Sword and Scale abruptly ends

• Wondery has parted ways with Mike Boudet’s true crime podcast Sword and Scale, after Boudet had repeatedly posted comments many found offensive, and behaved aggressively online. Sword and Scale posted an emotional announcement from Boudet, who blames Aaron Mahnke and Rabia Chaudry, and says he has laid off his staff and closed his show. Chaudry congratulates Wondery for “finally doing the right thing”; Mahnke claims, in a long thread, that Boudet has been increasingly aggressive and that hundreds of people had complained to Wondery. A freelance journalist called Maggi sums up the story from her point of view.

• John Lee Dumas was the first keynote speaker at Podfest. Slides from his talk, The top 4 tactics for creating, launching, growing and monetising your podcast, are available online. “JLD”, as he calls himself, was also the target of the humorous “roast” at the end of the event, which took place in Orlando FL, USA and attracted podcasters from across the US and Canada. Other speakers included Libsyn’s Rob Walch, Evo Terra, and Chartable’s Dave Zohrob. It was sponsored by Himalaya.

  • Our Editor, James Cridland, was on an episode of The New Media Show recorded live at the event (which is also available in the Spreaker Live Show podcast; he was a guest alongside She Podcasts’s Elsie Escobar.

• Spotify, the #2 podcast platform, will be pre-installed in new Samsung phones, it’s been announced. (The Google Podcasts app is not even pre-installed on Google’s own Pixel phones, though the player is).

  • Spotify was released a week ago in India: it already has more than 1m users.

• Luminary aren’t making friends on Twitter, with a tone-deaf first tweet.

• Sonix, a transcription and editing service, have added custom dictionaries to their transcription tool. Got a co-presenter called Nikki, or want to mention a podcast called Podnews? Now it’ll get it right every time.

• Voxnest has partnered with music platform Jamendo to offer easier access to licensed music for podcasts.

• Plus Belle La Vie, a famous French television show on France 3, now has a fiction podcast to accompany the show. It’s the first fiction podcast for a TV show in France. It’s made with Bababam.

• Metrics for the podcasting industry remains an issue with some. Inside Radio report on the metrics discussions at the RAIN Podcast Business Summit last week. Your Editor moderated a panel - mention of his sparkling repartee is, remarkably, absent.

  
  This link is no longer available, as at Aug 11 2023

• The RTX Podcast Festival is a new event in Austin TX in July, as part of RTX, a gaming, animation and internet culture event.

• Can Anchor be “the YouTube of Podcasts”, asks The Verge. #thesomethingofpodcasts

Podcasts

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  Masala Jones claims it’s the first-ever Asian-American scripted podcast, and touches on themes of race, representation, and sex positivity. (Khrisp Audio, Pleasure Podcasts, Podbean)
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  Ghost Town, a comedy podcast about mysterious, abandoned and esoteric places all over the world, will have a live stage show on April 25th in Los Angeles CA, USA. (Megaphone)
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  The Uncertain Hour is gearing up for season three, which opens March 21st. It “dives into the uncertainties of our lives and goes down the strange rabbit holes of history to find the origin stories of the economy we live in”. (Marketplace/APM)