ABC News to launch new daily podcast Start Here

In the US, ABC News is planning to launch a competing daily podcast to The Daily and Up First, Variety reports. It’s called Start Here, and it will be released on March 28th. The ABC already produce a number of podcasts.

AdsWizz is to be purchased by internet broadcaster Pandora for US$145m. AdsWizz, which supplies ad insertion to a number of content partners, will continue to operate independently.

Our podcast subscribe pages are a great way of linking to a podcast from social media. Today, we’ve made it easier to link to them - just type in your podcast name and go. Pages link directly to popular podcast apps for iOS and Android, and include a play module of the latest episode; you can remove the Podnews header, too.

What’s stopping brands from using podcast advertising? AdExchanger writes an article highlighting three technical reasons that are problematic. Most are intrinsic parts of the medium’s lack of centralisation.

Some data, from March 2017, about podcasting and audio books in France. At that stage, 39% of the country had listened to a podcast. OpinionWay, the company who conducted the research, has a (french-language) podcast, also called OpinionWay.

Podtrac has published the top 20 podcasts for February 2018. The top 3 is unchanged from January.

Norm Pattiz, the Founder of Podcast One, writes a long advertorial highlighting radio drama’s new home on podcasts. Meanwhile, PodcastOne has severed ties with wrestler Vince Russo after remarks he made about a wrestling journalist’s girlfriend. Pattiz is reported to have called the wrestler and offered him a way back onto the network.

The 9 best podcast networks, according to We Edit Podcasts, include PodcastOne, Megaphone, and seven others.

A good example of niche podcasting fulfilling a need: we learnt about Berlin Briefing earlier this week. It’s a round-up of local news for people who live in Berlin, aimed at English speakers who don’t speak German.