BBC launches new podcast unit

• The BBC has launched a new unit in Bristol, UK, focusing on podcasts. The Creative Development Unit, led by Clare McGinn, is part of a rebranded production division now known as BBC Audio. It has a core team of four. The BBC employs around 35,000 people, and by that measure is the largest broadcaster in the world.

  • Meanwhile, Times Radio - a new national radio station from The Times of London - launched this morning.

• How big is podcasting’s “independent” audience? Tom Webster has some numbers: and it turns out that actually, it’s still satisfyingly high.

• The Podcast Academy has relaxed the terms of new registrations. “No more letters of recommendation”, says the Chair, Rob Greenlee: you’ll just need to give the names of two people to vouch for you.

• The Podcasters Directory is to launch in early July. The directory offers a free listing, and allows podcasters to be matched with guests and resources.

• Audacity has had a maintenance release to v2.4.2: 41 bugs have been fixed.

  
  Aug 25 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.
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• Being a Podcast Editor is not as easy as you think, says Tere Bautista.

• Joshua Dudley reviews the new Wondery app. “It’s a solid app that plays it safe and colors inside the lines,” he says.

• Sports podcast company Blue Wire has signed Greg Olsen from the Seattle Seahawks for an interview show.

• What effect has the pandemic had on podcasts in India? Not much, says Indus Vox Media’s Amit Doshi, in an interview in Quartz India.

• Carl Robinson highlights the problem with audio content marketing: 'today’s audio creation tools are very slow and costly to use’. It promotes Rumble Studio, an automated system that interviews your guests “asynchronously”.

  
  Aug 25 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

Tips and tricks - with Podcorn

• Jeremy Enns suggests that to improve a podcast, you first need a roadmap.
• Nothing to do with podcasting: or is it? Here’s how Paul Schrader writes a (movie) script.

Podcast News - with The Jordan Harbinger Show

On The Jordan Harbinger Show My Life As A Secret Love Child. Now that I’m 18, is it right for me to still be kept a secret from my father’s other family? Listen to Feedback Friday

Salt and vinegar potato crisps have green packets in the UK, but they didn’t always use to be: Walkers, the biggest brand there, switched the pack colours for some reason in the early 1990s. Or did they? The Walkers Switch is, so the makers say, like Serial, but for crisps. And yes, it’s in the true-crime category. Quite rightly. (They’re purple in Australia, by the way).

Unfinished: Deep South is the newest documentary series to join Stitcher’s Witness Docs investigate podcast network. It investigates the unsolved lynching of a wealthy African American farmer and WWI veteran, Isadore Banks, in Arkansas at the dawn of the Civil Rights movement.

Mike lost his new job at the start of the pandemic. His podcast, What Happens Now?, shares stories of how other people are coping, and finding positives from the crisis. Today, Mike interviews the CEO who made him redundant in March.

Death Sex & Money and Luminary show Love + Radio are co-producing a two-part series with stories from listeners of both podcasts on how people are coping without physical touch in isolation. The series, called Skin Hunter, all started from a tweet.