One thing about producing audio for the internet that a lot of people I talk to really like is the relative tranquility of the whole experience, especially when contrasted with all other forms of online publishing. There’s no comments section, and audiences generally have to explicitly listen to a whole show to hear what’s actually […]

Conan O’Brien’s podcast, Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, launches next Monday, and the production has circulated a star-studded guest list preview. Stitcher (née Midroll Media) is handling advertising sales, and there’s an interesting connection there: Adam Sachs, the former CEO of Midroll, is now the COO of Team Coco, O’Brien’s production company. ICYMI: “Some podcasters […]

I spent much of the past week attending the Hot Docs Podcast Festival in the great city of Toronto, and I brought back a scattered collection of notes and observations on Canadian podcasting that I’m ill-equipped at the moment to string together into some unified clarifying narrative. But I’ll share what I have in the […]

The trial of Mexican drug lord Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman began with jury selection on 5 November in Brooklyn, New York. Guzman was extradited to the US in January 2017, having escaped twice from prisons in Mexico, and is now facing charges of drug trafficking and conspiracy. In light of both the length of the […]

Last week, Amazon rolled out a series of Alexa updates that lets users access US election information through the smart speaker platform. Bill Barton, the VP of Information on the Alexa team, noted in a corporate blog post that the move was a response to consumer behavior. “Customers asked Alexa millions of questions during the […]

I don’t want to spend too much time on this, but I just wanted to highlight two recent additions to the genre that are pretty compelling: the CBC’s Front Burner and The Guardian’s Today in Focus. Three parts to this take: (1) Both productions genuinely beat the problem of information redundancy for me, speaking as […]