Happy New Year - update this bit in your podcast feed

• Happy New Year! Take a note to update your podcast feed’s copyright notice to say “2026” rather than “2025” when you next publish an episode. (You don’t have to use a date, but if it’s there, you probably want it to be correct, and in our experience, most people forget it’s there in the first place.)

• In November, Third Coast, which organises a podcast festival and competition, announced that it had transitioned to being a voluntary organisation, after financial pressure. It sent out an update yesterday, confirming that the competition will take place in 2026, and that the archive will be maintained.

• As you might expect, Podnews can’t afford a Getty account for images. Nor, it seems, can Spotify - which published an episode of The Louis Theroux Podcast with a watermarked image from the Getty Images website. Spotify has since found the $375 for the picture they wanted. The company made US $1.5bn profit in Q3/25 alone.

• USC Annenberg’s Inclusion Initiative has published a report into the movie industry. Only nine of the 100 highest-grossing films at the 2025 US domestic box office were directed by women - a “complete reversal of any progress”, the report says. However, 2025's 8.1% of women directors is above the average of the last twenty years. In November, a report described podcasting’s diversity as “woeful” - with 64% of popular podcasts being hosted by men.

• In a paid article, Ashley Carman highlights this year’s winners and losers in podcasting (and music). The winners? Podcast production companies, Netflix, YouTube. The losers? Podcast ad networks, Apple Podcasts and the “manosphere”. You’ll have to read it to find out why.

• The Week, a UK magazine, publishes the best podcasts of 2025, listed by genre. (Weirdly, the “daily podcast news” genre seems missing). Also, John McDermott gives his best podcasts of the year. The weekly podcast news genre is definitely in his list.

• Stephen Hallgren, CTO at Bumper and former CTO at Simplecast, writes Staying Afloat in the Rising Sea of AI Content, discussing the rise of AI slop generation companies last year.

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What’s next: 2026 in podcasting

Laura Burkhauser, Descript:

We are in for an authenticity crisis in 2026. Podcasts came out as this raw, authentic, pared back, alternative media. We’re going to keep feeling tension as the medium transforms: as it becomes more popular, more lucrative, and as technology changes.

I’ve started to see a trend of fake podcasts on TikTok. That’s only going to get worse and more nefarious. And I think it will eventually explode in two directions. I think on one hand, people will become savvy to the number of fake podcasts floating around to disguise ads and start looking for ways to verify personal authenticity and genuine expertise.

But I also think next year we’re going to start to see a rise of synthetic creators - a creator who doesn’t want to be on camera, who creates a synthetic creator persona and deeply invests in it. This is not slop in the traditional sense. Slop is a form of content arbitrage where the cost to create is so cheap that even if the return on that content is low, it’s still more than the cost that it took to make it. It existed before AI, but AI will make it worse. I’m not talking about slop here because I think each artifact of these “fake creators” will be lovingly crafted and created - just also completely fake. And some will be created purely and entirely to sell products.

I think it’s important not to see this all as bleak. I think we’ll see brand new genres emerge next year that blend authentic storytelling with synthetic media in ways that are surprising, creative, and even fun.

Those are some of the things I’m looking forward to and dreading a bit about 2026. I think it’ll be another really interesting year for the podcast industry, which will only continue to grow in its influence and its importance.

• Hear more in the Podnews Weekly Review

Podcasts in the wild

• Spotted in Brooklyn NY, USA, by Podnews reader Arielle (“by my favorite taco spot in Gowanus”), a hand-drawn ad for this science fiction podcast (we assume, looking at the lovely artwork). Except, the real artwork for The Old Man and the Three is very different, and features Cam Johnson as the host. And it’s not science fiction, it’s something to do with the NBA, and yes I suppose on second look it’s clearly a basketball on the artwork. Anyway, on looking at Google Maps, it seems this ad has been there since Nov 2024 and probably earlier since JJ Redick did their last show in July 2024 (indeed, it has a date of 2023 on it), but even then, the show appears to have never used this artwork and… anyway, we’re overthinking it aren’t we? Tacos. Yum.