LeVar Burton to make a show for children

• LeVar good news: At a session at CES, LeVar Burton unveiled his first children’s podcast. Sound Detectives will be launched in Q2 by SiriusXM’s Sticher.

• LeVar bad news: in an end of the role of humans to do your reading-into-a-microphone jobs? Apple Books has launched a “digital narration” service to turn your ebook into an audiobook. Who needs LeVar Burton anyway?

• In Vulture, Nick Quah is the latest to predict a rough year for the podcast industry in 2023.

• “The latest update of Slack automatically produces transcripts when you upload audio files.”

• Is the listener to your true-crime podcast the person who actually did the crime? Narratively looks at the story behind one listener of The Trail Went Cold - who is now in prison.

• A new newsletter from Brad Nolan called Segue “shares advice for radio professionals looking to add podcast creation to their library of content”.

• In Germany, the Rosa Luxembourg Foundation have produced a 40-page study on left-leaning political podcasts, comparing podcasts in the country with those in the US.

The Tech Stuff - with RSS.com

• In the Podcasting 2.0 “board meeting” podcast, a future for cross-app comments was clarified. ActivityPub will be used; but, instead of podcast apps having to act as full ActivityPub clients, users will use OAuth to log into anything compatible with Mastodon’s API (including Pleroma and Mastodon itself) to post comments (so they’re also visible there, too). Apps can use the threadcap library to quickly grab all the comments for an episode to display them. Best practice is that at least one comment is visible from the episode’s screen. (Podnews Daily’s RSS feed has the socialInteract tag in our episodes if you need a test case).

• The requirement that podcast:value only appear once for a show or episode has been removed. You can now have more than one podcast:value tag - if you’re using webmonetization and lightning payments, for example. (Podnews Daily has both in our feed if you need a test case).

• Podcast app PodcastGuru releases new apps this week, which are podping-enabled (so you’ll see a new episode the moment it is published).

Podcast News - with editaudio

From editaudio: More Right Than Wrong Angie Lee and Rachel Yoo explore the tensions that women often face in the modern workplace in conversation with creative leaders from across industries.

Texture and Artefact is a new project from James Errington, combining personal monologues, field recordings, interviews with friends and family, clips from old cassettes, occasional drama and original music, all knitted together into narrative soundscapes. From the person who gave us Centuries of Sound, it’s a beautiful piece of sound design. One episode a month, the first is out today.

In 4 Things For Your Podcast, the story behind why Avery Warner cancelled an episode, and said “My guest and I didn’t have an alignment on certain views. What happened next I thought was very unprofessional. I can’t support nor promote that kind of behavior.” It’s a learning for us all!

Bacon is My Podcast, a “unique approach to the interview podcast”, is going twice-weekly as of this week. Interviews continue on Monday with hosts Jim and Mike; Thursdays will be “personal experiences and stories about their lives, current events and discussions about the world of movies, comics, television and music”.