Guest Essay: Gallows Humor, or What Happens When Your Best Guest Dies
This essay discusses a suicide, death, and loss. Please skip this if you’re not in a place to interact with these themes. If you are having thoughts of suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255. My phone rang well before sunrise on the morning of June 8. His manager wanted me to know, […]
Editor’s Note
I’ll keep this short. Hot Pod has had a pretty good year, I think. We broke some intriguing stories, like Panoply divesting from the content business and the Wall Street Journal partnering with Gimlet on a daily news podcast, and though the newsletter isn’t built to break stories or to be particularly scoopy, it’s nice […]
A List of Lists
Before we wrap up for the year, I wanted to run a selection of those Best of 2018 lists that frustrate some people, and I generally find pretty fun to peruse and read. It’s been quite a year. Here we go: My top ten overall podcast list for Vulture. My top ten podcast episode list […]
What I Learned in 2018
Back in January, I started writing my own little newsletter about audio. It was the follow-on from a column I’d had previously on a British magazine’s website, which was discontinued but that I still wanted to write. The mainstream UK media had gotten as far as reviewing podcasts as they would radio shows or rounding […]
Tracking: December 18, 2018
ICYMI: Last week, NPR officially started rolling out the Remote Audio Data (RAD) initiative, its open-sourced bid to push the podcast industry away from downloads-based analytics towards true listens-based analytics. Here’s the official announcement on the matter, and I published my quick analysis and a Q&A with NPM’s Bryan Moffett in an Insider. The […]
Topping the Charts (of another sort)
Like “Band Aid,” but podcasts. Kinda? Sorta? It’s very British.
The Remote Audio Initiative (RAD) Initiative is now live
A group of podcast companies and publishers, led by NPR, have officially begun rolling out their gambit to usher podcasting towards a “true” listening metric.
2018: Year in Review
What kind of year has it been? When I sat down to plot this column last Tuesday, a few words popped to mind: busy, chaotic, confusing. Frankly, I’m not sure how I’ll remember 2018 down the line, but I have some ideas of a few things that’ll stick. I. Perhaps the most pronounced public narrative […]
Nick’s Picks on the Other Big 2018 Stories
(1) Haven’t you heard? The Daily News Podcast, i.e. the new front page, continues to mushroom in the wake of The Daily and Up First. (Slate even has two daily news podcasts now! Also, interestingly enough, the New York Times published a thing yesterday rounding up a few for your convenience. Strange!) Two questions on […]