Serial gets a governors award

• BREAKING: The Podcast Academy has just announced that Serial will be awarded the Governors Award, recognising the impact a podcast or individual has had on the industry. Co-creators Sarah Koenig and Julie Snyder will accept the award at The Ambies next Tuesday.

• Spotify has updated its list of partners for Spotify Open Access, a method to make subscription content available on Spotify. It’s now supported by subscription platforms Supporting Cast, Supercast, Memberful, Hello Audio, Audiomeans, and Vriend van de Show.

  • The company has signed Bababam and Choses à Savoir onto their podcast platform Megaphone. The publishers, two of the biggest in France, will be early testers of the Spotify Audience Network in the country.
  • Spotify’s engineering team has posted technical details on how their natural language search service works for podcasts. This has been rolled out for most users and should improve the search experience.

• Harry and Meghan’s Archewell Audio is getting ready to launch a new show on Spotify: and given some clues as to why there have been delays. A spokesperson for Archewell Audio has told Podnews that they’ve been having conversations with Spotify about trust and safety, minimising the spread of misinformation and supporting transparency. They’ve had a number of meetings with the company - including their senior leadership - stressing a responsibility for quality, fact-based information, especially around mental health. Those meetings appear to have gone well; and so Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, is now on track to launch her first podcast series this summer.

• In a piece entitled Podcasting’s International Subscription Revenue Opportunity, Variety carries research from YouGov across different countries, with attitudes on willingness to pay for subscription shows and podcast listening frequency. Brits are least likely to want to pay for podcasts; Indonesians the most likely.

• Podetize has announced new initiatives to support women-founded, women-led podcasts.

• Acast is producing some “mashups” of their favourite UK podcasts, in aid of Comic Relief’s Red Nose Day, which is today. The UK charity helps people in the UK and around the world live free from poverty, violence and discrimination, and support people with their mental health, including supporting people in Ukraine and those attempting to cross the border. You can donate here.

• IAB Podcasts Upfront will be held virtually on May 10-12.

  
  Sep 12 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

• Podcast app Fountain has released a new version, including Lightning Comments, improvements to the player, and support for the 'person’ tag.

Programming note: We’re at Podcast Movement Evolutions next week. From Tuesday to Friday, we’ll be focusing on a smaller amount of stories from the event.

Moves and hires

• Jason Jed Raqueno has joined the IAB Tech Lab as their new Senior Director, Privacy, Identity and Data Protection. He was previously working on digital and ad media privacy for Loblaw, a Canadian retailer. (Worthwhile mentioning that someone with this job title appears not to use LinkedIn!).

Podcast News

Today’s episode of Pod Chat from Danny Brown features Podnews’s Editor, James Cridland. The fortnightly show launched this month with an interview with Hall of Famer Evo Terra.

The team behind Shelter in Place: escape into life is celebrating two years of award-winning work and almost two hundred episodes. The show is an award-winning narrative nonfiction podcast.