Who wants to moderate podcasts?

• The Verge asks “Can anyone moderate podcasts?” - following up on the story that Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast is still available on Apple Podcasts. Interviews suggest most podcast apps are trusting Apple to choose what’s acceptable and what isn’t; and the story claims that podcasting “isn’t ready for moderation”.

• Apple Podcasts are looking for a Head of International. You’ll work out of their London office. “We are seeking an excellent senior leader with a thorough understanding of the Podcasts industry.”

• Some nice coverage of Africa Podfest, which happened last weekend.

  
  Sep 1 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

• Lemonada Media has signed with Hollywood talent agency CAA. They were previously with UTM.

• What are Mark Cuban’s thoughts about podcasting? He spoke to Erica Mandy at Podcast Movement; she writes about the interview in Business Insider.

  
  This link is no longer available, as at Sep 1 2023

• More consolidation on the way? The owner of Global, a company that owns radio and poster sites in the UK and the DAX audio ad platform in the UK and North America, has bought 8.8% of iHeartMedia. (“The deal is not connected with Global”, though).

• Last week, we reported the ACPM Podcast Ranker in France. Today: the other one, run by Médiamétrie, reports that January hit 100m global downloads of podcasts by their French publishers, almost all radio broadcasters. An incomplete ranker, it measures participating publishers only.

• GRStudio “helps you record, edit and publish podcast content from your browser”.

• Google Podcasts is “pretty good now” says a review; is the Dutch language market really too small for podcasts? asks Lieven Heeremans.

• We’re proud to sponsor the Podcasting, Seriously newsletter from Lantigua Williams & Co: a “mission to highlight stories that deserve recognition in podcasting, and to support you in your adventures.”

The Tech Stuff - with the Podcast Index

• 9.4% of recently-updated podcasts use the Podcasting 2.0 namespace. From a sample of 84,955 podcasts inspected last week, 8.6% use the locked tag. 0.2% already use the person tag.
• We mentioned a while back that Libsyn have been updating all RSS feeds to https:// rather than http://; other podcast hosts doing this are Podomatic, Squarespace and Spreaker.
• just_audio is an open-source “feature-rich audio player for Android, iOS, macOS and the web”, written in Flutter.
• Also open-source, the Anytime podcast player, which uses the above audio component. Android-only currently, but written in Dart and Flutter. (And shortly to have a proper user-agent).
• Here’s a good post about how Breaker skips silences in their iOS app.
• Nobody wants to know how to replace an embedded episode image with a new one using ffmpeg in m4a (AAC) format files. But in case you’re not nobody, use ffmpeg -i "inputaudio.m4a" -i "inputimage.jpeg" -map 0:a:0 -map 1:v:0 -codec copy -disposition:v:0 attached_pic "output.m4a"
• Not entirely unrelated to the above, the Podnews podcast now has embedded episode images.

Tips and tricks - with PODGO

• The art of podcast presenting (Rachel Corbett

• How long does it take to produce an episode of 20,000 Hertz? (Podcast Movement)

Podcast News - with CBC Podcasts

From CBC Podcasts: Recall: How To Start A Revolution In October of 1970, Canada was in crisis. This series will reveal the stories of that time through the voices of those who lived it: the bomb expert, survivors and the radicals themselves.

A Cup of Tea and a Chat with former KROQ announcers Gene “Bean” Baxter and Allie Mac Kay has signed a sales deal with ART19. It moves the podcast away from being a Patreon-exclusive. (Bean is also on Podcast Radio).

Deeply Human is an ambitious collaboration between the BBC World Service, American Public Media and iHeartMedia. “The program brings together the No. 1 podcast publisher globally with the BBC’s nearly century-long expertise in audio storytelling and APM’s success in making podcasts for the American market” says the press release.

The Sounds Profitable podcast includes an interview with Rishabh Jain on podcast ad targeting after the death of cookies. Worth a listen to understand what advertisers really get from a podcast listen.