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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

  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 […]

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 […]