Podcast Week kicks off in NYC

• Podcast Week kicks off in New York NY, USA, today - a week of events focusing on podcasting. Today and tomorrow, the Sounds Profitable Business Summit brings together the business of podcasting with those that buy it - a one-stage event with an emphasis on networking. Then, the 2026 IAB Podcast Upfront takes place on Wednesday, unveiling the content coming up for brands to work with; and finally, Podcast Movement on Thursday and Friday, where creators come to refine the craft they have already built. Podnews will be in New York throughout Podcast Week.

• AI replicas of the voices of podcast hosts outperform human announcer-read ads by +26%, according to a new study. The data shows that an AI cloned voice of the podcast host works +26% better than an ad that has been read by a different (and human) pre-recorded voice. An ad actually read by the real podcast host works +9% better still, though. Podnews readers can download the case study here.

• Broadcast-ready AI-voice production tool AudioStack has been upgraded to use a multi-agent system “that reasons through a brief before producing anything”.

• Headliner announced new, automated, YouTube video clips automation. Currently free to use, the tool identifies and edits clips to highlight your best moments. The company says that “shows that automate the busywork keep creating, while shows that don’t tend to slow down or stop.”

• Finding quality shows is getting easier for advertisers and agencies, with the Mission Media Quality Score, announced today. Mission Media has added the score, which evaluates shows across a range of signals, to help give an objective measure of how audiences engage with them.

• PodAnalyst has launched v3 of its analytics tool. It adds two new features: Radar watches your show round the clock to alert you of things worth a closer look; and Iris is a tool that answers questions directly about your podcast performance. You can also connect Iris to your own Claude or ChatGPT account.

• The Virginia Queer Film Festival has announced the official selections for its first Queer Ear program. Queer Ear will debut Oct 2-4 in Norfolk VA, to expand equitable and accessible forms of media storytelling.

• WNYC announced two new limited series, which will be broadcast on WNYC from today.

• Audacy has signed a podcast and video partnership with Smosh, a sketch comedy channel and creator.

• There’s a new podcast festival happening in Spain. ¿Se me escucha? will take place in Albacete, in the south-east of the country, on Nov 7.

• Bushwick Film Festival, in Brooklyn NY, USA, has announced its first podcast program. It’s on Oct 10th.

The Tech Stuff - with RSS.com

• Soundandgo has a set of nice tools - an audio converter, a loudness analyser and normaliser, and plenty of microphone test tools as well. They’re all free, and all in your browser.
• A scam to be aware of: someone emailing from "spotify-publishers.com" is posing as from the SEO team at Spotify Advertising, trying to buy backlinks on websites by emailing contacts they’ve harvested from RSS feeds. That domain isn’t Spotify’s, so far as we see.
• If you’ve found a new podcast app and wondering how it describes itself to podcast hosting companies, this is how to test user agents. Dodgy apps pretend they’re Safari or Apple Podcasts.
• While we’re here - this is a full, up to date list of all podcast apps, bots and other podcast consumers. It’s free, and is a community effort.

  People news

• Marina Hyde is to leave The Guardian, where she was a columnist. She is a co-host of The Rest is Entertainment with Richard Osman.

Tips and tricks - with Podcast Movement NYC

Podcast News - with Airwave

With Airwave: Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing is a daily podcast for stock investors. Weekday episodes offer a long-term perspective on business news with The Motley Fool’s investment analysts. Weekend shows are a mix of personal finance and longer-form interviews. Yesterday, we learnt that, for all the benefits of AI, human judgement is the scarcest asset for any company.

Brumbassadors: Why Birmingham Means Business is brand new today, from the UK’s second city. The show tells us to forget the stereotypes and features influential voices from business, culture and sport who are shaping Birmingham’s future.

In 1996, the state of Rhode Island took a risk on a radically different kind of high school. Traditional schools were losing too many students. Kids were bored, disengaged, and dropping out. The Met, based in Providence, set out to reimagine what school could be. Now, twenty years after graduation, in The Advisory: Class of 2006 nine former classmates and their advisor reunite to ask a simple question: How - if at all - did their unconventional high school change their lives?

Myf Warhurst fronts Better at Home, a cinematic new video podcast that redefines what 'the good life’ looks like and asks the question: What would you make room for? Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate (BHGRE) presents this six-part elevated video podcast of real stories, produced for multiplatform screens everywhere.