interviewed his family to get more of the answers he sought. Neither would be complete without the other, he said — he “wanted it to feel like an integrated whole.” From there, a hybrid of an album and a podcast was born.

Lots of musicians have translated their skills to podcast production, creating the instrumentals and original theme songs heard in many shows. But songs with lyrics? Embedded right there in an episode? There hasn’t historically been a place for them since they compete with the words being spoken. But a desire to incorporate singing anyway has led several creators to reimagine the structure of the shows they produce, crafting songs that are meant to live right alongside interviews and discussions. As with Coss’ creations, their songs become just as important as the speech that surrounds them.

Speaking and singing have already mingled in the context of podcasts, but mostly fictional ones. The scripted series Electric Easy guides listeners from speech to song by featuring musical performances right in the plot; same goes for Halloween in Hell, which is about a singing competition hosted by Satan. But it’s less intuitive to follow along when songs are slipped into something like a chatcast or an interview-based show, which might not have natural segues between the two formats. Listeners may be turned off when they’re jolted from one to the other, especially since they can’t be walked through the transition by visual footage the way they can while watching movies or TV.

Beyond fictional podcasts that roughly follow the Glee format, the interplay of song and speech has mostly been limited to things other than podcasts. Think hip-hop and rap albums, which swing from musical tracks to spoken interludes and scenes. Another example is the FM radio model, where DJs surface between songs to banter, often about things other than the music. Coss says he couldn’t find podcasts that achieved the balance he was trying to strike, where the songs deliberately pertained to the discussions or vice versa; instead, he drew inspiration from musical concept albums, like The Point by Harry Nilsson, as well as Woody Guthrie’s “three hours of song and conversation,” housed by the Library of Congress.

With these examples in other audio fields, audiences have had years to warm up to the idea that mediums will mix; to avoid turning off listeners within podcasts, producers aimed to be as unsurprising as possible with how they presented the music. In the scripted series Here Comes the Break, the show’s narrator interviews real-life musicians for a fictional podcast (within this real podcast), on which the artists debut actual tracks they recorded in the real world. To prevent listeners from being disoriented by the otherwise unmusical plot suddenly switching to song, the music is always placed at the end of an episode; the same is true of Coss’ show. Both podcasts also keep their content the same length episode to episode — roughly 30 minutes —which, as a standard length in the industry, provides listeners with a familiar element within an otherwise unfamiliar concept.

One musician and producer has experimented with how far podcast listeners are willing to go to hear the songs she wants them to hear. The movie-discussion podcast You Are Good, hosted by Sarah Marshall and Alex Steed, features both covers and original tracks by the musician Carolyn Kendrick (who, using her technical skills, also produces the show). In a given episode, listeners hear a chat between Marshall and Steed, a song that Kendrick has recorded to complement the discussion, then a return to the conversation.

“I definitely make the songs much shorter than I would if I was making a regular album,” Kendrick says. Creating songs for the middle of an episode, as opposed to the end, also requires generalizing lyrics and “trimming the fat” that doesn’t directly support the discussion, she says. “My number one fear is that the music will be distracting, and hopefully it’s not.”

Far from being distracting, given that You Are Good is both silly and serious, lyrical music can be a helpful transitional tool. After the hosts joke around in the first few minutes of an episode about The Shining, the listener hears low, spooky notes on a piano, with Kendrick repetitively singing the phrase “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” which she says “conveyed the creepiness of that story.” It works as a transition into the markedly heavier conversation between the hosts that follows.

The music in these podcasts can be their selling point, says Brady Sadler, CEO and co-founder of the audio company Double Elvis, which produced Here Comes The Break. In that show in particular, which was branded as a “music-breaking podcast,” songs debuted exclusively in the episodes, and the musicians acted as a “built-in influencer base” to hype up the drops on social media, Sadler says. “Having the exclusive music definitely achieved what we were hoping for,” he adds: getting people excited to hear a song within the context of the podcast and its characters, even though they knew they could hear the song via wide release the very next day.

The generally positive reception to these shows may be due to listeners’ expectations already beginning to shift. As Coss points out, Spotify has published “Daily Drive” playlists for years, mixing music with reported news, and Sadler speculates that, more broadly, many listeners have gotten used to going to one place (e.g., Spotify, Amazon Music) to hear both music and podcasts, even if the two mediums aren’t often played in quick succession.

Maybe Spotify knows something these creators can only speculate: that listeners do indeed want content that combines speaking and singing. That would make it seem as though projects like You Are Good and Forever Is a Long Time have popped up in response, taking cues from the industry’s biggest players.

“The timing is interesting, right? That I would be drawn to this kind of project in a moment where musical and narrative audio are crossing over more and more,” says Coss. He laughs, “I certainly don’t want to give Spotify credit.”

The “longer arc” toward this moment, he says, is likely more personal. He, like Kendrick, was a musician before he was a podcast producer. “I brought those skills with me to narrative audio as a new place to explore and create,” he says. “I think there was always a desire to bring those things together.”

Apple gains two big subscription podcast partners

2021-11-02T09:00:00-04:00

BBC Studios on Apple Podcasts | Image: BBC

Wow, November 2nd. Can you believe it’s Christmas already?!

In all seriousness, though, we do have a lot of presents for you today. Specifically: Three! exclusive! announcements! Also, if you don’t know me yet — hey! I’m Aria, Ashley’s Hot Pod sidekick. I publish mostly on Fridays for our Insider audience, which is another great reason to subscribe over there. I’m in for Ashley today, as she traverses the depths of hell, aka moves across NYC.

Now, guided by my trusting hand, let us go! To the news!

EXCLUSIVES

BBC brings exclusive podcasts abroad

As of today, Apple has another big partner for its paid podcast channels: BBC Studios. And unlike other subscription products, which mostly offer perks like ad-free listening for existing audiences, this channel will give US and Canadian listeners access to shows that were previously only playable in the UK.

Here’s an example: The show 5 Minutes On already exists, but if you were to try to access the landing page from, say, your very American apartment in Philadelphia, you’d get an error message that says, “This content is not available in your location.” It also doesn’t show up on Spotify, Stitcher, etc. Through BBC Podcasts Premium on Apple Podcasts, paying Philadelphians (and Dallasites! and Montrealers!) will now be able to listen to 5 Minutes On and other shows like Nuremberg: The Trial of the Nazi War Criminals, which stars Natalie Dormer from Game of Thrones.

BBC Studios is calling these previously localized programs “exclusives,” and there will be more coming soon. I’m also told we should also keep our eyes peeled for similar expansions in other countries. As a reminder, Apple’s podcast subscriptions are enabled worldwide.

Beyond these exclusives, BBC Podcasts Premium also offers ad-free versions of about a dozen other shows, which, as I said, is a common fixture of paid podcast channels… speaking of!

Slate expands audio-subscription offerings to Apple

Also coming atcha this morning, Slate launched its own Apple Podcasts Subscription. You could already pay for things like ad-free listening and bonus content through Slate Plus, which was hosted directly on the publication’s site, and which also bundled in features that were relevant to its written content, like unlimited access to articles. Now, consumers have the option to pay solely for Slate’s audio, which notably includes the popular podcast Slow Burn. In fact, I’m told that since the show has been such a big reason people have signed up for paid access before now, it was a no-brainer to launch the official Apple stream this week: Slow Burn’s newest season comes out tomorrow.

Amazon Music continues to make moves

Hi! It’s Ashley. I’m out today but had to deliver a little somethin’ for you all. Earlier today, I wrote about Amazon Music launching its first dedicated podcast feature: synchronized transcripts. You can read more about them here, but the broad thing to know is this feature is launching with select Wondery and Amazon Music shows, as well as some third-party programs like Crime Junkie and This American Life. You can scrub through transcripts like you do a video, so the words match up to the audio you’re hearing and allow you to jump around. Ads won’t be transcribed.

I have many thoughts on transcription, but namely want to know why this doesn’t exist in every app? Spotify announced transcripts for some of its shows earlier this year, but still, not every original or exclusive has them. Notably, Joe Rogan’s show has none, and I very much would appreciate being able to skim that show rather than committing hours. Obviously, transcripts should also be distributed for accessibility purposes. (Is this where I can rant about how wrong it is that many NYC subway stations don’t have elevators or escalators?)

Kintan Brahmbhatt, Amazon Music’s director of podcasts, also spoke with me about developing the platform and why Amazon hasn’t settled on a single release schedule for its shows. “We look at it as a 10-year story arc,” he said. “This is not like a one- or two-year ‘make a quick buck’ kind of thing for us. Amazon is in it for the very long term.” We’ll have more from the interview for Insiders on Thursday.

Now back to Aria, with a couple other things of interest today. Podcasts are increasingly becoming part of the lexicon, and these developments really show it.

A podcast on Broadway…

I poked around, just for you, to get more details about the recently announced Broadway adaptation of Closing the Distance, an audio drama that was produced and released during the pandemic. According to co-executive producer Valerie Smaldone, it will indeed be “the first and only Broadway play that began as an audio drama podcast.”

We’re entering a whole new world of derivative works, my friends. Books have long become movies, and even graffiti can inspire songs; now, it seems that podcasts have established themselves firmly enough to get adapted into not only TV series and live touring shows, but full-on professional plays. For what it’s worth, this is no accident: derivative works are the goal of The Audio Drama Initiative, the company that produced Closing the Distance and has a larger slate of, you guessed it, audio dramas. “We gauge how they resonate with an audience, and then see what medium — film, theatre, episodics — might be best to develop,” says Smaldone. Until now, though, that theatre option has been markedly untapped.

So who’s gonna go see it? And will you only go if Jason Alexander revives his audio role? Lmk.

…. and in my TV time

While I was watching Hulu recently, I got an ad for Grammarly, the whole premise of which was that people were using the company’s editing services while launching a podcast. Here’s a screenshot:

It felt odd and new and noteworthy for podcasting to so casually grace my screen, but it seems likely that this kind of thing will only get more common. At the same time, maybe it’s a red herring? Hulu is the maker of Only Murders in the Building, which is about loving true-crime podcasts. Another possibility: maybe only certain people get served this particular Grammarly ad (e.g., people who report on the podcast industry). I imagine it’s tricky to target based on ~plot~ but at the same time, all of the Bed, Bath & Beyond ads I’ve seen recently have had queer couples, which I take to mean that I’m not only being watched — I’m being seen.

So pleased to be with y’all this morning — provided Ashley has a smooth move, she’ll be in your inboxes later this week! Take care ‘til then.

How public radio is trying to save print

2021-10-19T08:00:00-04:00

The Chicago Sun-Times needs help. After being bought and sold several times over the last decade, the 73-year-old paper is looking for a more stable home to continue its award-winning reporting — and it may have finally found it in an unexpected place: a radio station.

Chicago Public Media, which owns the radio station WBEZ, is currently in talks with the Sun-Times to merge. A final deal would combine their newsrooms and audiences in hopes of creating a financially stable enterprise for both teams. Similar mergers and acquisitions have become a common way to bolster the struggling print industry, but if radio were to take on a major newspaper, that would be a first.

“Audio is a growth business,” says Jim Friedlich, chief executive of The Lenfest Institute for Journalism, who advised CPM on the potential merger. “Now Chicago Public Media and other media with audio roots have both the wherewithal and the self-confidence to take a bold step like this.”

Since 2004, US newspapers have shut down at a rate of 100 per year, a pace that’s only accelerated since the start of the pandemic. To stay afloat, some smaller newsrooms have given up independence, being bought by news conglomerates or becoming joint entities with other local outlets — and public radio and TV stations have increasingly offered themselves up as partners. New York Public Radio acquiring the website Gothamist was one of nine similar deals in recent years, triggering researchers to document the trend by creating the Public Media Mergers Project. Public radio has been a particularly strong force, holding its ground amid digitization and the podcasting craze (partially because it’s participated in it), and it might be strong enough to help print do the same thing.

WBEZ may be particularly well suited to supporting the Sun-Times. The station is a big name, pulling in 550,000 weekly broadcast listeners, according to CEO Matt Moog, while also being the audio house that brought us Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! and This American Life. Moog tells me the organization has been “breakeven or better for the past seven years, even through the pandemic.”

Part of the financial health of public media stations in general involves the financial perks of being a nonprofit. Listeners and viewers are incentivized to donate since contributions are tax-deductible, and the organizations are exempt from corporate income taxes (as well as sales and property taxes, in some cases). They can apply for grants reserved for nonprofits while reserving the right to pull at heartstrings — and wallets — by saying their programming is funded by “viewers like you.” In addition to more than a dozen or so public-media mergers in the past decade, there have also been cases of newspapers converting to or becoming affiliated with a nonprofit without the support of NPR or PBS affiliates in order to access these exact benefits.

Newspaper closures, on the other hand, have been attributed to fewer paid subscriptions, as consumers flock to free sites and social media, and the resulting disinterest of advertisers. Between 2008 and 2018, it’s estimated that advertising revenue for newspapers dropped by 68%, even as digital advertising revenue increased for those same publications. What’s more, certain types of local reporting — public-service and investigative journalism in particular — are often the most expensive, says Friedlich. Many local public-service stories involve “long lead times” and “deep investigations,” he says, as well as steps that are relevant to a story’s locale, like doing environmental testing or submitting freedom of information requests to local government.

WBEZ reaches 550,000 weekly broadcast listeners

When donations are incentivized by nonprofit status, they can help cover those costs. In 2016, The Lenfest Institute, a nonprofit, acquired the Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper, making contributions tax-deductible if they’re made to the institute to support the Inquirer. Under this arrangement, Friedlich says, the resulting donor support has comprised “a critical 5 percent” of the paper’s annual revenue, being used for “meaningful initiatives in digital transformation, investigative news, and diversity, equity and inclusion.”

Public radio has taken the already powerful funding strategy of nonprofits and made it its own. Stations across the US have established a reputation that they will ask for — and receive — donations from listeners, and it’s also commonplace to hear that a “generous donor” agreed to match fundraiser contributions or that a certain program was “sponsored” by a local business. Strong public radio stations “have built out sophisticated developments and business-side teams,” says Elizabeth Hansen-Shapiro, lead researcher for the Public Media Mergers Project and CEO of the National Trust for Local News. “They have a really strong basis of financial support, in terms of major gifts and membership and sponsorship. The business model itself is pretty robust and diversified.”

This may be how CPM and the Sun-Times could stand to succeed. Though exact plans are still in flux as CPM and the Sun-Times iron out the formal deal, they’re said to take several cues from what public radio already does well. For one, Moog says, he intends to apply public radio’s financial infrastructure to the Sun-Times existing efforts: the news site would no longer have a paywall, he says, but instead a membership program with a free tier, “the same way it happens with public media.”

The Sun-Times could end up focusing on memberships over subscribers

Taking cues from public radio will also mean, quite simply, producing audio. It’s a strength of both teams, according to Moog, who says that future plans could include podcasts, “interactive audio chats,” or Sun-Times staff reporting on air. The teams have had success collaborating on audio before, with the true-crime podcast Motive. WBEZ’s vice president of communications tells me the show has been downloaded several million times; that number includes downloads for subsequent seasons that were produced without the Sun-Times, but Moog describes the initial season as one of the most successful podcast products WBEZ has produced.

If Apple ratings can serve as a crude metric, Motive might have outperformed other Sun-Times podcasts as well, gaining a few thousand ratings as opposed to a few dozen. The task of getting the podcast in front of so many listeners was supported by CPM’s ability to broadcast promotional material to its millions of monthly listeners, and the show likely gained traction because of podcast listeners’ existing fascination with true crime, which was bolstered by the Sun-Times’ investigative reporting chops. In the audioverse, it was a match made in heaven.

There are still risks for radio, of course, as well as for the outlets they take on. In the time that’s passed since New York Public Radio bought and revived Gothamist in 2018, it’s struggled financially. Earlier this year, 14 people were laid off, including Gothamist’s editor in chief, as one of several measures to reduce a multi-million-dollar deficit.

Both Moog and Hansen-Shapiro expressed that the example of NYPR shouldn’t be cause for concern about the state of public media, which Moog describes as “generally quite healthy.” Public radio benefits from many of the same feel-good, “intimate” elements that have given podcasts their foothold, and that’s on top of its ability to broadcast, particularly to people Moog describes as “engaged” and “loyal” listeners. “From a podcasting point of view, our ability to connect with that audience and promote some of the audio work that we’re doing is really significant,” he says.

Hansen-Shapiro agrees. In an industry where needs abound, but funding can be tight, “the advantage that public media stations have is that they’ve been at this game a lot longer.”