Teach Me How To Live
Let me begin by showing my cards here: I’m a sucker for stuff broadly known as “self-help” or “personal betterment,” along with many of its associated sub-genres that carry the prefix “personal” (e.g. personal finance, personal fitness) or the suffix “hacks” (e.g. life hacks, travel hacks). Which is to say, I’m the kind of guy […]
Pinna Stands Alone
This morning, Graham Holdings announced that Pinna, the kids programming-focused paid listening service that was originally launched in 2017 under the Panoply umbrella, is being spun out into a standalone company. The new entity will be led by CEO Maggie McGuire, a veteran of children-focused media divisions. Previously, McGuire held executive positions at Scholastic, Viacom’s […]
Meanwhile, in Seattle…
The second installment of PodCon — the podcast conference/convention founded by VidCon’s Hank Green, Night Vale’s Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor, McElroys Travis and Justin, and directed by VidCon’s Monica Gasper — took place in Seattle over the weekend, and I hear it was bumpin’. When asked how it went, Green tells me: I feel […]
Tracking: January 22, 2019
Over the weekend, CBS News aired a general package on podcasts — which contained, among other things, the fact that Gimlet employees now number 120 people (!? that sounds expensive!) — but you should also be aware of this poll they conducted: “According to a new CBS News poll, two-thirds of Americans listen to podcasts […]
Governments have podcasts, too
It’s been quite a week for the British government. The prime minister lost a major vote with serious constitutional implications by a historically large margin, and it’s still very unclear whether anyone will be able to figure out what Brexit really entails by the March deadline. And while all of that was going on, the Department for International Trade (DIT) dropped its very own podcast, Local to Global…
Robot Voices Update
I wrote a piece back in October about Pocket’s revamped text to speech feature inside its read it later app. In it, I posited that I didn’t yet think that the robots were coming for all the audio jobs, but that AI and automated reads would become more common in the coming months and years…
On Podcast Apps
Around the same time the newsletter went out on Tuesday, Fast Company published a piece by Glenn Fleishman — veteran tech journalist and a podcaster himself, via The New Disruptors — that, similarly, sought to sketch out likely pathways into the future for podcast apps. And it seems we were thinking about the same things.
Spotify and Podcasts, 2019
CES, that fine mess formerly known as the Consumer Electronics Show, was held in Las Vegas last week, and I took in the proceedings the way I always have: from behind the comforting glow of my laptop, far away from dense crowds and parched #brands. As expected, the smart speaker was one of the more […]