Outlook. Last Tuesday’s shocking electoral conclusion has severe ramifications not just for the media generally — print and digital, legacy and new, mainstream and alternative, and so on — but also for podcasting specifically, whose current composition as an emerging industry historically renders it more susceptible to the fallouts of uncertain economic and media environments. And make no mistake: we are marching straight into a thick fog of uncertainty.

Keep your eyes peeled for two things. First, a potential slowdown in advertising spends. Second, consider the significant possibility of an economic recession over the next few years, something that was already being predicted prior to this election and that some economists believe could be exacerbated by the stated policies from the incoming administration. From the Wall Street Journal, published last Wednesday:

“Uncertainty is bad for ad spending growth,” said Jonathan Barnard, head of forecasting for Zenith, an ad buying and research arm of Publicis Groupe. Still, he said there will not be an “apocalyptic pullback” and just how much contraction occurs depends largely on how the economy performs and what specific moves the new administration makes.

And what of public radio? Keep your eye on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), the federally-funded organization whose financial support is essential to the health of the public media system. Familiarize yourself with two things: (1) the breakdown of NPR’s revenue sources, articulated best in this blog post from 2013 that highlights public radio’s dependence on CPB funding — note, especially, the line: “These station programming fees comprise a significant portion of NPR’s largest source of revenue. The loss of federal funding would undermine the stations’ ability to pay NPR for programming, thereby weakening the institution” —  and (2) the historical string of on-again, off-againtensions surrounding the system’s perceived relationships with ideological bias.

Perhaps expectedly, executives at podcast publishers are generally adopting a “wait and see” stance on the days to come. At least, that’s what I’ve found based on my email interactions with several over the past week. Many are bracing for impact — one phrased the situation this way: “I am placing higher probabilities on the downside cases in all of our financial models” — though there are a few, of course, that believe such concerns to be overblown. (“I wouldn’t worry about it,” one person said.)

“We’ve seen no signs of any slowdown,” Matt Lieber, president and co-founder of Gimlet Media, told me. “Obviously, if a recession happens then ad budgets will get cut. But to be honest we’re seeing so much growth in podcast spending right now that even in recession I would expect slowing growth, yes, but not negative growth.”

Hernan Lopez, founder of Wondery, submitted a more positive view: “I’ve never seen ad spend decline in a growing economy. In times of general market-driven anxiety, ad budgets may shift from a quarter to the next, or between different kinds of media, and if anything podcasting has more to gain than to lose.”

National Public Media’s Bryan Moffett notes that he remains “cautiously optimistic,” pointing out the strength of 2017 upfront buys and the medium’s steady quarter-over-quarter gains. “Niche media do tend to get cut faster in turbulent times, but I also wonder if podcasting will weather any storm better than history would predict,” he wrote. “We all know how effective podcasting can be in terms of marketers reaching the right audience with the right message. So, I think we’d need a pretty significant economic pullback before any real cuts come, and they’d probably come in line with everything else.”

An executive of an independent podcast network expressed some general concern, but pointed out that even if there is to be an ad spending cool-down, direct response advertisers would likely stay within the medium as they have already figured out how to assess and achieve the return-on-investments they want. Another person I spoke to posited a similar outcome — there will always be companies looking for people to sell things to, that person said — but did note to watch how many of those companies engaged in direct response podcast marketing will fare moving forward.

We need to move on, but I’ll just quickly note three more things:

• This climate of uncertainty will be felt by every aspect of the podcast ecosystem, but it will be felt hardest by the community of independent producers and freelancers that provide labor, efficiency, and creativity to the space; these proprietors of small boats in a sea that thrashes from the movement of bigger ships.

• Given everything that we’re currently seeing in the nexus of media and politics, it seems imperative, now more so than ever, that podcasting remains open.

• Remember to donate to your local public radio station, people.

Okay, let’s go.

Radio Ambulante Inks Distribution Deal with NPR. The public radio mothership will distribute, market, and promote the show across all of its platforms, including NPR.org and the NPR One app. I’m told to expect collaborations between Radio Ambulante and a number of other podcasts from the NPR newsroom like Code Switch, Latino USA, and Embedded. I’m also told that the show will have a presence on the weekend newsmagazines. The deal came out of conversations that started about a year ago, when NPR approached the Radio Ambulante team.

For the uninitiated, Radio Ambulante is a fully Spanish language narrative journalism project — in the vein of This American Life and Snap Judgment — focusing on stories from Latin America and Latin communities in the United States.The show was founded in 2011 by Daniel Alarcón, Carolina Guerrero, Martina Castro, and Annie Correal. (Castro and Correal have since left the team.) Radio Ambulante is widely loved and critically acclaimed, being honored the Gabriel García Marquez Prize for Innovation in Journalism in 2014.

Alarcón tells me that the team intends to expand in the near future. “We have to see where we stand early next year, but I think we have to grow in order to fulfill our mission,” he said. “This deal will help us get there.”

The show will roll out its latest season on November 22. The news was formally announced earlier this morning, but the gossip trickled out at the Third Coast Festival which took place in Chicago this past weekend.

A Serial Spinoff? Speaking of Third Coast, I wasn’t able to be there myself this year, and I wish was, because this bit of news was apparently announced at a presentation by executive producer Julie Snyder. The details, cobbled together from tweets by attendees: There will be Serial spinoff debuting in March. It will be hosted by This American Life producer Brian Reed, and it will be an “artsy” and “novelistic” 7-part series set in Alabama following “a man who despises the town he’s lived all his life and decides to do something about it.” Cool. [H/t Andrew Lapin, Stan Alcorn, Daniel Gross.]

Audible expands comedy offerings on its Channels lineup, stacking its deck with audio shows from comedians like Will Arnett, Nick Offerman, and Eugene Mirman. The new slate also features something called “Audible Comedy Specials,” a programming channel that bears strong structural similarities to the comedy special blocks you’d find on television networks like HBO and Comedy Central. Which is kind of a shrewd move, efficiently tapping into the well-established sub-community of comedy podcasts and, on the supply side, offering comedy producers yet another platform to monetize a given performance.

This expansion likely draws from a supply and production infrastructure established by the company’s West Coast-based, comedy-focused arm called Rooftop Media. Audible acquired Rooftop Media back in October 2014.

Meanwhile, in Canada: the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) isn’t cool with third-party podcast apps distributing its programming with in-app ads served on top, according to a report by Canadaland. Specifically, the CBC “has sent legal threats to at least one third-party podcast app developer for serving ads without a prior agreement with the broadcaster.” The corporation is also blocking the presence of its programming on those apps. The exact apps that are affected are not confirmed, though the article highlights the Podcast Republic and also points out the other apps that adopt the in-app ad practice, like Stitcher, Overcast, and Podcast Addict.

Hit up Canadaland for more details on this story.

“The wrong format for the moment?” Josh Nathan-Kazis, a staff writer at The Forward, published a string of tweets (or a tweetstorm, as the kids call it) that mounted an intriguing critique of the political roundtable podcast format in the wake of last Tuesday’s election. Reproduced here, with some streamlining:

An item for the media post-mortem: The political roundtable podcast turns out to have been exactly the wrong format for the moment… They’re cheap to produce, and fun to half-listen to while doing the dishes. And there was a lot to talk about. It felt like you could understand the election through the roundtables. Everyone was so smart. Knew what they were talking about. The intimacy inherent to podcasting made them addictive: Hang out with the smart kids each week and they’ll tell you all you need to know.

On Tuesday, it turned out the smart kids were wrong. Some were flagrantly, smugly, obnoxiously wrong. Others were a bit wrong. They weren’t uniquely wrong. But there’s something about that intimacy that makes their particular wrongness feel almost like a betrayal. I wonder how much we really learned from these podcasts. They were closed loops; arguments among friends, played for entertainment.

And were we really trying to learn? Did anyone go to Keepin’ It 1600 or Slate’s Political Gabfest for anything but affirmation? And if that was just 2016’s “unskewing,” then maybe these shows were more harmful than we realized. Ear candy. If we’d spent a bit less time listening to our radio buddies joke about ‘bedwetters,’ maybe we wouldn’t have been so surprised this week. (To be fair, Keepin’ It 1600’s post-election mea culpa episode on Wednesday was really good.)

Put simply: did the political roundtable podcast glut of the 2016 election cycle fail us?

There is a lot to think through here, and I’ll start by saying, perhaps unsurprisingly, that the strokes being painted here are way too broad. (And Nathan-Kazis qualified as such in follow-ups.) At the heart of this critique, I think, are two central ideas: the first is the explicit notion that the insular space created by the roundtable podcast either leads to or creates a greater probability of confirmation bias, and the second is an implicit sense that the media product supplied by these shows exacerbates a potential negative tendency among consumers to use these media products, some journalism and some not so much, as a crutch as opposed to one-of-many tools of news and information.

The first idea can be straightforwardly interrogated: my immediate reaction is to argue that the risks of confirmation bias here is less linked to the format itself than it is to the participants of the roundtable. Which is to say, it’s not the tool, it’s the wielder; failures, where they existed, were specific to the show, not general to the form. We were awash with election podcasts this cycle, but there were definable differences between shows that were explicitly journalistic in intent (like the NPR Politics Podcast) and shows that were rooted more in a classical sense of punditry (like Keepin’ It 1600, consumed by many as therapy and, interestingly enough, now appears to be the mirror image of conservative talk radio). Those are two very separate product types with very different relationships to the journalistic position, and speaking personally, my experience of what I now recognize to be confirmation bias between the two shows were dramatically different.

The second idea is harder to parse. Essentially, it attends to what appears to be a causal question: does the sense of comfortable insularity conjured by these podcasts somehow discourage listeners from seeking out additional or competing viewpoints? Attempts to unpack the question only leads to further inquiries: is it even possible to prove a causal relationship? Is there a certain condescension in this causal hypothesis — one that suggests news consumers to be anything other than perfectly intelligent adults that will take the time to fully read complex pieces, verify sources, balance out their information-intake, and check their biases on their own?* To whom does the responsibility of information fall: those who produce the information, or those who consume information? These are, interestingly enough, fundamental questions akin to those pertaining to corporate social responsibility on the part of the information producers; I am tempted to think that governance is required, but government often seems antithetical to the productive creation and free flow of information.

(Do I expect all Hot Pod readers to fully read my newsletters, whose extensive length is a feature — not a bug — meant to underscore a sense of complexity?)

Nathan-Kazis’ point on the medium’s intimacy triggering a stronger feeling of betrayal hits closer to home, as it highlights the previously unrealized problem that emerges from the design premise of many of these roundtable podcasts, particularly those produced by journalistic institutions from the Slate Political Gabfest to the FiveThirtyEight Elections podcast. The conceit of such shows is to give listeners a sense of what journalists or experts are talking about in spaces separate from the performed professionalism of the public platform; after all, what is said on the front page is far from what was debated in editorial discussions leading up to an article’s final construction or what was discussed on a human level at the bar afterwards. The basic idea in these setups is to engender trust in the people and the process, not just the product; but when the people and the process fail, the cut feels so much deeper, and it is incredibly hard to win that trust — that sense of comfort and safety (which is perhaps the problem?) — back.

That intimacy and sense of process, however, proved essential to how several non-political roundtable podcasts played the role of therapy for many with their post-election episodes. And it is perhaps here that the roundtable conventions are unambiguously valuable. Shows like Call Your Girlfriend, Still Processing, Nerdette, and The Read all provided listeners with personal spaces of communion; spaces to be alone but together, to feel and process the scope of the night’s events, to emotionally prepare for the days to come.

So, did the political roundtable podcast fail us in 2016? Some did, some didn’t; but the problem listeners face is the fact of living in a world where both successes and failures — emerging from both journalistic and non-journalistic sources — exist, flatly, within the same platform, the same space, the same context.

A media format is a tool; it is only as strong, and only as right, as its practitioners. Whether we screw it up or not, podcasting’s core value proposition is always going to be there for us all: a distinct ability to create a space to talk things through, to feel things out, to let doubt grip you. If anything, maybe the lesson here is that we should leaned more into conveyed doubt. A scene from On The Media’s bonus episode, dropped the day after the elections:

Bob Garfield: “What I most hope… is that we are not all passengers on the ship of fools.”

Brooke Gladstone: “What the F*CK does that mean?”

Relevant: Melody Joy Kramer on Poynter — “Spread your masthead across the country, and other ideas to prevent groupthink”

Bites:

• For those keeping tally, add the following companies to the list of brands making their own podcasts: InterContinental Hotel, Avion Tequila, State Farm Insurance. (AdWeek)

• Refinery29 is launching what appears to be a combined podcast-newsletter product, called “UnStyled.” The last time I’ve heard of such a product combination, it was WBUR’s “The Magic Pill” project. (Refinery29)

• “The Story So Far: Fiction Podcasts Take Their Next Steps” (New York Times)

• “Where political talk radio is driven by a sense of community, not partisanship” (CJR)

• DGital Media launches the latest show under its new partnership with Sports Illustrated, “The Seth Davis Podcast.” (SI.com)

• Meanwhile, in Australia: the Wheeler Center and the Audiocraft conference is collaborating to launch “The Australian Audio Guide,” which it describes as “an online companion to the best Australian podcasts and radio features.” (Link)

Moves:

• Adam Symson, the Chief Digital Officer of EW Scripps, will be the company’s new CEO when the current chief executive, Rich Boehne, retires in the second half of 2017. Scripps acquired Midroll Media over the summer, a development that Symson was heavily involved in. Symson will serve as Chief Operating Officer in the interim.
• iHeartMedia brings on its first SVP of Podcasting: Chris Peterson, formerly the Content Partnership Manager at TuneIn.
• WGBH has hired Travis Stewart as Podcast Business Development Director, a newly created role. From an internal email: “He joins us from Viacom where he was Director of Content Distribution and Business Development, responsible for developing and executing traditional distribution strategies for 26 Viacom media networks including MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, BET and others.”

Happy Election Day (oh dear god). Three quick stories with that sweet, sweet podcast-angle (#onbrand):

(1) Avail yourself with dueling podcast columns on the subject: The New Statesman, “How to use podcasts as US Election Therapy,” and Wired, “Fed-up, Freaked-out Americans find comfort in Politics Podcasts.”

(2) Slate’s trying something new: to dynamically report on the elections in near real-time through podcasts. According to an internal email by executive producer Steve Lickteig: “Producers will update stories throughout the day, and listeners will get refreshed news whenever they want… The best way to experience this is by opening slate.com/newscastin a browser tab and leave it open all day. At least once per hour (but probably much more often as the day heats up), you can return to that page and hear fresh stories mixed with ones you’ve heard before or, even more likely, an entirely new batch of stories.”

The company is leveraging its in-house audio CMS, Megaphone, to produce the feed, which interestingly enough won’t be available on iTunes or podcatchers. The updates will be hosted by This American Life’s Zoe Chace and PBS Newshour’s Alison Stewart. Updates begin at 9am ET.

(3) Poynter ran a vote over the weekend on the best political coverage in this election cycle, breaking out a category just for podcasts. Keepin’ It 1600 (considered by some as therapy) was beat out by FiveThirtyEight’s Election Podcast (considered by some as anti-therapy) for first place, with NPR’s Politics podcast bagging third, with NPR’s Politics podcast bagging third. Full list on the article, near the bottom. I’ll do a post-mortem next week on the set of very, very strong pods we’ve seen breaking out in this genre.

Also, to the reporters, editors — and producers! — reading this: good luck, and thank you!

GE Podcast Theater announced the follow-up to its hit branded podcast The Message last week, and it looks like the team is sticking close to the playbook on this one: the new show will be a single-season, short-run science fiction podcast that draws heavy influence from contemporary works — the press outreach email described it as “Her meets Ex Machina” that will be enjoyed by “lovers of Westworld and Black Mirror”; a title salad that seems in want to evoke pastiche — while exhibiting a light touch from the actual brand sponsoring the project. The follow-up will also continue The Message’s core design conceit of telling a story based from a piece of technology that, of course, GE is interested in. (Image-building by association, in other words.)

The show will be called Life After, and the plot will follow an FBI employee who tries to communicate with his departed wife through digital assets left behind on an all-audio social media platform. It’s not… the most original premise, sporting strong similarities to the Black Mirror episode “Be Right Back” (as well as a Michael Keaton film from the mid-2000s called White Noise, which was kind of criminally bad). But it’s worth noting that The Message wasn’t all that original either, leaning hard on the now cliched “fictional radio reporter” as the framing device and making use of plot points that, again, bore very strong similarities to another project, this time a very early episode of the indie-horror podcast The Black Tapes. Nevertheless, the podcast’s core value was firmly rooted in its polished execution, and we’ll likely see the same with this new project.

(At this point, I’d like to issue a quick disclaimer: I used to work for Panoply.)

Let’s take a few steps back for a second. For the uninitiated, GE Podcast Theater is an experimental partnership in branded podcast production between GE, Panoply, and the advertising agency BBDO. The Message, the team’s first foray into this nexus, debuted last October and pulled off a very, very successful run, with the most recent publicly available audience tally putting the podcast at around 500,000 downloads per episode, according to a Bloomberg article published in June. (Keep the imprecision of the metric in mind here; that number probably refers to downloads per episode since the show’s launch in October 2015, which doesn’t really give us a good sense on download acceleration, growth rate, or the long tail. Alas.) But the campaign’s successes expanded well beyond its downloads: The Message was a minor press hit (The Atlantic: “The Radio-Age Genius of The Message”) and even managed to bag a few Cannes Lions international advertising awards.

Much of that success, I think, comes from a combination of two things: (1) the project’s novelty as an unconventional piece of advertising — aside from a small logo on the podcast art, The Message was near-devoid of direct references to its corporate progenitor, and I reckon there was something about this quality that likely drew critical attention from the advertising community — and (2) its ability to competently capitalize on a general hunger for genre fiction among podcast consumers by serving a highly-produced product in a field that was then-dominated by independent works with a more artisanal feel. (Ugh, sorry about the use of “artisanal.”)

On that front, it’s worth considering just how much the podcast space has changed in the past year, particularly with regard to audio fiction. There are more ambitious audio fiction enterprises now than ever before — see Night Vale Presents, The Paragon Collective, The Sarah Awards, Wondery, Gimlet’s Homecoming, and so on — and one imagines the broad podcast consuming body, which absorbs and evolves as it expands and matures in numbers and demographics, has shifted somewhat in its taste and expectations for something like fiction.

So, with all that in mind, and given just how close they’re sticking to the formula, I wonder if the team expects to receive the same kinds of returns as last year.

Alexa Christon, GE’s Head of Media Innovation, appears to be keeping a realistic but hopeful view on Life After when we spoke over the phone last week. “We actually never expected The Message to go to number one on iTunes,” Christon explained. “We were just excited about the content and the concept. We felt we had something, but we also knew it was really hard to crack #1… We’re hoping that there will be buzz again, but we’ll see.” (When asked how much GE is paying for Life After, Christon declined to spill details. She merely replied: “It’s nothing unusual.”)

Without the novelty, Life After doesn’t quite have the same structural advantage that it had with The Message. This leaves the team with having to tough it out the way all other shows do: executing the show at a very, very high level. But hey, the trailer, which dropped last week, sounds really good, and I’m curious to hear if the rest of the show will be able to match it.

Life After comes out on November 13, 2016, and will run for ten episodes. It will be distributed through The Message’s RSS feed. Also worth noting: Giant Spoon, a media agency, is involved in the distribution strategy for the project.

Relevant: GE also announced an original podcast for the Australian market last week, called Decoding Genius.

Radiotopia names the winner of its Podquest competition: Ear Hustle, a nonfiction narrative podcast that “unveils the hidden stories of life inside prison, told and produced from the perspective of those who live it,” according to the PRX blog post announcing the result. The show’s creative force is made up of Earlonne Woods, Antwan Williams, and Nigel Poor. Woods and Williams are currently sentences in San Quentin State Prison. Poor is an artist and professor at California State University, Sacramento. The team is a remarkable story, one that was most recently told in a California Sunday Magazine profile back in late September.

Ear Hustle beat out nine other semifinalists that were themselves selected out of an applicant pool made up of 1537 entries from 53 different countries. You can read up on the other semifinalists on the Podquest website — and if you’re a publisher, I highly recommend you consider them for recruitment. (There is no talent shortage if you look hard enough, folks.)

In winning Podquest, Ear Hustle’s 10-episode first season will be picked up by Radiotopia for a 2017 debut. It will be Radiotopia’s seventeenth show, the third addition in recent weeks following the pickups of West Wing Weekly and The Bugle, two shows that are somewhat departs from the podcast collective’s story-driven, highly-produced narrative programming. As such, Ear Hustle’s pickup represents a return to Radiotopia’s roots, albeit one that, interestingly enough, itself looks to be a deeper realization of the collective’s sensibilities and aesthetic.

A trailer for the show can be heard here.

How Stuff Works’ Jason Hoch, observing on Twitter Saturday morning: “4 of the top 6 podcasts on iTunes are new and contain only a short promo episode clocking in under 4 minutes… Why do podcast publishers launch promo episodes as ‘episode 1’ of a series? Easy — get subscribers, and therefore, future downloads.” Hoch, by the way, made an appearance on the Digiday podcast last week, where he declared: “There is no podcast bubble.” Dude is full of soundbites that make my job easier, I swear.

The History, and Future, of AV Club’s Podmass column. Long before The Timbre (RIP), Charley Locke’s work at Wired, Caroline Crampton’s New Statesman column, and long, long before Hot Pod, you had The AV Club’s Podmass column. Since 2011, the column has consistently served as one of the few places on the internet that took podcasts seriously in front of a wide, mainstream audience. But its future appears to be in question now that Becca James, who has edited the column since 2014, is leaving the company.

I traded emails with James last week, asking a few questions about her time at Podmass and what happens next. Here’s the Q&A in full:

Can you tell me about the history of Podmass?

Podmass technically started in 2010 when Kyle Ryan* included a best podcasts round-up in the site’s year-end coverage. When everyone returned from holiday break in 2011, Kyle suggested they review podcasts each week, recommending which ones to listen to and which ones to skip on a weekly basis, which gave rise to the “The Best” and “The Rest” format that you see in the February 2011 debut of Podmass. The coverage treated podcasts as episodic entities, reviewing the same shows each week and was based on the original lineup from the 2010 article, which writers added and subtracted to at will. The concept was new then, as podcasts weren’t getting much coverage other than occasional stories about specific shows and the first podcast boom had already ended. As Kyle explained to me, “This was a way to write about the medium but also be a utility because even back then it felt like there were too many podcasts to keep track of.” I was hired in 2013 and started compiling Podmass when Kyle was on vacation or otherwise busy. Eventually, he left to pursue a career with EW, and Podmass was handed down to me in the spring of 2014. By that fall I had changed the format to highlight 10-15 of the previous week’s best episodes. I felt this was a better way to introduce a larger group of people to podcasts, as opposed to the more inside-baseball, labor-intensive former version of Podmass, which covered the same 30 or so shows each week. The new format was really about showcasing the medium of podcasting as something for everyone, with The A.V. Club ready and willing to help readers find their niche in this world.

* Ryan is currently an editor-at-large for the AV Club and the VP of Development at Onion Inc., the AV Club’s parent company. He had left in April 2014 to briefly serve as Entertainment Weekly’s online editor, returning to the AV Club a year later.

What kind of work goes into producing the column?

I have a staff of writers that come from all walks of life—designers, comedians, artists—but that are steeped in the world of podcasting. They pitch episodes to me by EOD on Thursday each week. Once I have everyone’s pitches, I go through and curate a list of 10-15 based on a number of things I extract from the writers’ pitches. Then I send out assignments. The writers come back with 200 words and some quotes from the episode by noonthe next day. I spend Friday compiling the reviews in our CMS before adding a feature image and a headline. Often throughout the week, I will email suggestions to the group and ask if anyone would like to cover that episode. These can come from emailed tips, Twitter, Hot Pod, etc.

There’s an argument floating about — most recently articulated by the Third Coast Festival folks — that there isn’t enough mainstream coverage of podcasts. What do you think of that argument, and where do you think we are in the state of cultural conversation about podcasts?

Podcasts are tricky because statistics still show that they are not as widely consumed as say TV. I remember making this argument when changing the Podmass format, saying that Podmass should be doing its part to draw more people toward this form of entertainment, which is why we should have more expansive, welcoming coverage. That is all to say that I agree with the Third Coast folks that there isn’t enough coverage of podcasts. People often comment on the enormous amount of podcasts, naming it as a hurdle in the quest to provide adequate coverage, but I think the stuff worth listening to rises to the top.

How has Podmass performed?

Podmass does well in my opinion. It is by far not the most read feature on our site, but it often makes it into the top 10 most-read articles the day it publishes. It has its diehard fans, which I greatly appreciate and wish I had more time to shoot the shit with in the comments section, which is where you’ll find a lot of them hanging out.

What happens to Podmass now?

I worry Podmass won’t make it into 2017 once I’m no longer around to wrangle it. It’s difficult to articulate how melancholy that makes me feel, as I really see this feature as a service to the readers, as true journalism. It’s a numbers game though, and without a salaried employee willing to take on the feature, it’s hard to justify it’s existence financially. As for me, I have a dear friend that spends a lot of time daydreaming about keeping the Podmass dream alive. After all, the spirit of podcasting is that anyone can do it, so it seems fair to say that anyone could create podcast reviews and share them online.

James will be done with Podmass by the end of the year. She currently holds interest in going back into teaching, and expects to be freelancing for a few places — including the AV Club — on the side.

Coming up over the next few weeks: One of the more consistent themes that I’ve been tracking in this newsletter is the tension that seems to exist between what I’ve been calling the “professionalizing layer of podcasts” and the ecosystem of independent podcasts that long predated those companies. On the one hand, you have a set of companies trying to push the industry into a more mature, and lucrative, stage. With the latter, you have a wide swathe of independent producers and artists taking advantage of the medium’s open and relatively unregulated ecosystem to create really interesting, wondrous things while enjoying the possibility of connecting with the right audiences without having to go through a middleman.

As one would imagine, the machinations of the former has frequently lead to the anxieties of the latter: has the growth of these companies necessarily led to the boxing out of independents? As the industry grows, does the bulk of the gains go to these professionalizing companies, or does it spread somewhat equally between the two categories? What does an equal spread even mean in this context?

I’ve been digging into this question over the past few days, and my digging will likely continue over the next few weeks. As such, I’ll be breaking this story out over the next two to three issues.

Bites

• Adobe has apparently prototyped a “Photoshop for Audio.” Called Project VoCo, the program that “can produce the sound of someone saying something they didn’t actually say with unsettling realism.” Oh dear god. (Pitchfork)

• The New York Times’ Amanda Hess has a fascinating story on an expansive digital community of female Star Wars fans made up of metacriticism, fan art, fan fiction, and a “podcast sorority that includes ‘Scavengers Hoard,’ ‘Rebel Grrrl,’ ‘Lattes With Leia’ and ‘Rebels Chat.’” Cool reminder of how communities benefits of an open medium. That’s what I took from this, anyway. (New York Times)

• Speaking of the Times, its latest podcast is out: “Tell Me Something I Don’t Know,” its collaboration with Freakonomics’ Stephen Dubner working under an LLC called Dubner Productions. (New York Times)

• Looks like WBEZ is going to pump out a three-part special series on the rise of Oprah Winfrey, starting Thursday. Personally, I’m PSYCHED. It’s a great time for audio documentaries, folks. (WBEZ)

• “’I felt like Morse tapping his first code’ – the man who invented the podcast.” (The Guardian)

• Following last week’s item on a sexual harassment allegation against PodcastOne CEO Norm Pattiz, the LA Times ran a story that included a few more accusations by people who did not want to be identified “to avoid retaliation.” (LA Times)

• Quick correction to last week’s newsletter: in the Neal Carruth story, I wrote that Dave Sweeney will temporarily look after Planet Money. Sweeney will actually take over the business desk. This mistake did not appear in the Nieman Lab version.

• Speaking of Planet Money: NPR comms head Isabel Lara tells me that the team’s recent reporting on the Wells Fargo fraudulent account debacle (here and here) was cited in a formal letter by Senators Elizabeth Warren and Robert Menendez. Cool.

• Also: goodbye to NPR’s How To Do Everything, which will post its final episode on November 18. Don’t tell anybody, but you were my favorite NPR podcast.

Moves

• Wondery has a new SVP of Brand Partnerships: Laurie Pracher, who comes from WNYC where she served as Senior Director of Sponsorships.
• WNYC has named Jennifer Houlihan Roussel as VP, Corporate Communications.
• Over at Midroll, Gretta Cohn is now Executive Producer for New Show Development. The company has also brought on Stephanie Kariuki as Production Assistant and Dan O’Donnell as Producer.
• Gimlet Chief of Staff Chris Giliberti has a new title: Head of Multiplatform.

Tiny Garage Labs pushed its short-form audio platform 60dB out into the public last week and bagged itself a bit of press, with write-ups from Fast Company, LifeHacker, TechCrunch, and Nieman Lab. A few weeks ago, I briefly wrote about 60dB and the Silicon Valley-based Tiny Garage Lab team, which is made up of Netflix veterans John Ciancutti and Steve McLendon together with NPR alum Steve Henn. Back then, it was still running its beta testing phase, and I made a point to draw attention to its focus on individual segments as the atomic unit of content.

Now that 60dB is out in the wild, I’m still particularly not sure what to make of it. But here are two things I’m thinking about:

(1) It would be imprecise to view 60dB, as Fast Company’s headline suggests, as intending to solve the structural problems of podcasts. (Though, from the looks of the app’s current content offerings, it does not mind getting involved with them for now.) Rather, the app is best interpreted as attending to the larger listener experience problems associated with broadcast radio, whose distribution structure is deeply inefficient. Ciancutti explained the problem when we spoke last week: as a radio listener, you essentially have two options when you encounter something you don’t want — you can either change the station or wait for time to pass within the confines of a specific station. (On the supply-side, the problem can be viewed this way: at any given point of time, a station only has one interface point to work on its relationship with a listener.) 60dB’s gambit, as a platform, is to solve the efficiencies on both the listener and publisher side: listeners are freed from the slog of unwanted experiences and having to make the bulk of choices by a largely automated consumptive experience driven by shorter content chunks strung together by “algorithmic personalization,” and publishers will enjoy larger volumes of listeners efficiently sorted from multiple directions into their show portfolios.

Sound familiar? It’s basically the premise of almost every digital content platform from Facebook to Spotify to, well, Netflix. Which means that the attended considerations and calculations for publishers should be the same, as they’ve lived through this story multiple times before — and are living through many of them now.

Considerations like: who will ultimately own the audience, 60dB or the publisher? Would the benefit of developing for the platform outweigh the potential lack of direct audience ownership in the future? What is the likelihood of a mutually beneficial audience development for both the publisher and the platform? And so on, and so on.

Which is not to say that publishers are destined to play any particular future here, or that there isn’t substantial benefit in collaborating with Tiny Garage Labs at this moment. 60dB stands to build out a new audience development arm for publishers that they are unable to explore for themselves, and publishers stand to provide 60dB with some compelling, structurally-optimized content. What I’m merely saying is: at the end of the day, the devil will be in the details of the deal.

“We’re closing deals with specific partners,” Ciancutto told me. “We’re helping partners to tell and make these kinds of audio stories.” When I asked about the monetization end of the deal for publishers, he replied: “It’s stuff we still have to work on and figure out. Right now, we’re working on nailing the experience. Monetization will come next.”

(2) There is also the more fundamental question about whether 60dB’s gambit is a winning one. Two out of the three founders are Netflix veterans, and the team leans on that connection pretty hard. One imagines the shape of its strategy is appropriately Netflix-like. What does that mean? It’s helpful to refer to analyst Ben Thompson’s Stratechery newsletter this week, which spells out that strategy:

Netflix has built leverage and monopsony power over the premium video industry not by controlling distribution, at least not at the beginning, but by delivering a superior customer experience that creates a virtuous cycle: Netflix earns the users, which increases its power over suppliers, which brings in more users, which increases its power even more.

But the success of a strategy lies not just on its shape, but on the strength of its variables as well. And so the question here is: will 60dB’s interpretation of “superior customer experience” — shorter content units, largely algorithmically-driven experiences — pay off?

A potential clue can perhaps be found in examinations of another media platform type whose dynamics function similarly: ad exchanges. In a piece published on last week’s New York Review of Books, Slate group chairman Jacob Weisberg made the following observation: “Ad exchanges… have made digital advertising more efficient without necessarily making it more effective in increasing sales.” Which is to say, time will tell whether 60dB’s gambit of equating content efficiency with effective experiences will amount to anything, and I’m very curious to see where this goes.

Gimlet officially announced its fall launch slate this morning, and in doing so, offers a look into what appears to be a new phase for the company. Close observers probably know many of these new shows already — they were unveiled during the Brooklyn Upfronts event over the summer — but this morning’s press release revealed a previously unannounced audio drama project with a high profile cast.

Here’s the line-up:

• Undone, a show hosted by former Radiolab producer Pat Walters that revisits big events from the past. It’s a familiar premise, one that was most recently utilized to great effect by Malcolm Gladwell and Panoply with Revisionist History. Launches November 14.

• Homecoming, an original audio drama project that’ll feature Oscar Isaac, Catherine Keener, and David Schwimmer on the talent roster. Launches November 16.

• Crimetown, which will mark Gimlet’s first foray into the ever-dependable true crime genre. The podcast is driven by part of the team behind HBO’s The Jinx — whose bubbling popularity back in early 2015 compelled critical associationswith Serial — and it will examine organized crime in Providence, Rhode Island. Launches November 20.

Additionally, the company’s flagship Startup podcast will kick off its latest full season this Thursday. This fourth season follows Dov Charney, the controversial former American Apparel CEO who was forced out of the fashion giant in 2014 following numerous reports of misconduct — including sexual harassment — as he pursues a new venture. (Frankly, I’m morbidly interested in hearing how the Startup team handles this. The push from their end would be for reporting, the push from his end is likely image rehabilitation, and how that dynamic plays out will be the thing to watch.)

Two things:

(1) The close proximity of all the launches really stands out to me here. We’re talking three launches in seven days, with each project having its own distinct press hook. Clumping is a smart strategy, I think, one that focuses attention is a way that presents Gimlet with a clear run of opportunities to firmly shape its narrative. The staggered launches of the company’s previous shows (Heavyweight in mid-September, Science Vs in late July) led to a pretty diffuse sense of momentum, and when it comes to a hits-based business — which Gimlet most definitely is — launch momentum is a kind of crucial capital.

(2) Also interesting: the strategic conservatism in these bets. You can see the math at work in all three projects: the combination of a legacy radio talent with a classic premise (Undone), stacking an experimental deck with Hollywood talent (Homecoming), and tapping into a battle-tested genre that is a staple on the iTunes charts (Crimetown). Not knocking the choices here; given Gimlet’s high-value-per-project business model and a growing need for its next big hit, these are understandable moves.

The company marches into November following a few optically rough weeks between the Mystery Show controversy and the subsequent winding down of Sampler, two developments that were even dissonant within the context of the most recent Startup mini-season, which kicked off a few hours after the Mystery Show announcement with an anxiety narrative that seemed to further split its private and public narrative. This November launch week presents a much-needed break from the past, and a chance for the company to reset its bearings.

Planet Money’s Neal Carruth is NPR’s new General Manager for Podcasts, a brand new position. According to the announcement memo circulated internally, Carruth “will support the teams working on those shows, strengthen connections between our podcast portfolio and the newsroom and member stations, and support innovation and new program development across NPR as a key member of the newly expanded NPR Story Lab.” He will report to Anya Grundmann, VP of Programming and Audience Development.

“I think we could probably have much richer conversations about NPR’s strategy in a few months, but what I can say is this reflects the seriousness of NPR’s commitment to podcasting,” Carruth said, when I asked about his strategy. “A big part of this for me is talent development — leveraging the incredible talent we have in our newsroom and inside the public radio system. I want to make sure NPR is a great place for creative people.”

He added: “And we want to make sure that member stations are part of this too.” (Poynter ran a longer interview with Carruth, if you’re interested.)

The hiring process for the position took place over a five month period, with the job listing posted back in June. This news emerges from the shadow of the NPR podcast promotion kerfuffle (which raised questions over the organization’s relationship to podcasts) back in March, the WBAA-TAL brouhaha (which raised questions over the broader public radio system’s relationship to podcasts and digital audio) back in May, and NPR One managing editor Sara Sarasohn’s departure from the organization in early September. NPR has been driving a positive wave of announcements lately, unveiling its restructured Story Lab initiative (the pitch portal is now open, btw) and drawing attention to a strong ratings increase (though, as Current’s Adam Ragusea reported, it’s unclear how to read that apart from a tweak in measurement methodology and the bump from a bonkers election year).

Carruth, a 17-year NPR veteran who most recently ran the Business desk and overseeing the Planet Money podcast, will start his new role after Thanksgiving. (He’s also a super chill dude.) His position at Planet Money will be temporarily handled by David Sweeney.

Travel Pod. There is huge overlap between food media and travel media: a trading in the currency of desire, an editorial choice or balance between dispensing information and peddling fantasy, an indexing towards the visual. Also worth noting to the list of shared traits is the tension I wrote about a few weeks ago within food media — between food media and media about food — which applies, I think, just as well to the travel vertical, though I do struggle to think of strong contemporary examples of viscerally-driven travel media beyond the heyday of the Travel Channel circa early 2000s. (I had cable once, as a child, and it was beautiful.)

Roads and Kingdoms, a Brooklyn-based digital media concern, is one such example of a media company about travel, in the sense that it plays with the symbols of globe-trotting fantasy while running longform magazine-y pieces. (A chilled-out person’s Vice, one would say.) There is much I find fascinating about R+K: its magazine gloss, its malleable niche, its acceptance of investment by media personality Anthony Bourdain. This is the kind of boutiquey media company that counts among its leaders a guy, one Nathan Thornburgh, who says stuff like: “a great listicle about seven cabanas and seven beaches is still going to kill on the Internet and power glossy magazines, but there are lots of people who think about travel as losing yourself in someone else’s life.”

The company, of course, is pursuing a podcast project, which will be called The Trip. Hosted by Thornburgh and executive editor Kara Parks, the show will showcase the kinds of stories that you’d expect from the site — a mix of travelogue, foreign journalism, cultural anthropology, scenes and places pieces — and will be backed by sound-rich production values. Bourdain will feature in some pieces. I’m curious.

Production is led by Josie Holtzman, a Brooklyn-based producer on NPR Music’s Jazz Night in America. Philadelphia-based Alex Lewis is handling the ad creative, a set of short midroll profiles on chefs working in New York City’s Lower East Side. The first season, which will run for six episodes, is sponsored in full by Tiger Beer, and Panoply will play a supporting role with distribution and promotion, whatever that means. It will tentatively launch in the first week of March 2017.

Governmental advertising on UK podcasts? Caroline Crampton, an assistant editor at the left-of-center British publication the New Statesman (which has a healthy podcast roster), writes in to let me know about a string of governmental ad buys that have been taking place on UK podcasts. Over email, she explained:

We’ve had two major government-sponsor campaigns on our shows. The first ran in spring this year, and was about the benefits to UK companies of exporting their goods to other countries (part of this initiative) and the other is from the Department of Work and Pensions and encourages small business owners to sign up for the new government Workplace Pensions Scheme (this one is due to run from 7 November). Both were sponsor reads, rather than externally-recorded ads, so we were sent a brief containing the facts and figures and then our hosts worked with it to create the final audio. Both campaigns appeared on the New Statesman Podcast, which is our biggest show and focuses on UK politics, and were mostly about spreading information – the action listeners was asked to take was just to read a website for more details.

I asked Crampton if she had heard of anything beyond governmental ads. She replied:

We haven’t yet seen any non-government political ads in the UK as far as I’m aware – at the New Statesman we haven’t yet been approached by a candidate or political campaign, and I haven’t heard such an ad anywhere else. My sense is that government media buyers have bigger budgets than everyone else in the political sphere, and are thus able to be a bit more forward-thinking and experimental with how they spend their cash. They seem to be trying out podcasts as a new platform for citizen informational campaigns beyond the more traditional posters and radio/TV spots. I don’t know of any political party or union that is yet choosing to spend money with podcasts as a way of reaching voters or members, although given that the 2015 general election was the first time the UK really saw parties spending big money on targeted social media ads (dominating the so-called “cyber war” is considered to be a big part of why the Conservatives won a surprise victory) I don’t think party political podcast campaigns can be that far off here.

Fascinating. Crampton, by the way, recently launched a new podcast criticism column in the New Statesman, and you should check it out.

Sexual harassment controversy at PodcastOne. I don’t normally trade in these kinds of stories, but this one is particularly alarming. Last week’s episode of Juicy Scoop with Heather McDonald, a podcast now at Wondery but formerly at PodcastOne, discussed the show’s departure from the latter network, with McDonald accusing PodcastOne founder Norm Pattiz of making remarks amounting to sexual harassment during a taping session.

Pattiz has since apologized for his remarks, regarding them as jokes. But further worth noting is McDonald’s discussion of her difficulty moving her podcast from PodcastOne to Wondery after the incident. The Wrap with the description (careful of the autoplay):

McDonald claimed that Pattiz initially tried to lure her back with money, and then, when she decided to do the podcast on her own, Pattiz worked to sabotage her.

“I kept moving to different servers because he wasn’t letting me do it. He was, like, calling the other places that were just allowing my thing to sit there … threatening them,” McDonald said.

The pertinent section of the episode begins around the 24:30 mark.

One more week, friends: hug your local political podcast producer. Buy them coffee, tip your hat, offer them a napping spot.

Bites:

• Audible crawls out into the wild west: one of its original shows, Presidents Are People Too, is now available for free in podcatchers everywhere. “It’s been our plan since the beginning to try other platforms as a way to introduce listeners to the great series we have available at Audible,” Audible SVP of Original Content Eric Nuzum tells me. (iTunes)

• The Memory Palace’s Nate DiMeo, currently the artist-in-residence at the Met, releases his first few episodes from that stint. (The Memory Palace)

• “How To Cope With 2016: Start An Election-Gambling Podcast.” (FiveThirtyEight)

• Midroll’s first Now Hear This festival took place over the weekend, and from what I’ve heard from a few attendees, it seemed to have been a successful first run. If you were there, let me know what you think! I’d love to run a round-up.

• The great Linda Holmes of NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour has a fun theory that sorts the different podcast communities according to a Hogwarts-like taxonomy, but her concluding point is cash money: “My point is mostly that when you’re trying to serve podcast audiences OR creators, many in these houses are UTTERLY indifferent to others.” (Twitter)

Gimlet ends Sampler. The company announced the end of the podcast about podcasts at the top of its last episode, which was published late yesterday evening. In the pre-show note, Gimlet CEO Alex Blumberg explained that the move was to “basically clear the deck” to give room to a new project that will be built around Sampler host Brittany Luse. It is unclear what this new show will be about or when it will be ready for launch, but listeners were told to remain subscribed to the Sampler feed for further information that will be released at a later date.

This move comes about a week and a half after the Mystery Show rumpus, and I suppose it’s also worth noting that the Startup episode released that week, which focused on Gimlet and its current stresses related to growth, brought up the fact that some of its shows — Sampler included — had essentially plateaued in audience growth. However, one should also keep in mind that podcast consumption tends to slow down during the summertime, and that may well be what we are seeing in that situation. Whether Sampler’s audience numbers directly influenced the decision to end its run or not (I doubt we’ll know for sure), it nonetheless comes at an interesting time between the company’s brush with controversy and the recent NPR pickup of WAMU’s The Big Listen, also a podcast about podcasts, which began publishing its latest season earlier this month.

Luse joined Gimlet in September 2014 largely off the strength of her independently produced podcast For Colored Nerds, which has continued publishing to this day.

This is, technically speaking, the first time Gimlet has winded down a show.

Science Friday is launching a new show. The long-running public radio show that serves weekly scooping of delicious science news is birthing a spin-off: Undiscovered, which I’m being told is about the “left turns and lucky breaks that make science really happen.” I’m guessing it’s sort of like How I Built This, but for science! The new show will be hosted by veteran science producers Annie Minnoff and Elah Feder, and it’s scheduled to roll out sometime early 2017.

By the way, Science Friday just celebrated its 25th year of operations with a gala at the Intrepid Sea, Air, and Space Museum in New York this past Saturday. Congrats, folks!

Community-Driven Discovery. “People get really hyped when they find me,” said Danielle Sykes, the creator of Podcasts in Color, an individually-driven digital project that’s working hard to build out an online space for people of color who produce and consume podcasts. I had asked Sykes, who goes by Berry, if she felt like the podcast ecosystem had been adequately accommodating for different voices and communities; that is, for demographics other than “the white guys with mics” stereotype the space has become saddled with. “There’s room for improvement,” she said, by way of explaining why people get excited when encountering Podcasts in Color. “But I believe it’s coming.”

And it may well come from efforts like hers. Berry’s work with Podcasts in Color is remarkable for a number of reasons — its push to diversify podcasting’s identity, its intent to push more podcasts made by people of color into the mainstream, its scrappiness — but her most interesting contribution, I think, is how she is laying down a framework for a community-driven approach to podcast discovery, which has almost universally been described as broken and whose articulated solutions tend to revolve around technological approaches: a better platform, a better app, a better curation system built on top of existing distributors, and so on. (Another approach that has popped up in recent weeks: greater critical embrace, as embodied by the Third Coast Festival’s recent call for inclusion among Fall Arts Previews.)

Podcasts in Color functions on two mechanics. Firstly, Berry cultivates and maintains an active community of interested participants over a collection of social media accounts, though the bulk of the interactions appear on Twitter, where she makes rigorous use of hashtags (like #PodIn and #PodsInColor) under the nom de plume “Mystery Berry.” Over Twitter, Berry maintains a near-continuous stream of engaged and enthusiastic interactions, pulling people into public conversation and constantly surfacing new shows and episodes. While the effect can sometimes be overwhelming, it is nonetheless effective in its pursuit. I have personally found more than a few shows off Berry’s conversational blast radius that I have come to appreciate, and it always strikes me how I probably wouldn’t have been able to learn about those shows anywhere else.

The second mechanic lies in an attempt to document the universe of podcasts created by people of color, which Berry does by maintaining a directory of such shows that lives on the Podcasts in Color website. She tells me that new submissions to the directory are added daily, and the product is a comprehensive, if somewhat unwieldy, database whose existence should strip away the logic from arguments asserting that it’s hard to find podcasters of color.

“I’m trying to create the podcast world that I see in my head,” Berry told me, adding that her general distance from the coasts — she lives in Denver, where she works part-time at a travel company — informs her work. “I see everything from a ‘middle America’ perspective, so I love to think of ways someone living in Denver could connect and find podcasts easily.”

Podcasts in Color remains relatively small in reach. By Berry’s count, Podcasts in Color currently reaches over 4500 followers across its social media accounts, and the directory sports only about a thousand visitors a week. But while its numbers may be fledgling, Berry’s work is rising to meet a need that continues to persist in the space. And besides, speaking as a person who started a newsletter out of nothing, everybody starts out small.

Find the Podcasts in Color community on Twitter, and the directory on its website.

This American Life’s New Tool. This American Life publicly rolled out its new audio clipping and sharing tool, called “Shortcut,” last week. Nieman Lab has a great write-up of the tool discussing its origins at last September’s This American Life audio hackathon (which I covered at the time) and contextualizing it within the broader spectrum of similar audio sharing efforts like WNYC’s Audiograms initiative and the Clammr app.

It’s worth noting that Shortcut will be open-sourced, and that the team plans to release the code for the app soon. Stephanie Foo, Shortcut’s project lead (and This American Life staff producer) told me that she encourages people to use the tool in a variety of ways. “I like to see this idea be taken and shared,” she said. Foo added that she invites companies like Apple and Stitcher, distribution platforms that generate tons of valuable user behavior data, to take notice and consider ways to facilitate sharing experiences for listeners.

She also mentioned that her team is looking create a “database of interest” of people and team who want to start using the tool on their own. “We want to see how much effort we need to put into hand-holding,” she said. Such teams should send a note to[email protected].

Whetting appetites through your earballs. “I think food podcasts in general have a ton of room for growth,” said Dan Pashman, who hosts WNYC Studio’s The Sporkful, when we traded emails recently.

I had written to ask a few questions about his show and, more generally, about the scope of opportunities for food podcasts. Pashman pointed out that millennials (née snake people) spend over $90 billion per year on food, using that number to illustrate the scale of potential interest among the prime podcast consuming demographic. That kinda makes sense, though I figure that number is probably always meant to be big given the fact that we all kind of have to eat to live, unless you’re one of those Soylent people, but I suppose the very existence of those varied approaches and subsequent rebuttals to the subject further underscores Pashman’s point about food being such vibrant point of concern, interest, and thought in human life.

“As a general matter, I’d say food media roughly breaks down into three categories: tips/hacks/recipes, news/journalism, and storytelling,” Pashman said. “I think the second and third categories are as well-suited to audio as any other medium, perhaps better-suited. As for the first category, there are some food podcasts that do tips and recipes very well, but I do wonder how that content will fare long term. People seem to want their cooking tips in shorter formats each year… Listening to a podcast isn’t the most efficient way to learn how to sear a steak or eat durian.”

And it would seem that all three categories are more or less well served by the crop of food podcasts currently on the market, from The Sporkful and APM’s The Splendid Table toGastropod and Food52’s Burnt Toast to Gravy and all those lovely works by the Kitchen Sisters. (Let’s not even talk about the subgenre of food podcasts that specifically focuses on drink. That’s a doozy.)

But I’ve always had a sense that there is a fundamental difference between “food media” and media about food, both of which sport very different kinds of market opportunities. Almost all food podcasts, I think, cleanly fall within that second bucket, leaning deep into narrative-first designs that doesn’t really draw all much from the viscerality that the idea and experience of food often promote. Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve generally viewed “food media” to be the kind driven by a certain viscerality — I think about the gauzy close-ups in cooking shows, the gorgeous glossy photos in print magazines, and all of those other borderline pornographic editorial units that tap into that lizard-brain feeling of want — which I think is somewhat structurally in opposition to what we traditionally think about when we think about storytelling narrative, and as a function of that is a genre that tends to favor visual approaches. The platonic ideal for this media species is probably something likeBuzzFeed’s Tasty social food video empire circa summer 2016, and I guess I’m having a hard time finding audio projects that attempts to purely execute on those mechanics. To some extent, I wonder if that’s even possible, but if it is, and if there emerges strong attempts to capitalize on those same mechanics, I do believe there’s a really interesting business in here somewhere, or at least a technique that can greatly increase the hook of existing food podcasts.

“I do think you can tap into that want without visuals,” Pashman said, when I spiralled off on this ramble. “In some ways perhaps it’s even more visceral because as people listen, they picture their own personal platonic ideal of a food.”

Hmm.

Tangentially relevant but interesting nonetheless: Found out that the Food Network hauled in $891.6 million in revenues last year, though a 2014 Quartz article observed the channel’s programming trend to have shifted its focus away from food and more towards competitions.

A Series on Food and Race. Pashman, by the way, is currently publishing a Sporkful special series on race and food called Who Is This Restaurant For? “The basic premise is that every time you walk into a restaurant, you’re bombarded with signals that tell you what kind of place it is and whether it’s for you,” Pashman explained. “We’re hoping that by exploring these signals from the perspective of both restaurateurs and customers, we can reveal something about the judgments we all make, our perceptions of race and culture, and how the world looks to different people.”

This mini-series marks Pashman’s second project in the past year that examines the intersection of food and race, following his set of reports called Other People’s Food that originally came out back in March. (It was re-published earlier this month as a lead up to the new series. Which is an interesting marketing initiative, if you asked me.)

I asked Pashman, who is white, about his growing focus on this topic. “If you’re living in America right now, how can you not be interested in exploring questions of race, culture and identity?” he replied. “I was optimistic that food could offer an entry point, some kind of common experience where a meaningful conversation could begin.”

I’m told WNYC Studios doesn’t share audience numbers (a shame!), but Pashman says the series has gotten a “huge response.”

“In a certain way, podcasts are to public radio as public radio was to commercial radio,” said Studio 360’s Kurt Andersen on a recent episode of Recode Media, sketching out the parallel between public radio’s oppositional nature to its incumbents back in its day and podcasting’s own stylistic rubbing up against public radio today. “It’s all part of the great circle of life,” he trailed off.

Check out the super fun interview, and this specific section begins at the 27:30 mark.

Once again, until November: Godspeed, all you producers working on political podcasts this election cycle. May you get the biggest of raises once this is all over. (If it actually ends, of course.)

Bites:

• I’m not personally clear about the cultural significance of the Webby Awards, but it’s taking entries for Podcasts and Digital Audio, so do keep tabs on that if it’s interesting to ya. (The Webby Awards)

• Acast announced last week that it is granting its clients access to music library Epidemic Sound and the Hindenburg Journalist Pro editing software. It’s probably a move to sweeten the deal for podcast publishers and producers considering the Swedish podcast company as a potential ad sales provider, though those perks do feel like add-ons as opposed to core demands. (RAIN News)

• Missed this last week, but really worth your attention: BackStory with the American History Guys, a popular Charlottesville-based radio show, is restructuring to become digital-first. As part of this shift, it will no longer offer an hour-long version for broadcast starting February 3, 2017, opting for primary distribution through a weekly podcast publishing format. The show had previously found distribution over 173 stations across 31 states and Washington DC,according to their website. Check out the Current write-up for more details.

• Podcast upstart Paragon Collective dropped a trailer for its upcoming horror fiction series “Darkest Night.” What’s interesting here: the show’s first season is being sponsored by AMC Network’s new horror streaming service, Shudder.

• “Is your podcast being held hostage by iTunes?” asks Forbes contributor Sarah Rhea Warner. (Forbes) Pair this with a recent take by a Goldman Sachs analyst: “It’s Time for Apple to Go Big in Content and Launch ‘Apple Prime’” (StreetInsider.com)

• Two Amazon Echo related reads: “How 3 publishers are staffing for Amazon Echo” (Digiday) and “Yelling at Amazon Echo” (New Yorker)

Moves

• Zach Brand, NPR’s VP of Digital Media & Services, is moving to The Guardian, where he replaces Aron Pilhofer as Chief Digital Officer.
• Meg Cramer has been promoted; she is now BuzzFeed’s new deputy director of audio. Cramer has principally worked on the company’s political podcast, “No One Knows Anything.”
• Podcast advertising platform CastPlus hires Jenni Skaug as VP of Business Development. Skaug previously held the same role at Ad Results.