Radiodays Europe's Podcast Day host city for 2019 announced

• Radiodays Europe’s Podcast Day will be in London, it’s been announced, on 13 June 2019. The preceding two events were in Copenhagen, Denmark.

• Spanish national newspaper El Pais covers podcasting “for mothers and fathers”, highlighting the popularity of the parenting genre in the country.

• As spotted in Podnews in August, Amazon is caching daily news briefing updates. We’ve spotted a specific useragent, AmazonNewsContentService, in a few lines in our podcast logfiles. Amazon does ask for very high bitrate files (320k MP3!) for their news briefings, and it could be to reduce transcoding artifacts.

• Podcast platform Messy·FM, which has a free tier, has released a slew of new features. “Listener support” adds a tip-jar to your podcast, with payment handled for you; a new embedded player is now available; promotion of podcasts throughout the “messy” platform has also gone live, as has access to individual podcast coaches. They’ve sent more information to users.

• What’s behind Spotify’s move into podcasting? Rolling Stone think it’s simple - it could save Spotify’s business. Every podcast listened-to within Spotify means none of those pesky record companies to pay.

Get the free Podnews newsletter for more like this

Get it free

• In almost perfect symmetry, Richard Davies asks Can podcasting heal our national divide?, while CNN claims that podcasts help extremists get their message out. Both may well be true.

• If you’ve an iPhone… you know the icon for the Voice Memo app? Here’s what it means.

• Event: the Vancouver Podcast Festival is at the end of this week (Nov 8-10). Here, for example, is just one of the sessions, including speakers from Podnews supporters Spreaker/Voxnest, Himalaya, and The Podcast Exchange.

• Meanwhile, the Editor of Podnews finds himself in Toronto ON, Canada at the end of this week, and is free for a beer and a chat on Friday afternoon/evening. Get in touch!

Opinion

• What is a podcast, exactly? Stabl asked a bunch of people, and got a bunch of answers. Here’s Pete Naughton’s:

  
  Aug 7 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

  It seems to me there are two answers. There’s the techie one, that a podcast is an episodic audio series distributed via an RSS feed. Then there’s the one which I’d give to my gran: podcasts are radio programmes from all over the world that you can listen to on your phone.

• Adam Bowie discusses daily news podcasts.

  As long as producers realise that they’re not trying to compete with 24 hour news channels that are rushing to break news, then podcasting publishing timescales can work well.

• Gustaf Lindberg posts “ways to keep your podcast listeners glued”:

  Contrary to popular belief, your podcast does not have to be uber serious for it to be considered topnotch. You can still inject humour and fun yet deliver something beneficial and meaty.

Podcasts

Chapo is the first podcast from Vice News, focusing on Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán’s trial. It’s also available in Spanish, as El Chapo, and Vice themselves report that prosecutors are concerned this may impact the trial.

A favour: please help us grow

Podnews is growing fast, but we’d like it to grow even faster, and this week we’d like to push for even more subscribers. So, please consider helping us do that - link to us on social media, tell your podcast group all about us, forward this to your colleagues, or do whatever you can. Podnews is an independent podcast newsletter with a global viewpoint: neither myopically focused on the US market, nor chasing advertisers. Our total subscriber number is always quoted at the top of each issue. Thank you.