For pretty much as long as there have been podcasts, there have been people trying to put them on the radio. As far back as 2005 CBS Radio transformed KYCY into “K-You Radio” — which broadcast podcast episodes around the clock until it was shuttered in 2007 — and as recently as last year iHeartRadio […]

I was tempted to kick this story off with a platitude along the lines of: “Starting something is the hardest part.” Then I thought the better of it, because that’s not strictly true. Keeping something going can be much harder, as in the case of a conversation, relationship, or even this newsletter, because with starting […]

Pretty much every night, I take a train journey north along the coast of Norway. As a chronically bad sleeper, I’ve tried a lot of different things to make it easier for me to drop off. Some were a disaster — turns out, pillow sprays make me sneeze — but eventually I worked out, as many […]

There’s always value in a simple pitch, I suppose. For Meet Cute, a New York-based podcast company that announced itself in Variety a few weeks ago, that pitch has two parts. The first is a pithy, albeit somewhat woo-woo, mission statement: “Hope for the Whole World.” The second is a sharp product focus, with the […]

Last Wednesday, author and podcaster Rich Roll published a Twitter thread that raised significant issue with WeCrashed, a new Wondery show on the story of WeWork that rolled out in mid-January. Specifically, Roll highlighted WeCrashed’s second episode, which featured an interview with WeWork co-founder Miguel McKelvey that not only appeared to utilize several portions of […]

We should probably start at the beginning. Last Wednesday saw the official announcement that Spotify, already the biggest buyer of podcast companies to date, was to make a fourth acquisition: The Ringer. I wrote about the deal in an extra newsletter, and mulled over the details a little more in Thursday’s Insider, where I noted […]