Did a true-crime podcast nearly stop a conviction?

• Can true crime podcasts get in the way of a successful conviction? In Denmark, the trial of a Norwegian woman accused of fraud was briefly threatened by a hit podcast, The Woman With The Heavy Suitcase (in Danish), which covered claims about her activity. Lawyers acting on her behalf raised the concern that she may not get a fair trial because of the podcast; but, happily, none of the judges had listened to it. She was sentenced to 18 months in prison last month, and banned from entering Denmark for twelve years: a ruling which she has appealed.

• Netflix has self-censored an episode of Patriot Act in Saudi Arabia, after government regulators there requested the removal of an episode about journalist Jamal Khashoggi. ListenNotes reveals that there are 2,676 podcast episodes concerning the journalist, not all of which may be positive to the Saudi government.

  
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• A new Smart Subscribe Plugin for Wordpress sites, launched yesterday, promises to display only relevant buttons to help turn website visitors into subscribers.

• Like book club but for podcasts, PodcastBrunchClub’s listening list for January 2019 is Community Responses to Disability.

• Sean Howard has written a set of posts about how to get the best out of Patreon. Part five, posted today, discusses use of a new Patreon feature, a Special Offer. Meanwhile, Tanner Campbell highlights alternatives to Patreon. (You can support Podnews via Patreon or directly.)

  
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• Gladiator, a podcast from the Boston Globe and Wondery, could be making it onto TV - the podcast’s television rights have been optioned by FX, a US television network. As the New York Times reports, Hollywood is buying hit podcasts in the race for content.

Stats and data

• As we reported late last year, podcasting in India is growing faster than anywhere else. ZeeBusiness notes that “podcasting platforms in India have seen listenership grow by a staggering 24x in the past 2 years alone.”

Podcasts

OZY Confidential promises “raw, rant-o-riffic crosstalk from the edge”, hosted by Eugene S. Robinson, who “gets heavy, deep and real with everyone from a world renowned Nietzsche scholar who left behind a PhD for life as a crack whore, to Boston Irish Mafia’s Kevin Weeks.” It launches on January 14th. (Libsyn)

Has everyone got a book in them? Bestseller: a self-publishing podcast by Reedsy tells the story of a former sportswear CEO, Shaz Kahng, and her first foray into self-publishing.

Developers’ corner

• Podnews self-hosts our podcast (and website). We’ve discovered Amazon Athena, a service which allows fancy SQL queries on server logfiles. We plan an article on using these for podcast statistics, and we’d be keen to hear from any developers who’ve used this already (and sharing notes).