Considered That: why NPR’s news show is no longer localised

• Launched Sept 2020 in Podnews, NPR ends localised versions of the Consider This podcast this week, which they claimed at the time was the “first localised daily news podcast”. Localisation “did not prove sustainable”, said a spokesperson; Current reports that the production process wasn’t scalable; audiences didn’t value it much anyway; and NPR is moving to Megaphone which means the use of different tools. Consider This continues, with national content (featuring anchors like Mary Louise Kelly, above)

  • Your News Now, an Australian podcast with “news and weather for your location”, was launched in May; while dynamic audio tool Spooler, launched in March 2022, is readying additional features.

• On a recent episode, The Accidental Tech Podcast discussed their current sponsorship situation and the importance of membership. Their revenue is “super down this year” because they don’t wish to offer DAI nor join an ad network. John Spurlock has a transcript and link to discussions on Mastodon and Reddit.

• Ads in Pocket Casts are 25%-off during the month of September, the company announced.

• In The Times, an article about The Rest Is Politics cohost Rory Stewart suggests he earns around £70,000 (US$88,000) a month from the podcast. The podcast was with Acast until July.

• Jeff Umbro, CEO and founder of The Podglomerate, was interviewed by the Podcast Business Journal last week. He described the company’s five-tier approach to marketing a podcast.

Tips and tricks - with Pod Predictor by Coleman Insights

• The Stitcher app closes tomorrow. If you’re wondering which podcast app to choose next, we’ve chosen the ones we’d recommend.

The Tech Stuff - with RSS․com

• You might use audio tool ffmpeg in your production process, but it comes with “a learning curve that looks suspiciously like a brick wall”, according to Hackaday. The good news? There’s a nice website here that adds a graphical interface to fiddle with it all. We didn’t realise that there’s an audio compressor built-in to ffmpeg, or a silence remover. Anyway, it’ll let you play about with it all, and copy the output command. (We use ffmpeg to produce our daily podcast (from a WAV), and our YouTube version).

• Lemmy, the increasingly popular Reddit alternative, might be working on an ActivityPub-compatible 'replies’ collection API to enable it to work with the emerging podcast:socialinteract feature in Podcasting 2.0. A volunteer is taking a look at how to support this API, which might bring cross-app comments to podcasting.

  • Podnews’s RSS feed supports socialInteract through ActivityPub, but if you wanted our opinion, we’d like it enabled on the channel (i.e. “show level”) as an option, rather than only for individual episodes.

Podcast News - with Airwave

Part of the Airwave podcast network: Since 2006, My History Can Beat Up Your Politics has been using history to elevate today’s political debates. The Columbia Journalism Review calls it thoughtful, nuanced, and highly engaging. It’s hosted by Bruce Carlson.

Money Assistant with Nicole Lapin and Nicole LApIn is a new and interesting idea - it’s hosted by Nicole Lapin and… an AI version of Nicole Lapin, relaying guidance from Magnifi’s advanced artificial intelligence technology. The show plans to share tips about personal finance, from both humans and artificial intelligence. It launches next week.

7pminphillypodcast brings together an authentic community and culture, driven by the discussions that the mainstream media may not want or care to hear about – trauma, violence, activism, and much more. It’s created and hosted by Steve Desmarathes, and after an initial period of just being hosted on YouTube, it’s now available wherever you get your podcasts.

Accessed That is a new accessible travel series released today from Queensland and The Peers Project. The show explores what it’s really like to travel while living with a disability. The aim is to both educate the tourism industry about the specific needs of guests living with disability, while at the same time, inspire travel without limitation.

Feed the Queue has been refreshed and relaunched by Tink Media, and calls itself the ultimate podcast discovery podcast. It will feed your queue with an assortment of fantastic podcasts you would likely not have heard of. Join the team from Tink Media and creators from across the industry to learn about shows you’ll love. The press release uses the word “char-queue-terie”, but we’ll gloss over that and pretend it didn’t happen.