The NZ Podcasting Summit to return for 2023

• The New Zealand Podcast Summit has announced its second year’s sessions. An annual hui for Aotearoa’s podcasting community, this year it’s scheduled for Saturday May 13 in Auckland. Speakers will include RNZ’s Tim Watkin, the Head of Funding at NZ On Air, Amie Mills, and The Spinoff’s head of podcasts, Jane Yee. Tickets are available.

• Seven audio workers have been laid off by Vox Media, reports Vox Media’s Hot Pod, including the team producing Cover Story. Vox Media declined to give exact figures. Around 130 people were laid off in total, or 7% of the workforce. Spotify is also to cut staff this week, according to Bloomberg.

  • Elsewhere, Google cut 12,000 jobs (6%), joining Microsoft’s 10,000 layoffs (5%), Facebook’s 11,000 (13%), Salesforce’s 8,000 (10%), and Twitter’s 3,700 (50%).

• Data: Prisa Audio made its first Up Front presentation on Friday. The company claims it is the world’s second-largest audio streaming company, and ranks #1 in the Spanish language. The release contains a number of data points; its ad revenue grew 43% over the previous year.

• Data: In Germany, the AGMA Podcast ranker for December was released (pdf). Zeit Online’s Was Jetzt (What Now?), a news podcast which published 82 episodes in December, is #1 with 6.8m downloads; comedy show Baywatch Berlin, which released four shows, is at #2 with 5.7m. Participating publishers only.

• In the Netherlands, news from Lieven Heeremans about a fund for audio production from the public broadcaster NPO: which was to disappear, and now isn’t, kind of.

• Congratulations to African podcasting group Pod Break for reaching your first year anniversary.

• On Twitter: “I made a needle felt collage of all my favourite podcasts yesterday and I think they’re pretty smart”

• Further reading:

  • Janan Ganesh writes for the FT: Podcasts aren’t as smart as you think (paywalled): “But people are starting to conflate [the podcast] with the hard grind of learning. At worst, they substitute it for reading.”
  • Vanessa Thorpe writes for The Guardian: Can BBC radio thrive in a new world of podcasts? on a defection of a presenter to a commercial rival (something our Editor has also blogged about)
  • Alexi Duggins writes for The Guardian about The rise of the child podcast superstars, featuring four podcasters aged 13 or younger.
  • Tyler Aquilina writes in Variety that “podcast exclusivity is quickly becoming an outdated strategy” - “it will be increasingly difficult for any but the most popular podcasts to claim a sizable chunk of the ad dollars available. Creators will therefore need to maximize ad revenue as much as possible, and limiting their potential audience through an exclusive distribution model will be increasingly untenable.”

The Tech Stuff - with RSS.com

• Want your podcast appearing in Fountain’s activity feed? Add a split to your Fountain address in your value block, and then it can see all your boosts, not just those made on Fountain. Change your username in this URL for the details.
  • While we did the above, we also added Podcast Index as a 1% split.
• A “high performance” port of OpenAI’s Whisper speech recognition tool for Apple silicon. Also runs on iOS.
• If you do a live podcast, are you LIT? The live item tag will give your podcast listeners a notification when your show is being broadcast live. Here’s a blog post explaining a little more, from the point of view of a radio station.

Podcast News - with editaudio

from editaudio: Date With Daddy An experimental audio journey hosted by queer events producer Marisa Grant. Marisa takes listeners on dates as Daddy, where both Daddy and the listener explore and learn more about themselves.

The Slowdown has a new host, the award-winning poet and writer Major Jackson. The show shared a selected poem and thoughtful reflection every weekday, and was previously hosted by Ida Limón. It’s produced by American Public Media in partnership with the Poetry Foundation.

Launched in Feb 2021, the San Diego News Fix has published its last episode.

Behind every catfish, there’s the bait. Love, Janessa is a new true crime podcast from the BBC World Service and CBC Podcasts. Produced by Antica Productions and Telltale Industries, it launches today, telling the story of an unwitting human face of a digital con.

Project Brazen and PRX have released The Sound: Mystery of Havana Syndrome - an investigative podcast looking at a debilitating and confounding illness in the Cuban US embassy. What caused it? Could it be caused by noisy crickets? Or mosquito spray? Or could it all be a mass delusion?