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 […]

I spent much of the past week attending the Hot Docs Podcast Festival in the great city of Toronto, and I brought back a scattered collection of notes and observations on Canadian podcasting that I’m ill-equipped at the moment to string together into some unified clarifying narrative. But I’ll share what I have in the […]

Quick preamble: I was working on my taxes yesterday when I realized that last Thursday marked the two-year point since I incorporated Hot Pod Media LLC. To celebrate the occasion, I’m hauling an old Hot Pod feature out of retirement just for this issue: the unnecessary deployment of irrelevant GIFs. Thanks for being a reader, […]

Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is issue 149, published January 30, 2018. One month in. When Apple rolled out its long-awaited in-episode podcast analytics last month, part of the anxiety (and excitement, really) was finding out whether, essentially, the world would end. Which is to say, whether this whole podcast thing […]

Slate Outlook. This is a tad newsier and more with-the-pack than I generally like to be, but whatever — there’s a bunch of juicy, usable stuff in here. Slate readers woke up this morning to something big from the 22-year-old online magazine: a total redesign, complete with an overhauled backend to improve the site’s user […]

Just a heads up: I’m told that the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) will indeed be publishing a 2018 update to its podcast advertising study, which means we’ll be able to get at least one contiguous read of the industry’s year-over-year ad revenue growth. As a reminder, the IAB’s inaugural podcast advertising report, which dropped last […]