Caroline Crampton
Caroline Crampton is a UK based journalist who has been writing about podcasts since 2014. Her journalism has appeared in publications including the Guardian, Lenny, the New Statesman and the Millions. She is a regular speaker and media commentator on the state of the podcast industry.
Sounding Off
A small storm was kicked up among listeners of the BBC’s popular Fortunately… podcast last week, when digital and podcasts commissioning editor Rhian Roberts announced on Twitter that as of 2019 the show would be available exclusively on the BBC Sounds app. As far as I’m aware, this is the first regularly publishing weekly podcast […]
Audio Fiction’s “Next Phase”
Right before we wrapped for the holidays, Ella Watts, a London-based podcast producer and consultant, shared the results of a research effort on the fiction podcast genre that she had undertaken off a commission by the BBC Sounds team. It’s an interesting piece of work, and I recommend taking the time to read it in […]
Who reviews the reviewers?
There are certain questions about the podcast business that come around again and again. One of them is to do not with the audio industry itself, but the way its products are covered in the wider media: essentially, why aren’t there more podcast reviewers?
Five Tests for UK Podcasting in 2019
It’s a shiny new year, and I spent some of the festive break trying to think myself out of the somewhat glum state in which I ended 2018. As I’ve been chronicling in this newsletter over the last few months, there have been a lot of developments in the UK podcasting scene that hint of […]
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 […]
Caroline’s Picks on the 2018 Stories to Follow Up
How podcasting deals with misinformation. There were a few points this year where I felt like that the broader media narratives around the spread of fake news made itself felt within the podcasting world, particularly the moment over the summer when Alex Jones’s Infowars podcasts were removed from several major platforms. But industry discussions quickly […]
An Arrest Down Under
A popular Australian true crime podcast brings us back to an old question: how far does this rabbit hole go?
Acast raises $35 million in Series C funding
The money will apparently fund expansion into new content and territories, a push towards more non-advertising revenue streams, and an improved offering for smart speakers.
In the UK, the podcast-to-TV pipeline is budding
A look at “Storypunk,” one British television writer’s gambit to make this a thing across the pond.
On “Low Barriers to Entry”
There was a familiar line in the intro to TIME’s “Best Podcasts of 2018” list that came out last week, perhaps you’ve heard of it: “Unlike film, television or music, there’s a low barrier to entry in the podcasting world: All you need is a microphone and someone to speak into it.” It’s a stubbornly […]