Column

Katherine Maher, the CEO of Web Summit and former CEO of Wikipedia parent organization, Wikimedia Foundation, will be the new president and CEO of NPR. Notably, Maher does not have a public radio background. It’s an interesting choice for the networks, which went through painful layoffs and podcast cancellations last year. Although NPR previously signaled a “broadcast-to-podcast” strategy, her appointment could signal a further pivot into digital.

Will.i.am of Black Eyed Peas fame is really embracing the AI revolution. Later this month, he’ll debut on Will.i.am Presents the FYI Show on SiriusXM with bot qd.pi. “I didn’t want to just do a traditional show, I wanted to bring tomorrow close to today, and so I wanted to have my co-host be an AI,” he told The Hollywood Reporter.

Oster, an economist who has become a leading voice on millennial parenting, is taking her popular newsletter, ParentData, independent. In an email to subscribers on Friday morning, she said the relaunch “has been in the works for months.” The news comes as prominent writers like Casey Newton and Ryan Broderick have announced their departures from Substack after The Atlantic reported that a handful of openly Nazi newsletters have been allowed on the platform. Oster’s announcement did not reference the controversy.

After laying off hundreds of employees at Twitch and Prime Video, Amazon is cutting staff at its audiobook and podcast platform, Audible. According to a memo obtained by Business Insider, Audible CEO Bob Corrigan said that the cuts were made “to position us for continued success in the coming year and into the future” and it’s really not worth finishing the quote, because you know the drill by now. Variety reports that the cuts will include more than 100 staffers, but will not impact the content teams.

The nearly-decade old podcast Death, Sex & Money is getting a new home at Slate. The media outlet announced it acquired the popular interview show hosted by Anna Sale, and production will resume in early 2024.

Rep. Maria Salazar (R-FL) and Madeline Dean (D-PA) filed the No AI FRAUD Act building on themes in an earlier bill introduced in October. If passed, the bill will protect individual likenesses and voices at a unified federal level instead of a patchwork state-level one, giving people the right to control who can use their image and fight against AI-generated impersonation.

The app stopped functioning last week and its website had become inaccessible, but the company issued a fix on Monday. Tiny representative Aditya Ponugonti told The Verge via email that the app and website outage were related to a DNS issue, and that “we aren’t shutting down Castro.”

As promised, YouTube now allows users to upload podcasts from their RSS feeds. YouTube is understood to currently be the most-used podcast platform, but its inability to ingest RSS feeds made it more difficult for podcasters to distribute on the streamer. It is another step in its goal to woo creators and corner the podcast market.

Playlists like Spotify’s RapCaviar were once a path to a hit song, and the curators in charge of them were key influencers in the music industry. That era appears to be on its way out.

France has introduced a new law that will tax music streamers 1.2 percent of their domestic revenue to support local music. Spotify’s music lead in France and the Benelux region has been railing against the move, and announced on X on Wednesday that the company will pull its sponsorship from two French music festivals.

Google mentioned the date in a support document about transferring your subscriptions away from Google Podcasts. You’ll have until July 2024 to migrate your subscriptions to YouTube Music or another service.

First spotted by Podnews, new SEC filings indicate that Spotify chief financial officer Paul Vogel and general counsel Eve Konstan exercised options and sold stock worth $9.38 million and $1.15 million, respectively.

Rapper/podcaster Danny Brown enters his Steam Deck review (not necessarily the OLED model, but still) as the ultimate in-flight companion device.

Spotify’s stock is currently up about 7 percent following the announcement that the company is laying off 17 percent of its staff. If CEO Daniel Ek is trying to appease investors with a new focus on efficiency, it is working. More than 1,500 of Spotify’s employees will be notified by tomorrow afternoon that they are out of a job.