Who’s in the British Podcast Awards “longlist”?

• The British Podcast Awards 2026 released its longlist - recognising 409 entrants across 27 categories. Almost half the longlist are claimed to be independent titles and talent. We see at least 53 nominations for the BBC, eleven for Audible, eight for Audio Always, Platform Media and Bauer Media, seven for Persephonica and Fun Kids, five for Rethink Audio, Sky News, Bloomberg and History Hit, four for Novel and Podmasters, three for Sony and Avalon. One notable indie who has a nomination: the 19 year-old Answer Me This!. Goalhanger, the UK’s largest independent podcast company, did not enter; Global also appears not to have put their shows forward.

  • The British Podcast Awards has announced that the final round of the Listener’s Choice Award - the listener-voted prize in the competition - will be chosen using the Spotify platform. After an open vote on the British Podcast Awards website, the top 20 will move forward to a vote that requires listeners to use Spotify to make their final vote. “Any podcast currently available on Spotify is eligible for nomination”. The award last year went to history podcast Betwixt The Sheets.
  • The awards are celebrating their tenth year. Above: Deborah Frances-White, winner in 2020 for The Guilty Feminist.

• The Crossed Wires podcast festival has been taking place in Sheffield, England. We’ll have a full round-up tomorrow.

• “If you’re watching this because you want to make stuff - just go and make stuff. That’s the only way to get better”. Tom Scott, a well-known YouTuber and podcaster, gives some incredible advice in this YouTube video - and much of it works if you ignore “YouTube” and replace it with “Podcast”.

• Podcasts made it to another streaming video platform earlier this year - this time, in New Zealand. For the last few months, TVNZ+ has carried six video podcasts from indie producer Frank, including Between Two Beers and Extremely Casual Gamers.

• Fancy taking your show to the next level? Mercury Podcasts is looking for new shows - and is planning to give one podcast a free four-hour session in a studio… in the Bahamas.

Thank you to Scicomm Media for becoming our latest gold supporter. The company behind some of the biggest podcasts like Huberman Lab, David Senra and Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin, they’ve been supporters since 2023, and help pay for Podnews for everyone. You can support us too, here.

The Tech Stuff - with RSS.com

• “Follow people, not shows” says GuestVine, a tool that lets you follow any person and every podcast they guest on. You get the results in a private RSS feed in your existing podcast app (or, via email). Here’s an example of Seth Godin; and here is one for football people.

• There’s been a significant drop in new episodes published on Spotify for Creators, according to Livewire. The podcast host only published 19.8% of all new episodes in June - that’s the lowest figure since the data was first compiled in 2021. (Our section sponsor RSS.com remains on its best-ever figures.)

• Podcasting is still vulnerable to the Amazon-apocalypse; almost 60% of all podcast episodes are released using Amazon’s Cloudfront (including ours).

Tips and tricks - with Podcast Movement NYC

• Let’s go back to 2016, for Alex Blumberg - the co-founder of Gimlet Media, who spoke at Podcast Movement that year in a session entitled The Second Golden Age of Audio
• How to Talk to the Camera the Way TV Presenters Do - Chris Goor, a professional video cameraman, has a ton of tricks.

Podcast News - with Airwave

With Airwave and TWiT.tv: This Week in Tech is the top-ranked flagship tech podcast with Leo Laporte and friends. This week, good news for digital privacy thanks to the Supreme Court; and BYD sells the most EV cars again. He’s joined by Jason Hiner, Lisa Schmeiser, and Owen JJ Stone.

A three-part fiction series in Spanish, Red Hot Chili Dinos, launched last month. Produced by one independent creator, June Curiel, AI was used right through the production process, from scriptwriting and music to voice direction, sound design and post-production - with human creative direction at every stage. She tells us that this might be a glimpse of what independent podcast production may look like over the next few years.

“The most successful ways that I’ve seen podcasters making money is really to adapt to a layered monetization strategy.” In PodBiz this week: Rebecca Dalby, VP of Demand at Triton Digital. Rebecca shares how creators can maximize their earnings by adopting a layered monetization strategy, outlines the strategic alignment behind the Spreaker and Triton merger, and offers practical advice on shifting metrics from rigid CPMs to total revenue yield.

Today, Berlin’s new worker-owned magazine HEIST launches its podcast - also called HEIST. It kicks off with three episodes, featuring HEIST founding editors in conversation with journalists covering the most relevant stories for Berlin, Europe, and the world. In the next weeks, you’ll hear investigative journalists and experts discussing: refitting Volkswagon factories to build tanks; life as a Palestinian in Berlin after October 7; and new American-style saunas hitting the Berlin scene.

Can AI be conscious? Why are tech leaders increasingly turning to faith leaders for guidance? And what happens when the world’s oldest belief systems collide with its newest technology? Hosted by researcher and educator DZ Kalman, Belief in the Future returns for a new season to bring together religious leaders, academics, technologists, and policymakers to explore the growing collision between faith and technology.