Welcome to Issue Eighty-Nine, published September 27, 2016.

Panoply opens a London office. The Slate Group’s audio arm announced yesterday that it was expanding into the good ol’ United Kingdom. Specifically, the company is opening a new production office in London that will “facilitate closer collaboration with UK-based audio talent.” Ryan Dilley, a BBC veteran, has been hired to lead the new operation.

Here’s the most straightforward way to think about this: Panoply intends to do in the UK whatever it does here, including original and partner programming, the cultivation of a UK-based network of talent, and the recruitment/aggregation of local podcasts into its network.

This move also puts Panoply in a good position to do two things: (1) grow a bigger advertising presence that would allow them to monetize UK listeners on their existing American shows — up until this point, it’s basically money that’s been left on the table — and (2) challenge UK-native digital audio companies that have spent the past few years making in-roads into the more lucrative US market, like Audioboom and Acast.

Andy Bowers, Panoply’s Chief Content Officer (and my old boss, by the way), told me that UK ad sales isn’t the primary motivation for this expansion. “This is about talent,” he wrote, adding that they have already been engaged with targeted UK-only ad sales using their new Megaphone platform. I was also told to expect Panoply’s first slate of UK programming to roll out early next year.

Speaking of which, I should consider opening up a Euro-Hot Pod bureau. You should consider supporting Hot Pod, so I can get started on doing just that :P.

Keep an eye on this: Nielsen is working on a Software Development Kit (SDK) that will, among other things, cater to the measurement of podcasts, according to a report by Radio Ink. They’ve been experimenting the kits with ESPN, and the company is “working towards having a syndicated service out there in the marketplace sometime in 2017.”

An SDK-approach is one of a few ways to deal with the industry’s measurement gap. But Nielsen will face similar political problems of adoption that plague companies like Podtrac — although it is, certainly, a neutral third party. For what it’s worth, I’ve heard skepticism over an SDK-approach from a number of execs in the space, so we’ll see where this goes.

Midroll’s Live Intent. The end of October will see the inaugural NowHearThis festival in Southern California, which will mark into Midroll’s first foray into a Lollapalooza-style multi-partner live programming. NowHearThis is set to feature shows from both within the Midroll ecosystem — that is, its Earwolf network and its universe of third party ad sales clients — and without, boasting shows like Radiotopia’s Criminal and NPR’s How I Built This on the lineup. (Quick aside: I’m told that most of these external partners are paid an upfront fee for participation. No revenue shares are involved.)

Midroll is not the first podcast company to organize such an event. Indeed, this past weekend saw the LA Podcast Festival, and the Vulture Festival this past May also included a solid block of live podcast tapings. But NowHearThis is notable in how it reflects Midroll’s expanding ambitions in diversifying its revenue base. When the company announced Lex Friedman as its new Chief Revenue Officer earlier this month, an explicit mention of a deeper focus on live events in the press release caught my eye.

“We don’t expect that, in the near term, live events will be as big as ads or subscription,” Friedman said when we spoke over the phone yesterday. “But it’s another way for us to diversify, and it’s the closest thing we have to kick off a network effect.” Friedman tells me that a festival like NowHearThis not only brings in ticket sales and sponsorship revenue, but the live tapings create additional material that can be served in Howl, the company’s premium subscription play. (Speaking of sponsorship: Casper and Mack Weldon, both veteran podcast buyers, are sponsoring the festival, with live show ad-integrations that will go beyond on-stage host-reads. More sponsors are expected to be announced soon.)

Midroll intends to produce more live shows of individual Earwolf podcasts in 2017, and Friedman hopes to collaborate with his third-party ad sales clients on live events as well. It’s an ambitious vision, one that I assume is backed by a long EW Scripps runway.

“We’re building a media empire, Nick,” he said, before bursting into terrifying laughter.

There’s been a misunderstanding, asserted Art19 co-founder Sean Carr when we spoke over the phone last week. He tells me that too many people have been conflating dynamic ad insertion technology with an automatic flood of programmatic radio-style prerecorded ads. One doesn’t necessarily leads to the other, he argues, pointing out that much of the current production conventions — the very same ones that contribute to the medium’s identity of “intimacy” — doesn’t actually have to change. “Most host-read ads are recorded separately from the conversation anyway, and edited in after the fact” he added.

For the record, I have come to agree with Carr’s position. (That view has been fleshed out across previous Hot Pods.) But I’d say that the anxiety that drives this conflation remains very real, and given that Carr felt the need to reach out on this suggests it remains top-of-mind among many emotionally invested the space. There is now, after all, very little that would structurally prevent the inflow of eardrum-assaulting radio-style ads — a state of affairs that could well spoil the medium’s identity for listeners trying it out for the first time.

“That anxiety will probably go away with better data,” Carr replied. I’m inclined to agree with this as well, though there will always be a gap between where we are right now and a place where we’re have that abundance of appropriate, agreed-upon data. Not for nothing, but transition periods almost always suck — whether we acknowledge that or not.

Anyway, Carr also tells me that his team is working on some research that he hopes will increase advertiser confidence. Watch out for them.

Some notes on the border between publishers and podcasts. Last week saw news that Actuality, the audio collaboration between Quartz and APM’s Marketplace, is coming to a close. The stories-about-business show first launched last summer and ran for two seasons. According to a joint blog post, the podcast was cancelled due to a lack of interest. “We’d rather hit pause now and move on to other experiments,” wrote Quartz editor-in-chief Kevin Delaney and Marketplace VP/Executive Producer Deborah Clark. The podcast averaged 100,000 monthly downloads across its last three months.

“Our initial expectations were to experiment in an important digital medium where Quartz didn’t have much experience. After two seasons, we learned a great deal about what works and what doesn’t in podcasting,” Delaney told me over email last week. He added: “I doubt this will be the last podcast product that Quartz develops.”

APM, for their part, will continue their efforts in these cross-platform partnerships. “Though not all our new podcasts at either Marketplace or APM overall will be in partnership with others, I think many will,” Clark told me. “Our guiding principle is how do we serve our audience better and sometimes that’s best done with other strong partners.”

Examples include: Codebreaker, its collaboration with Business Insider which will drop its second season later this fall, and Historically Black, which is a collaboration between the Washington Post and APM Reports (the organization’s documentary unit).

As one media company shelves its audio ambitions (for now), another finds its runway.

Bloomberg Media, the business news behemoth, has found some joy in its on-demand audio operations over its past year of experimentations. Michael Shane, a Bloomberg operative who was recently promoted to the position of Global Head of Digital Innovation, told me last week that the company’s young podcast arm is now a seven figure business.

Bloomberg’s on-demand audio offerings are chiefly made up of subject-specific shows built around key reporters in the newsroom. Examples include, but are not limited to: Odd Lots(finance, featuring Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway), Material World (retail broadly speaking, featuring Jenny Kaplan and Lindsey Rupp), and Game Plan (the workplace, featuring Rebecca Greenfield and Francesca Levy). The company is adding a tech podcast to its network next month, and is on the hunt for a San Francisco-based producer to handle duties on that show. (It’s worth noting that, shockingly, the team has only been composed of four producers up to this point. “It’s a lean team,” Shane said. “Which is great, because we like to do things profitably around here.”)

Shane’s team is also investigating potential collaborations with the company’s long-running 24-hour broadcast radio division. The most prominent example of this is Bloomberg Surveillance, a typically 3-hour broadcast program that is being repackaged as highlights to serve podcast listeners. “It would be crazy of us to build a digital audio strategy that didn’t involve Bloomberg Radio,” Shane said. He also noted that Surveillance currently hits six figure audiences per episode, and that the show’s ad inventory has been sold out through 2017, with Bank of America as the sponsor.

When I asked about CPMs, Shane informs me that company sells at premium rates across all platforms — and that audio, certainly, is no exception. He also did pontificate, briefly, on the industry’s expectations of fallings CPMs as the basic ad formats get commoditized over the long run. “I spend a lot of time wondering, ‘What’s next?’ ‘What can Bloomberg offer [advertisers] around digital audio that’s more than an ad read?’” Shane said.

“I heard someone say once that the business model for podcasts is to be beloved,” he continued. “As long as we can keep being audience-first and not squander that goodwill, this can be a great business for us over the long term.”

A Sneak Peek at RadioPublic. Jake Shapiro and the RadioPublic team have been keeping busy. After the crew of PRX alums announced their new venture earlier this summer, they’ve been hard at work on the listening app that will mark their first foray into product market. Shapiro was kind enough to invite me to take a look at a very basic prototype of the app. Some notes from our conversation:

• The team intends to preserve and advance the medium’s open nature; which is to say, it will eschew a YouTube or Spotify-style closed ecosystem. “We just don’t think that’s the right way to do things,” Shapiro said, adding that the app’s experience will be built on top of open RSS feeds while being focused on serving listeners with a much better user experience than what exists now. That user experience is driven by a goal of “helping listeners make a more informed choice,” as Shapiro puts it.

• While those ideas were understandable in the abstract, I had trouble visualizing the significance of the product even with the prototype in front of me. Shapiro provided an analogy to Flipboard, the social magazine app that, in many ways, serves as a user-friendly portal through which mobile users could manage their experience navigating the unruly web while respecting its open quality.

• When I asked Shapiro about publisher outreach, he told me that, while the app is being built to provide value autonomously from any required publisher participation, the rise of dynamic ad insertion technology across an emerging class of hosting platforms necessitates some “technical handshakes” in order for both parties to properly benefit from the experience. Publishers are encouraged to get in touch.

Meanwhile on the West Coast, the small team known as Tiny Garage Labs — founded by Planet Money alum Steve Henn along with former longtime Netflix operatives Steve McLendon and John Ciancutti — has been kicking up some noise as well. Last Thursday, Henn published a semi-manifesto and call-for-collaborators on Medium, and the team also scored a chunky Nieman Lab mini-profile that fleshes out their general product direction with 60dB, Tiny Garage Labs’ first market offering.

Here’s my read in a nutshell: it would be a mistake, in my opinion, to lump 60dB in with either your basic podcatcher play or a “Netflix for Audio”-minded play like Midroll’s Howl (in this case, it is prudent to not read too much into the team’s Netflix lineage). Rather, given Tiny Garage Lab’s outsized focus on short-form audio — a perspective that views individual segments as the atomic unit of content, as opposed to the episodic paradigm — 60dB would best be categorized against something like the Amazon Echo’s Flash Briefing experiments; which is to say, it is a wholly new, and entirely separate, product category.

ESPN Audio’s 30 for 30 team. Senior producer Jody Avirgan has announced the team that will take on the brand’s well-loved 30 for 30 adaptation into audio. They are: Rose Eveleth, of Flash Forward; Julia Henderson, formerly of WNYC’s Studio 360; Andrew Mambo, formerly of WNYC’s great Radio Rookies project; Katie McAuliffe, formerly of WNPR and a former ESPN music assistant; and Marcus Anderson, formerly of who comes in without a radio background (which is fantastic, IMHO).

Another quick ESPN-related tidbit, for those interested: according to an Awful Announcing blog post, “FiveThirtyEight podcasts across the board were downloaded over 7.8 million times in August alone, a 422 percent increase from February.”

Bites:

• WNYC has had a busy week: it rolled out The United States of Anxiety, their second collaboration with The Nation (the first being the excellent There Goes the Neighborhood). The station also welcomed the second season of 2 Dope Queens. I’m told season one drew “millions of listens.”

• Wondery CEO Hernan Lopez writes in to let me know that the network expects to hit 8 million downloads by the end of the month. The network is currently spread across 14 shows, with two original shows. They are hosted on the Art19 platform.

• Radiotopia recruits The West Wing Weekly. The addition is said to allow the collective to “explore a new content direction, and evolve as a network.” (PRX)

• Speaking of PRX, the company announced a new initiative last week called “Project Catapult,” where it will work with five chosen stations over a 20-week program to develop a sustainable local podcast strategy. (Current)

• Have you checked out Audible’s Channels recently? The lineup now features what appears to be several new additions. Note, also, how the presentation flattens different content types, from original shows to comedy to article readouts. (Audible)

• Speaking of article readouts, iTunes apparently is getting ready to promote a similar type of articles-read-aloud content. This is probably a nothingburger in terms of the larger questions of what this means for the podcast industry, a good chunk of which are crossing their fingers for access to their listening data, but hey, if you’re into Apple Kremlinology, this is a data point just for you. (TechCrunch)

• An adapted version of the Politico Playbook, the political news website’s flagship newsletter, is now being distributed in audio form over the Amazon Echo’s Alexa platform. The audio version adopts the “90 second flash briefing” model, and drops daily starting yesterday. (Washingtonian)

• Two reads for the public radio-oriented: “Great journalism alone won’t guarantee public radio’s survival” (Current) and “This American Fight” (Fast Company)

From Emile Klein, artist and friend of the show:

A huddled mass of NY’s Tinder-boys and the world at large just witnessed the rebirth of Andrea’s miracle machine, Why Oh Why. In an act of good sportspersonship, the Uffizi threw out Botticelli’s Venus. Andrea’s stone soup comes in equal parts love pangs, smarts, and unnerving humor. What’s true? These stupid emotions.

Hey hey you you have you thought about supporting Hot Pod? Donate and become a member. Hot Pod Members fuels the reporting in this newsletter, and it keeps the lights on in my apartment! Please keep my lights on. Winter is coming.

Another Public-Facing Podcast Ranker. It’s troublesome, though if you’re a podcast publisher you best pay close attention nonetheless. This one’s going to be long, so either skip it or strap in.

Here’s the deal: Podtrac, the decade-old podcast measurement (and until its recent restructure, advertising) company, announced a new podcast industry ranker yesterday, one that aspires to display the top twenty podcasts in the industry based on monthly downloads. This is the second of such public-facing rankings that the company has released in recent months; in May, Podtrac pumped out a chart that ranked podcast publishers against each other based on network-wide monthly downloads.

That initial ranker suffered from two glaring flaws: firstly, it simply can’t be considered adequately representative of the podcast industry due to its incomplete sampling (the original report purports to cover of “90 percent of the top podcasts”), and secondly, there exists a general lack of transparency around the ranker’s sampling methodology (said “top podcasts” category isn’t clearly defined, and it isn’t clear who is and isn’t included). The podcast publisher ranker’s initial May 2016 sample did not include publishers like Panoply, Gimlet, Earwolf, The Ringer, and Wondery — which is not to say that they would show up in the top ten if they were included, mind you, I’m just making a point about representation — and many of them, to this writing, remain excluded.

This new show ranker, which was reportedly assembled due to advertiser demand, suffers from those same fundamental issues, with some added complexities that further interrupt the ranker’s capacity to serve as a trustworthy conveyor of value in the podcast industry.

Let’s break this down:

(1) Yesterday’s new chart ranks individual podcasts based on “Unique Monthly Audience” (as determined by Podtrac’s internal measurement rules), but the chart itself does not explicitly display actual download numbers. I view this as an incredibly odd — and even counter-productive — choice. The omission strips the chart of important granular analytical value, and patrons of the chart are placed in a position where they wouldn’t even be able to, say, discern the scale of the difference between two consecutively-ranked podcasts, which can go a long way in properly conveying the shape and form of the competitive landscape.

Interestingly enough Velvet Beard, Podtrac’s VP of Podcast Analytics, tells me that this omission came out of a compromise with certain publishers who are reticent to disclose their show numbers.

(2) That reticence is further reflected in the eighth ranking on the new chart, which awkwardly reads: “Publisher declined to list show.” This state of affairs comes out from a crucial distinction between the two Podtrac rankers: while the original podcast publisher ranker lists publishers that explicitly measure their podcasts with Podtrac (an arrangement understood by Podtrac as permission for inclusion into their ranker), this new show-oriented ranker does not require explicit publisher participation in the company’s measurement services for inclusion.

It was explained to me that part of the ranker’s methodology involves some internal modeling that doesn’t actually require publishers to opt into their measurement system for download size assessment.  Which, you know, the more I think about it, is a choice that would creep me out if I was a publisher, because not only are we left with a situation where an external body has taken upon itself to tell the story of my audience for me — and worse, without my explicit acknowledgment and consent — it also happens to be a story based on their terms, the foundations of which may well be different from my own. And that means something in an industry that lacks a universally standardized and enforced measurement paradigm.

That mystery eighth podcast (whose identity was included in the initial press release sent to me, and was scrubbed in a follow-up version after I attempted to verify) isn’t the only show that was included in the ranker without given permission; the Joe Rogan Experience, which came in on the eleventh slot, appears to be a non-participant as well.

(3) Beard tells me that the company has been consistently trying to reach out to publishers to get them involved with the ranker. “We send out emails, but not everybody writes us back,” she said.

I suppose there are strong strategic reasons why some publishers would not want to get involved in Podtrac’s ranking system. To begin with, you have the table stakes concern that a publisher who chooses to be listed would be ceding its monopoly over how it tells the story of its own downloads. Which would be fine for some… and less so for others, particularly those who make it a practice of fluffing their numbers, which is a very real problem in this industry that lacks mature measurement standards and a strong, independent third-party that can serve as a check against bad practices.

But even for those whose goods are sound, there is simply too much of a perceived risk to anoint Podtrac as that third-party due to the company’s current relationship with Authentic, its ad sales arm that was spun off as a sister company earlier this summer. The two companies still share leadership and infrastructure, which presents a strong disincentive for some publishers who would be understandably uneasy ceding parts of their narrative to company that’s structurally connected to a potential competitor. The golden rule applies: it’s not the actual conflicts of interest, it is the perception of potential conflicts of interest that matters.

For what it’s worth, Beard tells me that the company’s long-term hope is to effectively decouple Podtrac from Authentic to mitigate such concerns. However, she also notes that the team has to first figure out how to make its business — which currently doesn’t make any money off these rankings— financially independent before any significant decoupling can happen.

* * *

Look, Podtrac’s industry rankers need a lot of work before they can be considered a genuine representation of the emerging podcast industry, and for what it’s worth, I do think the Podtrac team is operating with civil intent. (And to some extent, I really do hope they pull it off.)

But let’s be real here. In a medium whose defining problem is its lack of measurability — which therefore generates advertising environment starved for every little bit of information — Podtrac’s good-enough rankers are bound to gain some traction among advertisers either way.

And it looks like things may be panning out in that direction: ahead of the IAB Podcast Upfronts a few weeks ago, I was speaking with Jason Hoch, the Chief Content Officer of HowStuffWorks, which uses Podtrac for analytics verification and is listed on the industry ranker, and he noted that the original ranker drew a tremendous amount of new advertising attention to his network. “The in-bounds we got from that were amazing,” he told me.

So I’ll say this: it appears increasingly imperative that podcast publishers start engaging with Podtrac in order to win back their audience narrative (and the narrative of the industry). I’m not the biggest fan of how Podtrac has gone about doing things — their lack of methodological transparency remains troubling, and the whole including podcasts without explicit permission thing feels kinda dirty — but they are, regardless, materially contributing to the publisher-advertising relationship.

Alternatively, publishers could always, oh I don’t know, develop their own data-driven public counter-narratives. That’ll be cool too.

And in case you were still interested: according to Podtrac, the top three podcasts in August 2016 are, in downward order, This American Life, Radiolab, and Stuff You Should Know.

A Leadership Change at NPR One. The public radio mothership’s buzzy listening app, NPR One, is losing Sara Sarasohn, its managing editor, who is leaving the organization after 24 years of service.

Tamar Charney will reportedly step in as interim editorial lead. Charney was hired back in January to serve as the app’s “local editorial lead,” a role that involves connecting the app with local public radio stations across the country. While she will take over many of Sarasohn’s duties, she will continue focusing on her original responsibilities as well. The team remains rounded out by content programmer Viet Le, along with an NPR One-specific product team led by product manager Tejas Mistry and content strategist/analytics manager Nick DePrey.

Sarasohn, who has worked multiple positions on All Things Considered and the NPR Arts Desk throughout her lengthy career, is leaving public media for a position at a Silicon Valley startup, and though she declined to provide specifics, she noted that her new gig isn’t involved in the audio world.

An internal staff note announcing Sarasohn’s departure indicates that she leaves NPR One in a strong position. According to the memo, “NPR One’s audience reaches record highs with each new month, more than 80 stations are contributing content to it, and the typical listener uses the app up to 12 times per month.”

It also noted that the organization will relay more information about the app’s future in the coming days.

The NPR One app — which flirts with aspirations of being “the Netflix for Podcasts” and is marketed as “the Pandora of Podcasts” — is reportedly considered to be “the most exciting thing to have happened at NPR in years.” I’m broadly a fan of it myself, but I do struggle to view the app itself as somehow central to NPR’s digital future. The ecosystem of content and technology that’s being built beneath the app, however, is another story. (Side note: between you and me, my main consumption modality with public radio nowadays is my Amazon Echo, which has come dangerously close to being my only source of verbal interaction on most days.)

Sarasohn’s last day is September 25.

Relevant — In what is probably a yuge coincidence, news of Sarasohn’s departure comes about a week after NPR announced that it was picking DC-based WAMU’s “The Big Listen,” a broadcast about podcasts, for national distribution. Hosted by Lauren Ober, the show is one of several audio  programs currently floating about podcastland that seeks to alleviate the medium’s discoverability problem through linear, performative curation. That list includes the CBC’s Podcast Playlist and Gimlet’s Sampler.

Tangentially relevant — WNYC Studios now has a third VP of On-Demand Content: Tony Phillips, a former BBC veteran of 27 years. (My whole life, basically.) His most recent role at the British radio mothership was “Editor, Commissioner, and Producer.” Phillips will expand the leadership layer, which also includes Paula Szuchman and Emily Botein, into a trifecta.

In other news, mid-October would mark WNYC Studio’s first full year of operation.

Cable Pods. CNN, the cable news heavyweight and source of all my anxieties, is pushing deeper into podcasts with the announcement of two new podcasts:

(1) “The Daily DC,” a daily morning political news digest show featuring CNN political director David Chalian; and

(2) “Party People,” described as a “look at the 2016 race from a rightward perspective.” The show is hosted by two CNN contributors, Republican communications strategist Kevin Madden and The Federalist editor Mary Katharine Ham.

Both shows begin their runs today.

These additions will complement “The Axe Files,” the (quite excellent) David Axelrod interview show that has thus far been the media company’s only original podcast. CNN has also made it a practice of repackaging and distributing a select list of its television programming — like “Fareed Zakaria GPS,” “State of the Union with Jake Tapper,” and “Reliable Sources with Brian Stelter” — in podcast form.

Curious observers might be interested to know that CNN’s foray into original podcasting is largely orchestrated by one Tyler Moody, a VP at the company, and that the podcasts are being hosted — and represented in the ad sales market — by New York-based podcast CMS company Palegroove.

And speaking of right-leaning politics podcasts: Fox News is making a weekly television show out of “I’ll Tell You What,” an elections podcast hosted by “The Five” co-host Dana Perino and Fox News Digital Politics Editor Chris Stirewalt. The show will be limited-run, airing on Sunday evenings until the elections in November. According to the Washington Post’s politics blog, the podcast’s conversion into the television format “represents Fox News’s first new programming initiative since longtime network chairman Roger Ailes resigned in July.”

Side note. A few weeks ago, I wrote a column observing what appears to be a dearth of explicitly conservative political and election-related podcasts, which briefly led me to consider this state of affairs being a function of early adopter demographics. Since then, I’ve regularly received recommendations from readers of more conservative-oriented shows, and while I believe my original observation still holds, I will say that one podcast in particular has found its way into my primary rotation: Radio Free GOP with Mike Murphy. It’s really polished, and really, really engaging, and it’s worth a try regardless of where you are on the spectrum.

Did you read Ken Doctor’s columns? You really should. The five-part research series published on Nieman Lab all throughout last week did an amazing job laying out the current state and potential future(s) of the professionalizing layer of podcasts from the 30,000 feet view more than I ever could.

The series contained a bunch of novel findings that are incredibly useful for incremental observers like myself — for example, the fact that digital native Gimlet currently scores 5 million downloads monthly across its 6 shows (many of which are off-season at the moment) and now has a 55-person headcount (damn!); that NPR, Midroll Media, and PodcastOne each account for $10 million in sales; that 50% of WNYC’s sponsorship revenue now comes from digital as opposed to terrestrial sources, a good chunk of which is driven by podcasts.

But Doctor’s columns also laid out an analogy that connects what many podcast publishers/networks are doing these days to the long-established digital media strategy of aggregation. It’s a connection that hasn’t previously occurred to me, but it has become to me an essential framework in gaming out the probable trajectory — and potential pitfalls — of many of these emerging podcast companies.

Anyway, hit ‘em up.

“You can’t compare it to anything else that exists in the industry right now,” said Rena Unger, the IAB’s Director of Industry Initiatives, in the latest episode of The Wolf Den. “Podcasts took one of the boldest moves. You’re not doing your own individual upfronts, you were sharing one stage. You have 12 competitive companies that take off their competitive hats and say, ‘Let’s work together to elevate the space and increase our pie together.’”

Unger was responding to my, uh, critique of the recent Podcast Upfronts, which largely comes out of anxieties that were pinpointed almost perfectly by Chris Bannon, Midroll’s Chief Creative Officer and co-host of the Wolf Den, who replied to Unger: “Yeah, it’s funny. There’s a great spirit of collaboration, but I think what Nick fears in his writing is that will disappear. That it will become some sort of commercial shark-tank in which where we race to the bottom in some way together.”

Or borrow a passage from Doctor’s final entry in his podcast columns: “The phrase of the moment, both from some in the trade and from many of the millions of listeners who’ve become podcast addicts, seems to be: Don’t screw it up.”

I’m getting that tattooed.

Bites:

• There’s a budding audio/podcast platform company floating about the Bay Area called “Tiny Garage Labs” that’s founded by former Netflix operatives and a former Planet Money correspondent. I’d keep an eye out on their blog — word on the street something’s coming real soon. (Tiny Garage Labs)
• Made a quick mention of this two Hot Pods ago, but it’s more or less confirmed now: Panoply now reps MTV Podcasts, which joins the network with two new shows — “Lady Problems” and “Videohead.”
• “A lot of sports podcasting simply reuses talk-radio formats. From the way you sound, this is clearly going to be something different.” “Yeah, I am hoping we can pull it off.” ESPN Films and FiveThirtyEight senior producer Jody Avirgan talks to Adweek about the upcoming 30 for 30 podcast documentaries. Lots of interesting nuggets in there. (Adweek)
• “The web is built on hyperlinks, with each link a pathway to discovery, an endorsement, a reference. Podcasts could be like that too.” Jake Shapiro, CEO of RadioPublic, published what appears to be a manifesto for the upcoming listening app that will make up his team’s first independent foray into the podcasting marketplace. (RadioPublic blog)
• The lovely Hollywood history podcast, You Must Remember This, is going on hiatus. But KQED was able to score a pretty great Q&A with creator Karina Longworth in the meantime. (KQED Arts)
• If you haven’t been keeping up with APM’s new investigative podcast, “In The Dark” — along with everything that’s been happening with the actual case it’s examining — you really should. Vulture has a great interview here with Madeleine Baran, the investigative journalist who drives the podcast. (Vulture)
• At the Online News Association 2016 conference in Denver last week, WNYC’s Delaney Simmons and NPR’s Mathilde Piard gave a presentation on their respective organizations’ attempts to wield social media tools as a points of audio distribution. (Journalism.co.uk)

Become a donating member. I make my living off Hot Pod, which is independently managed by me. Hot Pod supporters receive an extra newsletter (sample one,sample two), access to a forum, and more to come.

Just out this morning: Audible Channels now comes bundled with the Amazon Prime Membership. The new offering is only available for US members.

Three quick things:

• While Amazon doesn’t publicly disclose exact numbers of Prime memberships, analysts at Piper Jaffray estimate the number to be around 57 to 61 million people, according to a CNET write-up. A CNN Money report from earlier this year noted that Prime memberships were estimated to have jumped 35% across 2015 alone, citing numbers from a Consumer Intelligence Research Partners report.
• Obviously, this greatly — and automatically — expands the reach of potential listeners with easy access to Audible’s original programming. This development is consistent with, and weirdly expands upon, a speculation I made to Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw in a January article: “Amazon is doing to Audible what it’s done to Prime Video.” This has become the defining lens for the way I read the company.
• Also worth keeping in mind: Audible’s insistence on not calling their original programming “podcasts.”

And in case you missed it, I wrote about Audible’s first batch original shows earlier this summer. I wasn’t particularly enthused, but I suppose it is a launch set. Audible Channels cost $4.95 a month for non-members. Normal full Audible memberships cost $14.95 a month.

Ken Doctor is putting me out of business. If you’re reading this, you’ll probably be very interested to check out his on-going five-part series on the podcasting business that Nieman Lab is running this week. The first entry, which came out yesterday, is a fantastic primer to the industry, and holds some ideas that I find are incredibly useful.

Doctor closed his first post with a wonderful series of guiding questions, to which I’d like to add one more: is it possible for podcasting to grow rapidly while maintaining its openness for independents?

I should’ve taken a vacation this week. But we’ve got some guidelines to talk about.

Your Handy Guide To the IAB’s Guidelines. This is going to be a long one, and a poor sequel to some of I’ve written before.

Ahead of its second annual podcast upfront event last week, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Tech Lab published its Podcast Ad Metrics Guidelines, a document seeking to assist in the resolution of what has commonly been asserted as the medium’s defining problem: measurability. Given that these guidelines were issued from an ostensibly independent third-party like the IAB, they were much-anticipated. Among some circles, it is thought to be just the kind of stuff the industry needs to get its house in order.

Time will tell, of course, whether the document will have some sort of impact. But for what it’s worth, I’m bearish.

Let’s consider the problem. Parsing semantics, the prevailing issue is only ostensibly about podcast measurability than it is about the verification of podcast advertising impressions. Specifically, advertisers want to effectively track the delivery of the ad spots they are paying for.

And to be even more specific, this issue principally pertains to brand advertisers. The space has long operated on a healthy stream of direct advertisers (your Mailchimps, your Audibles, your Blue Aprons, and so on) whose ad buying operations are primarily driven by a focus on promo code conversions. Their assessments would definitely benefit from better ad verification, but they are ultimately not dependent on them, because direct advertisers could easily bypass the “black box” nature* of current podcast tracking practices by making their own tangible return-on-investment calculations based on how many listeners end up using a promo code. In contrast, brand advertisers need to know how many people they are hitting as a way to justify their ad buys because their advertising initiatives are driven by intangible concepts like mindshare, influence, brand identity, and so on — more fluid factors meant to influence buying decisions over the long term.

* In case you’re not familiar: by “black box,” I mean hat, for the majority of downloads, it remains relatively unknowable what happens to a podcast ad once it is stitched into an episode file and shipped off to a listener.

From the perspective of advertisers, the problem is that downloads don’t mean the same thing between different podcast publishers. As Sarah van Mosel, Acast’s Chief Commercial Officer, once phrased the problem to me this way: “Buyers just need to know that when they’re spending $100K on one podcast, they’re getting the same amount of ‘stuff’ as if they spend $100K on another podcast.” The IAB’s goal with this report, then, is to provide a publicly available technical framework that the industry can use as a common language, so that brand advertisers can engage with podcast publishers off a baseline layer of trust. (Implicit in this idea is that actual accuracy of the prescribed technical specifications is besides the point as long as everybody is incorrect in the exact same way.)

If this all sounds extremely familiar to you, it’s because we’ve been here before. Back in February, a consortium of public radio organizations banded together to publish their own set of guidelines on podcast metric measurements. My analysis then (which you can read here) perceived the publication of that document as a political move by that consortium to accelerate the IAB’s production of its own report. I was also skeptical about the report’s capacity for impact, and a lot of my thinking then can be directly applied to this situation.

Two chunks on why I’m bearish on the new report:

(1) The IAB’s guidelines merely serve as a best practices document, which means that there is no formal enforcement of these standards. To state the profoundly obvious, best practices are only as strong as the number of people who adopt them, and as a result, we’re left in a situation where, for the standards to be useful, a critical mass of industry participants must be achieved on their own accord.

But the reason podcast downloads have historically been fluffy is that various players of the podcasting space aren’t incentivized right now to speak to advertisers in the same language… or challenge the narrative of their current reporting systems. Why? A relevant quote in an Observer article from Midroll’s now-CEO Erik Diehn, responding to the public radio guidelines in February: “If everybody adopted these standards today, some shows might come down a little bit in size and some might come down pretty dramatically.” It’s an irrational, but humanly understandable, collectively psychology: though measurement standards in some form or another will benefit companies in the long-term, some are hesitant to suffer in the short-term, and as a consequence, the lesser status quo is favored.

There are few possible paths to a future where the IAB’s guidelines can mean something. For one thing, we could see a future in which a critical mass of podcast publishers — all occupying a solid enough position to sustain whatever corrections the guidelines may bring onto their reporting structures — voluntarily bite the metaphorical bullet, adopt the standards, and collusively enforce those standards by convention. And for another, perhaps simultaneously, it also possible to see a future in which advertisers could use the mere existence of these guidelines as a “cudgel” (to quote a source) to pressure publishers into being more aggressive about refining their measurement capabilities.

Either outcome would be constructive, but they would be so in spite of the IAB’s guidelines, because the document itself isn’t very good in the first place.

(2) Put simply: the IAB’s guidelines appears to be a compromised product. Compared to February’s public radio guidelines document, the IAB’s report is significantly less technically rigorous, with key fundamental definitions still half-heartedly defined. One of several red-flags: a “partial download” is still defined as “a unique file request that was less that 100% downloaded” — which means that a podcast file that’s, say, 1% downloaded is still valued as equal to a podcast file that’s, say, 99% downloaded.

The report’s lack of a punch might well have something to do with its long drafting process, which stretched well beyond a year. (I’ve been hearing gossip about it since Q2 of 2015, and a lot of that involved talk about internal tension.) And looking at the eclectic list of volunteer participants involved the process — twenty-three strong, which representation from new and old podcast companies, public radio institutions, tech companies, legacy media types, and Nielsen — one imagines, given everyone’s possibly clashing incentives, that the fact we even saw a report at all is itself a miracle. One presumes, then, that the process was agonized.

But in the scale of things, I don’t think the report’s wide-miss — along with any future fumbles — is going to matter very much. Indeed, I suspect it’s entirely possible that individual companies can secure the interest and trust brand advertisers on their own, converting them for the rest of the industry’s benefit. In Ken Doctor’s Hot Pod-beating column yesterday, National Public Media’s Bryan Moffett cited getting business from Fortune 100 brands brands like Wells Fargo, Dell and Target. Doctor would further note that “six-figure ad buys, rare until recently, are now more commonplace.”

The question, of course, is whether those dollars, six-figures and all, will stay in the industry over time.

Broader considerations. When I’ve previously written about brand advertisers, I’ve often been asked: why do podcast companies want them in the first place? Generally speaking, brand advertising dollars tend to be much bigger and more reliably scheduled across a longer period in time than direct advertising dollars. That kind of money stabilizes — and greatly catalyzes — advertising-driven media businesses. There’s also an element of prestige involved here, and the professionalizing layer of podcast companies, if anything, are principally driven at this point in time to be accepted as part of the upper echelons of the media industry.

A follow-up question/thought experiment: does the podcast ecosystem actually need brand advertisers to function as a legit industry? This question is worth some debate, but I’d argue it isn’t that essential. There’s an entirely plausible future where the podcast ecosystem runs on a rich marketplace of direct and local advertisers powered by dynamic ad insertion technology. Provided, of course, that there be the development of more efficient ad marketplaces somewhere down the line that’s able to facilitate greater transaction volumes. (And preferably one that doesn’t fully corrupt the advertising experience.)

There will always be products, services, and people looking for attention, and as such, there will likely always be potential, if not hard-fought, dollars for podcast ad slots, whose unique value proposition in the advertising marketplace is that intimacy thing everybody talks about. (Unless, of course, Facebook continues to grow its power and scale as the attention-monster it is beyond all counterargument, in which case we should all just give up and go to welding school.)

But I will say that I think brand advertising dollars make it substantially easier for podcast companies aspiring to be massive, triple-A, upper echelon institutions equivalent to the Big Three labels in the music industry and the major studios in the film industry. Which we should probably follow up by asking whether we actually want podcast companies that big in the first place, which is a fair question.

Talking Points Memo now has a podcast offering of its own, and the influential left-leaning political news website is attempting the paywalled podcast method. Episodes of the interview-based podcast, called “The Josh Marshall Show” (named after the site’s founder), are automatically available to the site’s paying Prime members, and non-paying readers can buy individual episodes for $1 each off Podbean. A free version, which will feature highlights from the full interviews, will be available to non-members.

Earlier this summer, Marshall told Nieman Lab that its paid subscription arm stabilized the site’s overall business, citing a number of roughly 11,000 paying subscribers.

I’m personally not that much of a TPM consumer, but the rollout strategy is one that I think fits well with the way the site’s system of offerings is already set up: it increases the value of the membership system in a way that matches the podcast format’s capacity for depth with the paying subscriber’s demand for depth. Square peg, meet square hole.

A Financial Snapshot of an Independent Podcast. “I’d always heard that new restaurants take 5 years to show a profit. I have no idea if that’s true, but this was kind of the attitude we went into it with,” said Scott Philbrook. “From day one, we approached it like a business and not a hobby, but we had absolutely zero information on whether or not a podcast that wasn’t backed by a major network or some other corporation could be a viable business model.”

Philbrook is the co-host of “Astonishing Legends,” a California-based podcast that bills itself as the “Click and Clack of esoterica,” its programming focus being strange historical events. Extensively researched, lovingly produced, and presented with the requisite amount of kitsch, the two-year-old show comes out of a rich tradition of podcasts — and media in general, I suppose — that trade in creepiness and pulp, finding kindred spirits in the Pacific Northwest Stories programs and Lore to whatever’s going on over at SyFy and the History Channel.

It’s also an independent creative operation figuring out its terms of existence. Philbrook and Forrest Burgess, his creative partner and co-host, took some time in a recent episode to discuss the current state of their business:

We’re so grateful to have several hundred patrons pledging amounts from $1 a month all the way to $25, and we’re currently bringing in around $1500 monthly from that. We’ve also managed to attract the attention of several sponsors and they are testing the waters with us to see if we’re a good investment for their advertising dollars. When you guys support them, they feel good about sponsoring the show. So with 3 to a max of 4 sponsors per episode and at the support we have from you on Patreon, our gross income has currently become roughly equivalent to a single person working an entry-level part-time job.

At a time when the more well-financed elements of the industry seek to earn legitimacy and scale from the top-down, Philbrook and Burgess’ discussion provides a window into the conditions of operators on the ground level. Curious, I reached out for more details, and Philbrook was kind enough to spent some time discussing the show’s approach and current financial makeup.

The note Philbrook sent was long and rich with detail, but this newsletter has some serious space constraints (ha), so I’m going to break this out into chunks focusing on the stuff that you can most tangibly use. I’ll throw the rest into the members newsletter.

(1) While the show is currently testing advertising possibilities (more on that in a bit), Patreon plays a huge role in the business. “It’s such a great way to connect with listeners and a lot of listeners really want to help the show out and that’s a way that’s convenient for them,” Philbrook said. All of that Patreon money, which adds up to about $1500 a month, goes to paying their editor and sound designer. Their editor, Sarah Vorhees, is hired on a per episode basis, and she charges the team an hourly rate.

“And we’re finally start getting some funds out to our sound designer as well, who’s been working for free from the beginning,” he added. “The money we’ve paid both of them is insulting, but they continue to be available for us for their own reasons. We are within striking distance of getting them their full rates, however.”

(2) The show currently has an exclusive sponsorship representation deal with Audioboom, the UK-based podcast services company, to cover ad sales. Philbrook noted that they initially attempted to handle advertising directly by themselves, but eventually decided to outsource given their production workload. They’ve been represented by Audioboom for almost exactly a year now, and they also host their episodes on Audioboom’s platform.

While Philbrook declined to disclose specifics, he tells me that the show’s advertising revenue outpaces its Patreon haul. But he maintains that their advertising arrangements have been largely experimental, illustrating the difficulty of longer-term planning at this point in time. “We are so grateful to have advertisers, but the thing is when you start out, they are all testing their return on investment so the sponsorship fees you’re collecting are not necessarily commensurate with your downloads or listens,” he said. “The idea is that if your sponsors see people responding to the live reads you’re doing on your show, and it proves to be a good investment for them, then they come back and you get closer to appropriate rates.”

(3) For the record, the show currently averages 115,000 downloads per episode across its initial 45 days, the standard Audioboom uses to negotiate advertising. They report having over 4.8 million downloads across the whole catalogue since moving over to Audioboom, with an additional 600,000 back when they initially hosted on Libsyn.

(4) The team also deals with a little merchandising, but they view it more as a way to connect with their listeners than an actual profit-center. For one thing, Philbrook tells me, they’re not trading in high volumes, and what little profit they’re able to accrue are often canceled out by the amount of time they put into fulfillment.

(5) Philbrook, a former editor of TV commercials is the only person working on the show full-time, while his co-host Burgess still works a day-job. The production also involves work from a volunteer research group that involves over two dozen people, which formed organically out of the show’s fanbase.

“Our overall experience so far with podcasting has been absolutely amazing,” Philbrook said. “Will we survive indefinitely? It’s hard to know. We’re currently netting about 10% of what we think we’d need to be making to both be full time employees of Astonishing Legends and be able to pay members of our team fair rates for what they do for us. Can we get the other 90%? I guess we’ll find out.” (Hat tip to Erin M, for inspiring this segment.)

Bites:

• Last week, I threw a good deal of reflexive shade on Apple’s Air Pods announcement. I still think the name is ridiculous — though perhaps no more ridiculous than the word “podcast,” goodness — but I’m totally sold on the argument put forward by Slate’s Will Oremus that Apple’s new tech is an early iteration of an “ear computer,” which functions on a voice-to-cloud computing paradigm not unlike that of the Amazon Echo. (Slate)
• “With a show that has a celebrity host that companies want to associate their brand with, you can get between $100 and $200, which is amazing,” Pineapple Street Media’s Jenna Weiss-Berman tells Fast Company. However, a marketing executive at SeatGeek expressed some skepticism over the rates to me on Twitter. (Fast Company)
• DGital Media, continuing its sports programming bent, is partnering with “collegiate marketing” company Learfield to produce a suite of college sports-related podcasts.
• NPR will nationally distribute WAMU’s “The Big Listen,” its podcast curation radio show. That description was complicated to write. (Current)
• Overcast, Marco Arment’s bespoke podcast app, tries out display advertising. (Marco)
• Sound designer Shani Aviram and Arrvl’s Jonathan Hirsch collaborated to make “Liminal,” a “small-batch” sound library and production house. (Liminal Audio)

Gimlet’s “Startup” Being Adapted For Television. My inbox has long bubbled with rumors of Gimlet getting involved in television and LA sightings of company co-founder Matt Lieber, and so I wasn’t particularly surprised when a Deadline report droppedMonday night indicating that ABC, one of the Big Three broadcast networks, is bringing the Startup podcast to linear television.

According to the report, the project will be a comedy with Zach Braff (of Scrubs and Garden State fame) attached to direct the potential pilot and star as its protagonist. ABC has reportedly made a “put pilot commitment” — which, I understand, means the pilot will almost definitely see the light of day. I’m told that this arrangement is fairly uncommon, and indicates something of a vote of confidence in the project.

Startup is merely the latest in an emerging trend of podcast properties being picked up for adaptation to television. (I published a deep dive on this back in April.) But however this first deal is structured — and whether its lucrative for Gimlet — I think it’s more interesting to see if the podcast company will be able to utilize the momentum of this first development to build out a formal adaptation pipeline similar to that of Epic Magazine, which commissions longform features with a specific eye for Hollywood interest. I think it’s good business: a good way to consistently multiply the value of their output, and an even better way of expanding their sphere of influence. (When I asked the company will be pursuing more adaptation deals, chief of staff Chris Giliberti replied, “Hopefully :)”)

But whether these adaptations will translate into good eye-fodder in the age of Peak TV is a separate matter. As a consumer, and a yuge fan of the podcast’s first season, I’m not wild about this Startup news. For the uninitiated, the podcast was originally a first-person audio documentary that followed former Planet Money co-founder Alex Blumberg as he set out to form what is now known as Gimlet. And while the show moved away from its innovative diaristic first-person style in future seasons to adopt a more classically documentarian format, that first season was absolutely sublime for the way it was so… well, vulnerable and performatively personal and utterly real.

That the TV adaptation is set to be a fictional comedy broadly described to be “based” on the podcast, revolving around a thirty-something dude who quits his job to start a business, feels contradictory to the elements that made up the original genius of the podcast, even if the TV show turns out halfway decent. I also wonder why, indeed, did Gimlet’s property need to be picked up to get television project of this subject going in the first place when there are already a number of original television properties that effectively explores in life lived within the paradigm of entrepreneurship. (See HBO’s Silicon Valley and the latter seasons of CBS’s The Good Wife.) A possible argument? Consider the built-in audience of the Startup podcast, multiplied by whatever Braff’s star power is able to bring in. The question is, then, whether that equation will work for ABC.

Anyway, it’s bad form to moan about something that hasn’t even materialized yet. I’m excited for Gimlet — this is, unmistakably, a coup for the Brooklyn-based podcast studio — and I’m eager to see how the team figures the adaptation. I only pray that the show be a gritty, violent remake.

Relevant: Desus and Mero of The Bodega Boys are making a late night talk show for Viceland. Now this, THIS, I’m super wild about. This can/will totally work.

On The Celebrity Strategy. The trade publication is running a special series on audio this week, with a particular focus on podcasts that readers of this hyper-niche column would probably find interesting. It’s chock full of the fairly platitudinal findings one comes to expect from broad excursions into the subject — sample sentence: “the key, podcast pros say, is to do something that no else is doing, and to do it better than anyone else can” — but there are bits of interesting information (and fun posturing) packed in the quotes.

The series also contains what is perhaps my favorite quotation — which bears my favorite insight — in a long, long time. Embedded in the article, “Celebrities Are Flocking to Podcasts, but Will They Stick Around?”, a podcast producer named Matthew Passy drops this gem:

Shaquille O’Neal could fart into a microphone for an hour and 100,000 people would download it, while other podcasters are putting out great content advertisers [don’t pick up on], because for advertisers there’s a high threshold… if you don’t have 10 to 50,000 downloads, most advertisers don’t bother.

Passy’s sentiment here refreshingly addresses the incredibly annoying and increasingly prominent spike in the lazy (and cynical) strategy of plopping a known name in front of a mic with little direction or production value with the expectation of committing temporary arbitrage, while usefully contextualizing it as functionally prudent within basic advertiser dynamic. It illuminates how the space currently possesses a value universe in which high-quality work is crowded out, and how these relatively slipshod programs, in their capacity to move money before advertisers gain full literacy of podcasts, leads to their further proliferation. Cheers, mate.

Vox Media on the hunt. Well lookie here. Vox Media posted a job listing earlier this week in search of an Executive Producer for Audio. According to the job description, the EP role will be in charge of both refining the existing stable of podcasts as well as launching new shows. It also appears to span across the company’s eight sites (and possibly its in-house creative agency, Vox Creative).

This comes a week after Recode, Vox Media’s tech and business news site, published a job listing for a similar position. Dan Frommer, Recode’s editor-in-chief, had indicated to me that their listing was “an early sign of things to come from Vox on the audio front” — and it seems that this is yet marginal development in a much larger strategic move. The juxtaposition of both these positions suggests the probable reporting structure, with the former overseeing the work of the latter, which itself foretells a probable future where we may see similar roles emerge across Vox Media’s seven remaining sites. (It’s a Matryoshka doll of executive producers!)

If you’re a mid-career audio operator looking for a big step-up, it’s a good time.

The Washington Post is ramping up its podcast operations, months after testing the waters with the history podcast Presidential that first dropped in January. To kick off its second wave of audio programming, the Post recently launched two somewhat straightforward shows: a fantasy football podcast (The Fantasy Football Beat), which it rolled out in early August, and an interview-driven politics podcast hosted by PostPartisan blogger Jonathan Capeheart (Cape UP), which dropped last week.

But it has also two rather interesting projects in the pipeline that should be watched: a yet-to-be-named quiz show featuring Chris Cilliza — whose blog, The Fix, is already being delivered in audio form through the Amazon Echo — and a fascinating collaboration with American Public Media called Historically Black, which will leverage the Post’s reader-driven Tumblr of the same name. A call for submission was put out two weeks ago for Historically Black, which you can find here.

The scaling up comes shortly after the Post hired Carol Alderman to serve as the company’s in-house audio producer in May. Alderman previously worked on podcasts at USA Today, principally coming, it seems, from a multimedia background. I’m told that Alderman is the only person on staff whose sole focus is on audio works — though the actual production flows involve collaborations from several other people in the newsroom. I’m also told that, as part of the audience team, she reports to Jessica Stahl, who officially holds the lengthy title of “Editor for Social, Search, and Communities.” Stahl serves as Alderman’s editor on the audio products. That’s a stark contrast from the New York Times’ approach, which a much larger team of dedicated operators with at least six full-timers focusing on podcasts, by my count, many of which are public radio veterans.

Also worth noting: the Post plans to further experiment with the Amazon Echo’s Alexa platform. I’m personally pretty bullish on the possibilities afforded by voice-based/audio-first computing and the way in which the Echo paves for a whole new way in which information can be transferred digitally, and I’ve been utterly fascinated by the number of news organizations that have begun dabbling with the platform. (A partial list of dabblers: NPR, Slate, the Wall Street Journal, Newsy, Refinery29, Bloomberg, TMZ, and, excitingly, local NBC affiliates.) I had originally planned to dive deeper into what’s been going at this particular nexus, but my lovely friends over at Nieman Lab beat me to the punch earlier this week. I highly recommend checking out their write-up on news organizations and Alexa.

There is, indeed, quite a lot packed into what the Post’s is trying to kindle on this frontier. To find out more, I asked Jessica Stahl a few questions over email, and I think her responses are pretty useful so I’ll run them in full here —

Could you tell me about the scaling up and how Carol Alderman plays a role here — is she quarterbacking projects, or will she be directly involved in tape cutting and such?

“We’ve spent the past couple of months sending our first batch of projects through the development process and are really proud of what we’ve been working on. Presidentialhas always been almost completely reported, edited and produced by Lily Cunningham in what can only be described as a Herculean effort. Beyond that, Carol is directly producing/editing some of our podcasts, and working with others primarily during the development process to help refine the idea and provide the training they need to eventually edit/produce themselves. So we’re hoping that with those two workflows in place, it we’ll be able to create the high quality output we want while still facilitating as many great ideas as we can. We’ve also been able to start codifying best practices, which helps us be consistent about things like launch process, format for posting to our site, promotion on social media, and so on.

What are the factors that led to the Post’s decision to do more with podcasts?

The first is passion and interest in this type of storytelling. We have people in this newsroom who listen to podcasts as consumers and love the experience they get with that medium. And that’s meant we have people in the newsroom who’ve been wanting to tell stories in audio form, including a couple — like Lily — who figured out they had the skill to go ahead and do it. So there was this enthusiasm for podcasts, and a well of exciting ideas, that was bubbling over. That’s kind of been reflected in the podcasts we’ve launched or are working on so far — they all come from people in our newsroom who were passionate about getting into this space and who were willing to work hard with us to refine pitches, record and re-record demos and basically create something they would be psyched to listen to.

The other major factor was the success of Presidential, which showed that audio can accomplish the type of deep, informative journalism we strive for, and that there are significant audiences for it if you do it right. We announced at the end of March, only about two months after Presidential had launched, that it had already surpassed 1 million downloads.

What does success look like for the Washington Post’s podcasts?

We’ve talked a lot about how we can define different models of success so that something that is building engaged community, for example, or doing really important journalism, or growing slowly but steadily could be considered to be working — just like something that gets tons of listeners right away would be considered to be working. We have several dimensions we use to measure success — similarly to how we might think about whether a written reporting project is a success. Sometimes big numbers tell you something worked, and sometimes you know something worked because it causes real change.

We’re also trying to be very intentional about how we know what’s not working, so we can adjust quickly to try new strategies, or ultimately to decide that we want to move on. Podcasts actually live as part of the Audience team, so figuring out how to benchmark progress and measure success across all sorts of different platforms is kind of just part of our worldview.

Are you guys trying anything interesting with respect to distribution?

Our “Historically Black” podcast with American Public Media (APM) Reports is definitely something new and different for us. That grew out of a UGC (user-generated content) project on Tumblr and has developed into a cross-platform multimedia effort that’s going to be distributed as a podcast, but also through Tumblr to the audience that’s participated in it, and through The Post website and all our various platforms via a series of articles.

We’re also thinking about podcasts in the context of audio more broadly. It’s still very early for us, but we’ve been having conversations across departments to talk about different ways we can think about audio and audio delivery, and there are a lot of great ideas. A platform we’re currently playing with is Alexa, which powers the Amazon Echo and other devices. We started out there with a daily politics flash briefing written by Chris Cillizza of The Fix that was delivered via text-to-speech. But we all realized that it would be more compelling to have a human voice with some personality deliver that information, so we used the Republican and Democratic National Conventions as an opportunity to launch a recorded, voiced version. I’m anticipating more experiments like that, both on the Alexa and on other platforms.

Tell me more about the Alexa projects. What’s the potential that you see here?

The Alexa politics brief is something that started as a collaboration between the product team and the politics section, and Carol hopped in to help make the leap into recorded audio. It’s not the only thing The Post is doing on the Alexa platform – we’re also experimenting with “skills” that enable users to ask for information about the elections or the Olympics and get answers from us.

There’s a lot of crossover between the platforms our product team is interested in and what the podcast side is interested in, so that was a great opportunity to start the conversation about what we want to experiment with and where it makes sense to work together either on technologies or on content. I think there’s a ton of potential, not only with Alexa but with all the new ways that people are going to consume audio products – from voice systems like Alexa, to music sites  like Spotify or Pandora that are opening up to spoken audio, to in-car systems, and things we haven’t thought of yet. Those are going to open up new audiences for podcasts and also demand new forms of audio storytelling. So we want to make sure we’re thinking about it and experimenting with it, and getting out ahead of it with offerings that feel right for the platforms we decide to focus on. And that means we’ll keep collaborating closely with all the teams that are thinking about those platforms from lots of different angles.

Bites:

• “In the early days of the medium, Podcasting was disproportionately a medium for white males, ages 25-44… but today, the content universe for Podcasts has exploded, and the diversity of programming available rivals any other form of audio,” writes Tom Webster, VP of Strategy at Edison Research, which puts out the ever-helpful annual Infinite Dial study in collaboration with Triton Digital. Webster’s statement comes from new data, and you should check out the full blog post.

• Art19 announced a new Executive Vice President of Content last week: Roddy Swearngin, who was most recently the Director of Digital position at Levity Entertainment Group.

• Wondery follows up the successful launch of its first original property, Found, with an audio drama anthology show called “Secrets, Crimes & Audiotape.” (Spot the reference.) The company is clearly leveraging its roots within the film and television industry, from which its founder Hernan Lopez (formerly of Fox International Channel) hails, and it’ll be interesting to see its efforts will lead to a new model for audio drama outside its current strengths in horror and sci-fi — and whether it’s endeavors will draw in bigger advertisers. (The Hollywood Reporter)

• Audible partners TED to produce a new show, “Sincerely, X.” (Fast Company)

• It looks the podcast component of ESPN’s multimedia initiative “Pin/Kings” were downloaded “more than 200,000 times” across all episodes as of August 26, 2016. The podcast published 17 episodes across its run, plus one teaser. (Digiday)

• “I’ve already done my first interviews for it last week. And tell your ad readers we’re looking for a sponsor for Season 2,” Malcolm Gladwell tells Adweek, when asked about a follow-up to Revisionist History’s highly successful first season. (Adweek)

• “UK Podcast Listeners Favor Ads over Payment”… and “56% said they didn’t mind ads during podcasts as long as they were relevant to the podcast topic,” according to a new survey. Usual survey-consuming disclaimers apply. (eMarketer)

Get Rec’d

This week’s entry comes from Lindsay Michael, co-host of CBC’s Podcast Playlist:

I think one of the most exciting independent podcasts out of Canada right now is The Lapse. Its tag line is “True stories, gussied up” — meaning solid storytelling but with a rich sonic backdrop. The show is narrated by Kyle Gest and listening feels like you’re watching a film in your head.

One of my favourite episodes was about ICP, Send In The Clowns. Who doesn’t love an Insane Clown Posse story?!? Also fun:  Taking My Parents to Burning Man

I have to mention that I’ve been listening a ton to Politically Re-Active with W. Kamau Bell and Hari Kondabolu. It’s making me re-think the way I think about politics in a way no other podcast has.

I’m really excited (and nervous) to announce the soft launch of Hot Pod’s new paid membership pool, “The Thing“!

… yeah, I really leaned into that joke. Sorry.

When you sign up for “The Thing,” you’re supporting the news gathering, analysis, and punditry that I do on Hot Pod. But you’re also joining what I hope will become a strong, informed, and connected community of podcast, radio, and audio folks.

As a member, you’ll get:

• A Friday Newsletter. This members-only newsletter will feature wonkier updates, analysis, and writing about the podcasting space for now. Over time, I hope to shape it into what I’m calling a “community-driven newsletter.” More on that at a later date.
• Members Only Forum (coming soon!). Meet other Hot Pod readers, discuss, connect, maybe collaborate. This should be up by next week.

And more stuff to come soon!

Memberships cost $7 a month. (I’ve also got a “need-based discount” situation for some folks. More details on that here. I dunno, seemed like a good idea at the time.)

You can sign up to be a member of “The Thing” straight from this link, or from the bar on the right.

I’ll be developing more features for The Thing to increase and differentiate its value to members over time — stuff like live shows, educational resources, maybe even a conference. This is all an experiment, and I’m hoping to try out a bunch of stuff to maybe create something new and special.

And to be clear: nothing changes with the Tuesday Hot Pods. Those’ll come out the same time, contain the same kind of stuff, go down the same rabbit holes.

Thanks for being a reader, and I hope to serve you well in the days to come.