New hires at UK production company Listen

Above: new hires at Listen include Darby Dorras, right, with MD Josh Adley. Find more info in our people section.

• There’s a new conference dedicated to podcasts from publishers, the Publisher Voices Summit, in London in early October. Co-founder Esther Kezia Thorpe explains why they set up the Summit, and what publishers can expect.

• Vox Media is to lay off 39 employees and slow its hiring, blaming deteriorating economic conditions.

• iOS 16 has published its second public beta. As we get closer, a reminder that iOS 16 brings with it the ability to set a correct user-agent for your iOS podcast app, removing “Apple Core Media”. We see a number of podcast apps, including Pocket Casts, Playapod, Castro and Podbean’s app, gaining from this new API.

• Paranormal and true crime podcast And That’s Why We Drink are running their second annual Cryptid Poetry Slam virtual live show on Sat Aug 13. All proceeds will be donated to The National Abortion Federation.

• Podcast hosting company Captivate has announced that they will be the Platinum Sponsors of the African Podcast and Voice Artist Awards. The competition saw more than 2,000 nominees this year.

• Remote recording tool Riverside has launched a number of updates: using your iOS device as a second camera; mobile support for video recording up to 4K; and the Clubhouse-like Live Call-in comes to Android.

• Livewire has published its top ten podcast hosts (by new episodes) data: Megaphone has climbed above iVoox to reach #8. You can now buy daily access to the data. Livewire also reports that Amazon Cloudfront powers just over 50% of all podcast hosting; if AWS falls over, half of all podcasts will too. We’d report on it when that happens, but we use AWS too, so :shrug:

• Sounds Profitable has announced it is to use Spooler to produce its future podcasts.

• Good news: Spotify’s Chartable has a new Spotify integration - promising a more reliable connection with Spotify stats. Bad news: you’ve got until Friday before the old integration goes away.

• Trinity Audio is profiled by Israeli website Geektime; it “wants to turn articles into podcasts” using artificial voices.

• Google has delayed blocking third-party cookies again. Podcasting itself doesn’t use cookies so is unaffected, but websites or attribution services might.

• In the 90 days to the end of July, 43% of all mentions in our newsletter were of women.

Moves and hires

• Darby Dorras has been hired as Director of Content for UK production company Listen. He was previously at Somethin’ Else as an Executive Producer.

• Amber Bateman has joined Listen as Executive Producer. She was with Mags Creative.

The Tech Stuff - with RSS.com

• Audio geeks might enjoy this sound design tutorial to help you recreate some of those classic 80s synth sounds from Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill, seen in Web Audio Weekly. (Fans of that song might also enjoy The Pub Choir singing it in Podnews’s home town of Brisbane QLD, Australia - your Editor is sometimes in this choir, but not this time).

• JustCast has added full integration for value-for-value with the Alby wallet. The company joins RSS·com last week.

• Podcast Admin is new, and is an open-source podcast platform that runs on Google Cloud and Firebase, and coded using React. Features include configurable pre-roll and post-rolls, statistics and supports multiple users.

• Boosts this week include 2222 sats from Blubrry’s Mike Dell (“I think I have the hang of this”); 1024 sats from Dave Jones besmirching Spotify once more (“When the Index first started people were roundly skeptical of there being 4.5 million podcasts. Now everyone wants to claim that number”); 3 sats from JAF2100 (“keep up”, they say, intruiguingly); 1,000 from Fail Better Media’s Georg; 10 from cristobal_mena; 10 from xavi_herrera; and a thumb-up emoji and 10 sats from alfcamacho. If you get value from Podnews’s podcast, please consider boosting it in your favourite new podcast app (try Fountain to get started).

Podcast News

Missing Pages is the first original podcast from The Podglomerate, which reopens cold cases from the book world. It’s hosted by world-renowned literary critic and publishing insider Bethanne Patrick. Across its eight-episode debut season, Missing Pages uncovers the power struggles, mistaken identities, and unfathomably bad behaviour within the secretive world of book publishing. Each episode brings in authors, experts, publishing insiders, and a circus of NYC media elites to tell the real story; unfit for print.

Chameleon: Scam Likely is brand new from Campside Media. Ordinary citizens all around the US are losing their life savings to scam callers… so the hunt is on for the shadowy multinational mob behind the con. Hosted by Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, it launches today.

If you like learning about new podcasts in Podnews, you can now get this section as a podcast itself. New Podcast Trailers is available in your favourite RSS podcast app.