Catch up when you fill up: the podcast at the pumps

• Filling up with fuel is now a great place to also learn more about a new podcast. Purple Daily, a Minnesota Vikings podcast from Gamut Podcast Network, will now accompany you as you fill up your car at regional gas stations Kwik Trip in the area. As you fill up, you get a 30 second taster on the gas pump screen. Here’s a video of the whole thing.

• Hosting on Substack? A Guardian investigation reveals some concerning other publications on the platform.

• The Age of Audio movie is to get an East Coast premiere on Feb 25 in Kevin Smith’s Smodcastle Cinemas, in Atlantic Highlands NJ, USA. If you’re looking for a great documentary that traces the history of our medium, you’ll be wanting this one.

• AIR, the Association of Independents in Radio (which, yes, includes podcast professionals too), is offering a free three-month membership, if you join AIR using code BetterTogether2026. It’s usually $100 for the year. (Already a member? Renew using code WorldRadioDay2026 and save $20.) The organisation includes job alerts, discounts on tools, and mentoring.

• Thing we all missed: an online symposium from the MeCCSA Radio and Audio Studies group, last Friday. Speaking was Siobhán McHugh, talking about the so-called 'pivot to video’ and why audio stories can generate empathy, insight and emotion, reverberations that endure long beyond the prescriptive video ‘podcast’.

People news

• In London, Platform Media has announced Rhyanna Coleman as the company’s first Director of Strategy. She’s previously worked with YMU and Spotify.

The Tech Stuff - with RSS.com

• The command-line tool ffmpeg is the little hidden workhorse of podcasting - and chances are that your podcast host is using it to convert audio files. But it’s capable of much more than just turning a mistakenly-uploaded WAV file into an MP3; it does dynamic compression and EQ, can set ID3 tags, set the LUFS levels correctly, and all manner of other things. Peter Kirn discovers FFAB: a graphical front-end for Mac and Linux - which not only lets you fiddle around to your heart’s content, but also shows you the actual command it uses, so you can build it into your workflow. Brilliant.

• Justin Jackson from the Podcast Standards Project wrote an update on “playing the game on the field”, asking where the focus of the project should be in 2026, and asking for proposals.

• Writing personally, Justin also posted a long piece about what podcasting will lose when XSLT goes away. XSLT - used by 11% of all podcast RSS feeds out there - turns the gobbledegook of an RSS feed into a decent viewable “web page”, with the result that some podcasters have been just sharing the RSS feed, given it looks fine to play the show from (here’s an example). However, XSLT is going away (and is already disappearing from development versions of some browsers).

• The folks at AntennaPod were at FOSDEM, the open-source conference in Belgium.

Podcast News - with Airwave

New, on Airwave: The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe - a weekly science podcast discussing the latest science news, critical thinking, bad science, conspiracies and controversies.

In ALFsplaining Ben Baker and John Matthews investigate another edition of the 1980s sitcom with their usual British sideways look… you know the one. In today’s episode, ALF thinks he’s seen Elvis Presley and will stop at nothing to prove it.

In Surviving Trump, 'Rigging the Election Rules’ examines how the podcast claims election infrastructure is rewritten to preserve minority rule: gerrymandering, census manipulation, “election integrity” laws, attacks on the Voting Rights Act, threats against election officials, centralized certification power, and voter intimidation backed by federal force. The show maps how Trump’s second-term administration and Project 2025 turn white supremacist and white Christian nationalist fear into law and bureaucracy.

Cared For is a show from Good Get and PRX about how we care for ourselves and our communities, and how we can, just maybe, create a world where it’s easier to do both. Topics include the big stuff—like aging and grief—and the stuff that can feel big when we try to tackle it on our own, like finally getting to that doctor’s appointment. Hosted by nurse, ex-nun, and comedian Kelli Dunham.