French podcast publishers work together; Duolingo make a dual French/English podcast

• In France, GESTE, a group of online publishers, has set up a 'Distribution of Podcasts’ working group, to “put in place the necessary agreements with rights holders (producers, journalists, dramatists, music etc)” and “to define best practice (indexing of RSS feeds, editorial presentation, access to statistics, respect for the integrity of the content etc)”.

  
  This link is no longer available, as at Aug 14 2023

• Duolingo launch today what the company claims is the first of its kind: the Duolingo French Podcast, a dual podcast in French and English, aimed to help people understand French using compelling stories. It’s presented by Ngofeen Mputubwele​, a journalist, lawyer, and podcast producer based in New York City.

• Malcolm Gladwell and Jacob Weisberg’s Pushkin Industries have released their latest podcast. Making a Killing is a new premium podcast on Luminary this week.

• Conviction, a new book by Denise Mina, “stars a strong female protagonist who is obsessed by true crime podcasts and decides, one day, to investigate one of the unsolved crimes herself.” It gets a positive review in the WaPo.

• One of the benefits of the open technical infrastructure of real podcasts: you can use the app you want, rather than a publisher’s app that could have all kinds of other code in it. Like the app from Spanish football league La Liga, which listened to your microphone and worked out your location to discover bars that were using a pirated video stream.

• Are host-read ads best? Or can you use a pre-produced spot ad instead? The Sonic Truth covers data from Megaphone’s Ken Lagana in this episode; as he says in an accompanying article:

  Some campaigns may require the power of an influencer just laying out the reasons why they love a product; others may be better suited to a pre-produced spot with an orchestral swell halfway through the ad. Some campaigns may even require both.

• Our Editor spoke at Podcast Day last week with three podcasts that everyone can learn from. Here’s what he said, in podcast form.

  
  This link is no longer available, as at Aug 14 2023

• Australia’s APRA MCOS offers a special podcasting music licence. Is it, at last, a way of licensing music for podcasts? We wrote an article on that.

• Spotifywatch: your Editor has now been given the new interface which gives parity for music and podcasts.

  • Sean Howard points out that the ability to advertise to podcast listeners, which we reported on yesterday, is only available to large, corporate, advertisers.
  • Here’s Gustav Söderström, the Chief R&D Officer, giving a 40-minute presentation on the company’s history.

Podcasts

CNN Films have launched Apollo 11: Beyond The Moon, a podcast comemmorating the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar mission. Presented by Brian Stelter, it contains new interviews with astronauts and scientists, and accompanies the documentary feature Apollo 11, which is broadcast next week. (WarnerMedia Podcast Network / knit)

New episodes of the true crime podcast The Lady Vanishes have, themselves, vanished: after 2.5m downloads, the podcast is following up new leads. (7NEWS / Acast)

The Football History Dude looks at the 100 years of the NFL. Arnie Chapman is the 'dude’ - he’s currently interviewing Upton Bell, the son of the Philadelphia Eagles founder. (Powerpress)

This is Uncomfortable is a new weekly podcast about life in your 20’s and 30’s, and how money messes with it. Hosted by Reema Khrais, it digs into the unanticipated ways money affects relationships, shapes identities, and often defines what it means to be an adult. (Marketplace/APM)

Spectacular Failures launches today: a ten episode season of the most spectacular business failures of all time, and what could have been done to avoid them. The first episode focuses on Heritage USA, a Christian-themed theme park. (APM / Carlson School of Management)