Cheerful Earful to bring funny back

• The world’s funniest podcast festival returns this October. Cheerful Earful will be in London, Brighton, Edinburgh, Melbourne, Dublin and New York from Sep 28 - Oct 28, with the largest lineup in the festival’s history.

• Is video the future for podcasting? It depends, suggests Losh Moodaley, writing for Podnews today - the hidden economics of the price of visibility mean you might consider calculating your own video threshold: when does it make sense to add video so that it starts funding itself?

• In Dec 2024, the BBC World Service ran an investigation on harmful health misinformation on Steven Bartlett’s podcast, and focused on claims by Thomas Seyfried. Private Eye reports that FlightStory’s Diary of a CEO has welcomed Thomas Seyfried back in an episode released on Jul 16, which also acts as a fundraiser for Seyfried’s work. Seyfried claims that chemotherapy and radiotherapy are little better than medieval quackery, and the real way to beat cancer is a ketogenic diet - claims that could significantly harm listeners if they followed them without real medical advice.

  • Bartlett quietly announced a commitment to on-screen fact-checking in Nov 2025 - but, these notes are invisible to audio listeners, and there is no link to any document in the podcast episode notes. In the YouTube video, there’s a link marked “Independent Fact Check”, but it’s truncated, and doesn’t work.
  • An article in The Sunday Times yesterday noted that his show is nearing the size of Joe Rogan’s. FlightStory’s PR company told us that “Steven Bartlett’s Diary of a CEO recorded 86 million views in May, roughly three times the 35 million logged by Joe Rogan’s podcast in the same period. DOAC also added over a million new subscribers during that window, while Rogan stayed flat.” There’s also a paid article today by Nick Hilton in today’s i paper, titled “How Steven Bartlett fooled the world”, which highlights recent guests, queries his continued establishment approval, and notes that Bartlett has, curiously, turned comments off for his podcasts on Spotify.

• The APAs from AudioUK have announced they’ve teamed up with Amazon Music to offer free or discounted entry to the awards for those who would otherwise be unable to take part due to financial constraints.

• Fountain has announced support for Apple Podcasts video. The podcast hosting company also supports the alternateEnclosure, so other podcast apps can also access your video (including Fountain’s app). Spotify and YouTube are coming soon; the Pro plan adds video at no extra cost.

• Looking for a decent teleprompter for your Mac? There are plenty which attract monthly fees, or require access to your microphone or something. EyesForward is a simple tool with a one-off payment of US$1.99, says the developer. You can buy it in the Mac App Store.

• Audio Flux has opened Circuit 08, looking for bite-sized audio stories about unexpected conversations, close-to-home discoveries, and the people who quietly shape our lives. The theme is “Confection”. It’s free to enter, and your work could be shared at Transom, XMTR Audio Arts Festival, and RESONATE in Richmond VA.

• The UK’s Goalhanger has made a short documentary about the company’s history, and the filming of The Rest is Football in New York.

• Blubrry’s Mike Dell writes about 21 years of podcasting - and “the thing I don’t want us to lose”. In it, he comments on the AMP Accords: “Better analytics can certainly be useful. But requiring podcast applications to provide increasingly detailed client-side listener information changes the relationship between podcasters and their audiences.”

The Tech Stuff - with RSS.com

• After a gap of almost nine years, the LAME project, which encodes MP3s, is now up to v4.0. It’s a technical reason for the bump to v4, though, and it’s not a major release - after it reached v3.100, the version number was too long to fit in an ID3 tag. Still, the software continues being updated; and v4.1 is actively being worked on.

• Want your podcast to sound as if it’s been recorded on a cassette, with hiss and wow/flutter? This cassette simulation works with ffmpeg to do just that - loaded up with a number of cassette profiles including 1978's Sony CHF90, and even a Soviet MK60 tape.

• The co-inventor of podcasts, Dave Winer, is busy inventing a new social network - using RSS. Here’s RSS.chat, an invite-only server, showing off the tool, which uses RSS under the hood. Is this the cross-app comments system that we’ve been looking for, for podcast apps? Here are the installation details.

• The image format .avif is now “baseline widely available” having been available in all major browsers for 30 months. We’d not recommend it for your podcast artwork quite yet, or for email, sadly; but for websites, it’ll save you considerable bandwidth. (We’re switching over to it).

  People news

• Matt Kellogg has joined Surfer Network, a premium audio advertising marketplace, as the company’s SVP of North American Strategy. He joins from SoundStack.

• At the BBC, Thomas Curry will become the Creative Development Director of podcasts for BBC Studios Audio. Ian Taitt will be Head of Production. Curry will be expanding BBC Studios’ network of co-productions and production partnerships, working closely with the company’s commercial and editorial teams.

Tips and tricks - with Podcast Movement NYC

• What happens at the end of your first season? Need to convince a brand, or a network, to sign you up for another? This session at Podcast Movement 2025 explains what data you might want to use, if you’re chasing a renewal deal.

Podcast News - with Airwave

With Airwave: The Box of Oddities delves into the strange and mysterious aspects of our world, exploring topics ranging from bizarre medical conditions to unsolved mysteries, and from paranormal phenomena to strange cultural practices from around the world. Today - could an ordinary clay pot be the oldest recording device in human history?

There’s a podcast for everyone - just like The Wash Exchange, which is a weekly podcast for car wash operators. Hosted by Blair Woodcock, the owner of Australian car wash chemical manufacturer Slipstream Pro, the show contains operator interviews, industry veterans, and where car washing is heading. The latest features Greg Cummins, one of Australia’s first car wash owners, on 30 years in the industry and the drought that nearly ended it.

“You have to be consistent and you have to be genuine in your subscription promotion”, says Eric Barnett of Supporting Cast in this week’s PodBiz. He shares how podcasters and networks can build recurring revenue through paid subscriptions.

It may be time to rethink our relationships with our devices. How to Touch Grass is new from The Atlantic today, to look at the often-fraught, always-changing relationship people have with technology. The first episode looks at internet nostalgia and what it can teach us about what we want from our relationships with one another and with tech.

You Are Here: The Time Travel Podcast is a new podcast hosted by E.J. Kalafarski. Each episode the show will travel to a different year through the lens of a movie from that period, using film as a gateway into the politics, history, and pop culture of the moment. The first episode takes us to 1988.