Blubrry launches private podcasting tools

• First look: Podcast hosting and analytics company Blubrry has announced a private internal podcasting service, allowing companies and organisations to produce secure audio and video on-demand for their employees and members. The company says it’s responding to increased need, driven by the high number of people working from home.

• The winners of the Webby Awards 2020 have been announced.

• Podtrac has released their top 20 US podcasts for April 2020. The Daily is still #1. The service only measures participating publishers.

  
  Aug 24 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

• Google Podcasts for iOS has added CarPlay support. It’s rolling out on the Apple App Store. Of note: its useragent has changed to start GooglePodcasts/ - the OPAWG list has been updated.

• An award-winning folk podcast, Folk on Foot is to run a second music festival online this Monday May 25. The first, over Easter, raised over £110,000 (US$134,000) to support musicians who are unable to earn a living during the coronavirus.

• Congratulations to the Podcast Movement team, who are celebrating over 35,000 members in the Podcast Movement Facebook community. You should take part!

• Quill is running a contest to give away a set of podcasting gear and services. It’s free to take part, and you’ve until Jun 10 to enter.

• RADIO·COM, the podcast and radio app from Entercom, has released data showing continued growth of the app. It boasts 15,000 podcasts (including Podnews)

• In the UK, the BBC has said that they’ll open BBC Sounds, their podcast app, to non-BBC podcasts. While others report this as if it’s news, the BBC is merely restating their policy, and it has already contained a handful of third-party podcasts. In November 2018 at launch BBC Sounds contained two third-party podcasts; one was heavily edited, missing a third of its episodes and having all commercial content removed.

• Andi McDaniel has been named the new CEO of Chicago Public Media. She’ll start in September; the organisation looks after WBEZ, home of - among others, This American Life and Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!

• The Australian ABC posted this urgent Twitter message which we feel our public duty to pass on, given our subscribers are especially affected.

• BAFTA and Emmy winning producer John Battsek has been signed by Audible UK to produce an exclusive documentary, Deepcut, examining the deaths of four young soldiers at the Princes Royal Barracks in Surrey.

Virtual Events

• This Saturday May 23 is the Booking Your Dream Guest Virtual Conference, with a number of excellent speakers including Eric Hunley, Dave Jackson, Super Joe Pardo and many others. It’s free to take part.

• Wed May 27, 2pm ET: Acast’s Feed Drop: Laughter Is The Best Medicine, a free virtual event about comedy in the podcasting industry.

• Next Thursday May 28 is the Podcast Festival. Our Editor, James Cridland, will be appearing alongside Kara Swisher, Podchaser’s Bradley Davis, the BBC’s Commissioning Editor of Podcasts for BBC Sounds Jason Phipps, and podcast producer Dr Siobhán McHugh. Tickets are still available for Podnews readers here.

• Audiocraft, the Australian podcast festival, will happen in virtual form on Jul 25, they’ve announced today.

  
  Aug 24 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

Tips and tricks

• After the S-Town legal case, now settled, media lawyer David Oxenford reminds us to get releases signed. (Local laws may differ).

Podcast News

Have you been outside recently? Weird, isn’t it? Can we all come out now? has “advice from people who have spent time away from society as they knew it, and then returned, changed”. It launches today.

How does Wondery’s Business Wars work behind the scenes? David Brown joins Sound Cartel’s Podcasting Essentials to explain how to produce an award-winning podcast.

Norm Pattiz, founder of PodcastOne, talks to Dan Granger in Oxford Media Presents: Media’s New Deal. The LivexLive/PodcastOne deal is “more like a merger”, he says.

NHS Kind to Your Mind, a podcast focusing on mental health, has been released by Voiceworks. The episodes include former Premier League footballer Andy Cole, and are designed to help keyworkers and their wider family with mental health and wellbeing during the coronavirus pandemic.

The duo responsible for Call Her Daddy are, according to Dave Portnoy, the founder of Barstool Sports, “unprofessional, disloyal and greedy” according to a new podcast in their feed, reports The New York Times.

StoryCorps is back for a new season. The podcast invested in new technology to enable remote recording of interviews, which are also held in the Library of Congress.

Thank you to Terry Mills of Views from a military mind for being Podnews’s latest personal supporter. We rely on people like Terry to help us publish every day. Thank you for your support

Privacy: As of today, we now delete all server logs automatically after 180 days (for our website and our podcast audio). We used to retain that information indefinitely. Ain’t nobody got time for that. Our privacy policy has been updated, and is otherwise unchanged.

New things: Our podcasting jobs service, Podjobs, now has an easier-to-use text editor to make it even easier to post your jobs and make them look pretty.