Murder case reopened, thanks to a true-crime podcast

Welcome to new subscribers from Spotify, Acast, Mumbrella, Fairfax Media, NY Public Radio, Wondery, Enders Analysis, Gimlet, Westwood One, the BBC, Whistledown, and a large amount of UK book publishers.

• In Australia, the ABC’s true-crime podcast Trace has resulted in a 38 year-old murder case being reopened. The podcast included revelations about possible suspects and a forensics bungle.

  
  Aug 8 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

• There are now 609,000 podcasts in the Apple Podcasts directory. Daniel J Lewis posts that 158,000 podcasts have three or fewer episodes; and that 43% of all podcasts haven’t released a new episode in 2018.

• Jack Rhysider posts how blackhat marketers are ruining the Apple Podcast Charts. In case you missed it, the latest episode of his podcast Darknet Diaries focuses on the people who manipulate the charts. Separately, AV Club is the latest publication to highlight the manipulation of the chart, which we first reported in May.

• Registration is open for Podcast Day 2019, by Radiodays Europe. The event is in June in central London; and the link above goes to a “super early bird” ticket. Podnews is a media partner.

• The Google Podcasts app is preparing an 'episode search’ feature, allowing you to search within episodes (presumably, search the show notes for guests and topics discussed). The feature was first seen in the source code in July.

• Lots of data about podcasts in Puerto Rico. The most popular hosts for the podcasts surveyed are Anchor, Libsyn and iVoox.

• Apple Music is now available on Amazon Echo smart speakers.

• Koo! is a “social network for short-form podcasts”, profiled in TechCrunch. It’s similar to what was once called Audioboo, the original incarnation of Anchor, and SoundMite.

• Podcast Brunch Club (it’s like a book club, but for podcasts) is trying something new for December, recommending a binge listen of Last Seen.

Podcasts

Ho, ho, ho. The Santa Daily has been launched by UK children’s radio station Fun Kids. Santa Claus has a podcast of his own, and he’s letting us know what he’s up to.

Unstructured has hit episode 100. Eric Hunley chats with forensic linguist James R. Fitzgerald who is behind the capture of the Unabomber and worked many other cases.

Last week, Sydney’s 2SER launched the second season of History Lab. It starts with a curious tale of the first deposit into the first ever bank in Australia. (Whooshkaa)

Everyone fails once in a while. How do we use it as a catalyst for success? Art of Failure talks to people who’ve failed - and then succeeded. (Libsyn)

Thunder Bay focuses on the Ontario town in Canada, which has “the highest homicide rate in the country. A mayor and his wife charged with extortion. A police chief put on trial for obstruction of justice. Nine tragic deaths of Indigenous teenagers. Why does it all happen here?”

Irish website The Daily Edge really likes the podcast Table Manners with Jesse Ware, which recently won an award: they describe it as “warm, charming, and funny”.