Podcasts receive premieres at 2021 Tribeca Festival

• Guardians of the River is to be premiered at the 2021 Tribeca Festival. The podcast, from House of Pods, is a series about whether it’s possible to protect some of the most remote and wild places on the planet - like the view above of the Okavango Delta in Botswana, Africa. The Festival was founded by Robert De Niro, Jane Rosenthal, and Craig Hatkoff in 2001; see Podcast News, below, for another podcast from the festival.

• After an explosive article on Peter Vincer on Friday from The Verge, an anonymous article has appeared in The Hype Magazine, breathlessly praising the Notorious CEO. On Twitter, Vincer has said of The Verge piece: “I like to have fun. And I certainly border inappropriate often. The rest is nonsense.”

• A columnist for Fast Company says: It’s not just you—the Apple podcast app is a disaster. “I truly cannot remember any other instance when an update made an app’s user experience this incomprehensibly terrible,” says Joe Berkowitz.

  
  Sep 4 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

• CleanPod is, apparently, a service that will remove the swearing from podcasts. They’re running a survey on how it might work.

• NPR has won its first-ever Pulitzer Prize for journalism. The winner, No Compromise, was an investigative podcast about gun rights activists.

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• NPR’s podcast revenue is likely to be up at least 30% this financial year, according to the COO of National Public Media, Bryan Moffet. The growth is attributed to advertising innovation.

• Spotify is close to getting Call Her Daddy as an exclusive for $20m, says the Wall Street Journal.

• In Le Pod, an article about the emergence of podcasting in Africa. It’s exploding in East Africa, says the piece in French: but West African growth is slow.

• Digiday report on the growing number of internal podcasts for businesses.

The Tech Stuff is below

Hints and tips

• Andrew Davies writes about podcast recommendation newsletters, and how they improve discoverability of new shows.

Podcast News

Project ARI is launched today - an original podcast for the Australian government’s Stop It At The Start campaign. The podcast aims to positively influence young people around acceptable behaviour and respectful relationships.

Un(re)solved also got a premiere at the Tribeca Festival. From FRONTLINE, it looks at why the US Department of Justice is investigating over 150 unsolved civil rights-era killings.

Gimlet’s Chompers, a podcast to help kids clean their teeth, is to become a Spotify exclusive on July 1.
Sep 4 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

Unraveled: the stalker’s web launches this week, tracking a stalker believed to have terrorised over 50 victims across more than a dozen US states.

Bon Appétit: Healthyish is a mini series from Condé Nast’s Bon Appétit, focused on providing healthy and delicious solutions to the seemingly supernatural battle against eating healthy. Hosted by Amanda Shapiro, it launches on Thursday.

Brain Cigar is a new podcast from comedy writers Peter Baynham and Jeremy Simmonds. It describes itself as “an essential new podcast focused on world events, TV shows, movies, music, books and products that Peter and Jez remember very clearly, even if you don’t”.

The Tech Stuff - with RSS․com

The podcast:guid tag has been finalised. This is a simple method for a webscale ID for every podcast; particularly useful for being able to automatically link to podcasts on different players and devices. Podnews supports it in our RSS feed.

Why’s it important? It’s difficult, if not impossible, to link to the same podcast on more than one directory. Our podcast pages, like this for Podland, for example, have a number of “listen elsewhere” links. For Podland, our own ID is 5hv2; Apple’s is 1542481043, Spotify’s is 1CZFAsED5FksKmNALhEs2R, Google’s is the slightly unweildy aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkc-y5idXp6c3Byb3V0LmNv-bS8xNTM4Nzc5LnJzcw==, Luminary’s is 645fc2b1-8b76-48e9-9c83-de8a6836b002; Podcast Index’s is 1333070, iHeart’s is 76114027 and so on.

Not every podcast is in Apple Podcasts, of course, and shows can be ejected from the platform for something as innocuous as a photo of an iPhone in artwork. RSS feeds, of course, change if you change podcast host. The only way we’ve found to match Spotify IDs is to search podcasts for the same title and the same publisher name: which doesn’t always work. Google ones are made from the RSS feed’s address, so will change when that changes.

On the other hand a podcast:guid is fixed, and stays with a podcast for life. As a method of referring to a podcast - or, at least, a method of matching podcasts - it’s ideal, and unambiguous. Unlike any of the above, too, it isn’t owned by anyone.

We’d heartily recommend that podcast hosts implement podcast:guid; and would very much appreciate support for it in major directories. It would make smart-link services like ours, Plink, Podfollow and others work better; and result in more traffic to your app.

In other news:

We’ve added links to Podverse, a Podcasting 2.0 app, in newly-built podcast pages. Podland is, as ever, a good example.
• Podnews’s podcast now correctly supports the podcast:transcript tag, after, cough, reading the spec. We have also tweaked our use of the podcast:alternateEnclosure tag after, oh, something similar. (We added a 32kbps Opus version last week, a version we’d like to make smaller still).
• BlueWire’s switch to Megaphone is highlighted in our 'podcast host changes’ page this week. Otherwise, Libsyn lost most shows; Omny Studio gained most.