Reuters Institute publish smart speaker report

• The Reuters Institute have published a smart speaker report focusing on news consumption - and many listeners want shorter news bulletins, the study suggests. It also discovers that podcasts aren’t used by many owners. (Want just two minutes of podcasting news?)

• NPR has announced their Student Podcast Challenge. Students and teachers participating in NPR’s Student Podcast Challenge can take a topic, a lesson, or a unit they’re learning about, and turn it into a podcast between three and 12 minutes long. Winning podcasts will be featured on NPR’s Morning Edition and All Things Considered.

• The Australian Podcast Awards have announced a partnership with Stitcher, who are sponsoring the Investigative Journalism & True Crime podcast category. Earlybird entries are now open, and podcast producers have until 14 February 2019 to enter their podcasts.

• Airborne, a new podcast and branded audio agency, launches in the Netherlands. A part of creative digital agency Born05, the team produced the award-winning podcast The Journey for KLM, which has achieved over 350,000 plays in five months on the inflight entertainment system of the aircraft.

• DiscoverPods have announced their podcast awards finalists.

• NPR interviewer Terry Gross was interviewed in the New York Times and offers a number of tips on how to have better conversations.

• NHPR - New Hampshire Public Radio - is making a bet that on-demand is the future of radio, according to the Concord Monitor, but the station says there are question-marks about funding. More than 10% of the station’s staff are now focusing on podcasting.

• TechCrunch publishes an excellent reading list for podcasting.

• The ABC’s Kellie Riordan posts six takeaways about podcasting in 2018 in her weekly newsletter.

• What’s behind Spotify and Pandora’s push to podcasts? Profits, says Marketwatch.

Data and statistics

• ESPN Podcasts report that their downloads, and unique listeners, are up by 31% year-on-year.

• RAIN does some interesting maths on the latest Podtrac stats, showing data per show. An interesting way to look at the data.

• We’ve updated our how to understand podcast stats page. One of the things we’ve added is a glimpse at the demographic information that Spotify provides podcasters.

Technology

• Røde has announced their RØDEcaster Pro Podcast Production Studio, a new mixer with some ideal features for podcasters. Features include Bluetooth (for flawless telephone calls using your mobile); hotkeys; and enough inputs and headphone outputs for four people. This EFTM preview article makes it look quite desirable.

  
  Aug 7 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

• Speechkit is a service using text-to-speech technology to allow news articles to be turned to speech (or even a podcast) as soon as they’re published.

• Krisp may have applications for podcasting: it’s a 'virtual microphone’ that blocks background noise from your phone calls, so nobody else need know you’re calling from the coffee shop/kindergarten/local bar.

• PodcastRE is a database archiving podcast culture; and is the subject of this article in historians.org.

Podcasts

The Otago Daily Times reports on the Wild Dunedin Podcast, which has won an award as “a perfect example of New Zealand podcast storytelling”.
Andrew Buckwalter has a (very) mobile podcast studio - in a vintage camper van. Nashville Untold is recorded in a modified 1961 Scottsman camper known as The Rambler. Here’s what he learnt when building it.

How do we fix it? is a podcast in search of positive solutions. Richard Davies, one of the hosts, posted optimistically on LinkedIn that: “The flowering of podcasts is a joy to behold. In the language of gardening, we are hardy perennials, here to stay.”

Opinion

• No, people aren’t skipping your podcast ads, says Kristofor Lawson.

  It was suggested [last week] that podcast advertising doesn’t work because a large majority of the listeners are skipping over the ads. But the truth is — that’s categorically false

• How do you make a better podcast? David Hooper reckons it’s got something to do with fewer words:

  Something I notice a lot of podcasters do is confuse “bulk” with value. In other words, they think a long episode provides more value to a listener than a short episode.

• BuzzSprout think they can help you choose a name for your podcast.

  Choosing the right name for your podcast can be intimidating. You want it to perfectly describe what your podcast is about but in a way that is fun and will catch people’s attention.

Daily updates in your ears: find Podnews in your Amazon Alexa’s news briefing section (Alexa app > menu > settings > flash briefing), or in Google’s news services (Google Home app > profile > settings > services > news). Or, in your podcast app.