Spotify has made two interesting personnel moves to bolster its podcast development pipeline around two key genres, sports and news, according to a report by The Information that dropped on Friday. Firstly, the company has hired Amy Hudson, most recently the sports media partnerships lead at Facebook, to oversee its sports programming assets. Secondly, David […]

Last Thursday, NPR’s board of directors announced Jarl Mohn’s replacement as the chief executive of the public radio mothership: John Lansing, a veteran media executive who currently serves as the head of the US Agency for Global Media (formerly known as the Broadcasting Board of Governors), the federally-funded agency that oversees government-owned international broadcasters like […]

Hana Walker-Brown is an award-winning documentary maker, composer, producer and writer based in London, where she currently works as an executive producer at Audible. In this edition of Career Spotlight, Walker-Brown talks to us about pointing the microphone in the right direction, adversity as a theme, and using your big ‘ol Doc Martens to keep […]

The thing about the Apple App store… The New York Times published a report yesterday, which essentially revisits a Wall Street Journal article from July, about how Apple’s app store seems to often privilege the company’s own apps over everyone else’s. It’s a topic that fuels broader on-going complaints over anti-competitive behavior by big technology […]

“I’ve achieved a peculiar sort of success,” said Nate DiMeo, creator of The Memory Palace, when we spoke over the phone last week on the occasion of the podcast being featured as the subject of a Radiolab episode that dropped last week. By “peculiar,” DiMeo was referring to what he perceives as the podcast’s cult […]

Back in July, Audible announced a new feature called “Captions,” which uses automated transcription to produce read-along text that appears on a smartphone screen while an audiobook as playing. The company pitched this very much as an “educational” resource, pledging to offer free access to students and schools as well as providing the option to […]

Ashley Carman over at The Verge — who, by the way, is doing great work on the podcast beat — pubbed a fascinating piece last week on a pernicious phenomenon: the weaponization of one-star reviews on Apple Podcasts to actively harm other podcasts. The Verge piece was built on a few key examples. There’s a […]