# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is issue 217, dated July 9, 2019.

A midyear check-in. I feel like I've been somnambulant. How is it already July? The past half-year slipped by like a breeze, and I'm still processing the two big news events that have defined the year in podcasting so far: Spotify's massive buys into podcasting and Luminary's bungled rollout, the latter of which has begun to carry the weight of a parable.

Both are complicated stories with endless implications, but they also happen to be the kinds of stories with consequences that will only become truly apparent in the slow, trickling aggregate - bit by bit and then all at once, like tankers in the ocean. Or climate change, I suppose. Which is why, at this point into the year, I continue to fixate on anything and everything related to those two tentpole developments. My repetitive return to these topics might strike some as dead-horse whacking, but I'm sticking with my gut. Few stories strike me as more important in podcastland, at least for now.

First, though, let's kick off this check-in the way we always do: with the big data points I keep taped to the corner of my desk:

Audience size: 90 million U.S. monthly listeners (or 32 percent of the US population 12 and older), according to the latest Infinite Dial report from Edison and Triton Digital, which gives the industry its clearest number to beat. That was a sizable jump up from 57 million last year and the biggest leap in monthly listenership to date.

Advertising: Podcast ad revenue was $479.1 million in 2018, according to the IAB/PwC's study on the matter, now in its third year. That's up from 2017's estimate of $313.9 million, and the report projects revenues to top $1 billion in 2021. As always, it's worth noting that the study primarily draws from the self-reporting of 22 podcast companies, which is to say I view the number best interpreted as the floor.

At this point I usually list a third data point: the number of iTunes (now firmly Apple Podcasts) downloads and streams as publicly disclosed by Apple at the end of each year. The assumption being, of course, that Apple Podcasts continues to drive the majority of all podcast listening, and therefore serves as a good sizing benchmark. I'm not sure how well that assumption holds up anymore, though we can't say anything for certain until we get a reliable third-party study or a competing platform (specifically Spotify) starts putting out similar number flexes. For now, though, I'm content to retire this metric during these check-ins to acknowledge the probable decreasing centrality of the Apple Podcast downloads/streams data within our framing benchmarks. The times, they are a-changin', as should we.

Okay! With those numbers laid out, here are the two big questions I'm taking with me from the first half of 2019:

1. Do we actually know what Spotify is supposed to become?

Given the intensity surrounding its acquisitions and subsequent announcements, it's tempting to think that we know a lot - even too much - about what the Swedish audio streaming platform aspires to look like in the future. But I don't think that's the case. In fact, I'd venture to say we know next to nothing.

We know the moves: the acquisition of content studios Gimlet Media and Parcast; the other acquisition of social audio app-turned-easy hosting platform Anchor; the hiring of TV veteran Liz Gateley as head of creative development for podcasts; the redesigned UX that positions podcasting on par with music; the testing of podcast playlists; the content deals ( the Obamas, et al.); the aspirational messaging of becoming an all-consuming audio platform. But as Spotify officials mentioned onstage at the Hot Pod Summit back in February, there wasn't really a master plan in place that drove those first acquisitions, at least not then. Rather, there's a general goal and a willingness to make bold bets in its direction.

It remains unclear whether that's changed. What we have, though, is a muck of details to sort through. How will Gimlet Media and Parcast relate to Spotify, and to each other? Will they be kept silos with their own P&L sheets (for some reason, I doubt it), or will they be directly integrated into the greater machine? How will Gateley's machinations - which I assume includes further dealmaking, talent signings, and new project development - factor into everything? Who gets priority, both within the organization and, more concretely, within the context of the app's user experience? How will third-party publishers be handled, and relatedly, how will Anchor be deployed? If it becomes a multi-sided market, how will the incentives work? Who has power, and who gets to make decisions?

Basic questions. What's not so basic, though, is the complexity of how all these questions will fit together as a system that handles a steady flow of projects big and small moving forward. An immediate test case: When it comes to the Obamas deal, presumably a very valuable asset, who in the company gets to take the lead on that?

All these detail pieces can be further sorted, I think, under a larger umbrella question: What will be the organizing principle? We can broadly discern the specific outcomes that are desired. From a business perspective, it's essentially whatever helps the platform obtain more users, convert more into subscribers, and keep everyone on the service for longer.

But what will be the appropriate creative strategy that'll get them to those ends? Does this mean creating more types of content for more types of people - not unlike, say, what HBO is now apparently being made to do under AT&T's corporate ownership? Or does this mean something more focused - to have the concept of a "Spotify Original Podcast" mean a specific thing with a specific brand identity, à la Pixar? (My guess: They'll first try for both, then they'll trend towards the former.) It's all pure potential energy right now, by which I mean anybody can basically say anything about Spotify's plans and I'll be like, yeah, totally, cool. But I'm excited for twelve months from now, after the honeymoon is over, when the real work of marriage has begun.

2. What will people pay for?

The immediate lessons from Luminary's messy rollout were pretty straightforward. Chiefly: None of this is going to come easy, especially when you're walking into a community, forged with strong ideological roots, with a big sack of cash looking to make some changes. It behooves one to grasp the full context and incentive system of said community, engage in proper outreach, forge meaningful coalitions. Only then can one begin to do all the disruptive things one aspires to do; in Luminary's case, that's the already tempestuous work of dealmaking, curating a strong portfolio, build a product experience that's actually better than the alternatives (and preferably, one that's not buggy on launch), and market the crap out of the whole banana.

But I also think the larger lesson we should take from Luminary, as an archetype of the emergent paid-podcast subscription platform model, revolves around the question of value - what it is, exactly, that people will be willing to pay for. This is a problem being explored breathlessly everywhere else in the media business too, from news organizations ( where things don't look too pretty) to major media conglomerates looking to play catchup with Netflix (look, if they've got Hiro Murai directing the Station Eleven adaptation, I'm paying for WarnerMedia's streaming service for at least a month). And so it goes as well here in podcastland.

This shouldn't come as a surprise to you by now, but I haven't found Luminary's answer to that question all that compelling just yet. The startup's messaging out of the gate was a blend of "don't you hate ads" (see: the Sign Bunny fiasco) and "we've got premium stuff," with the interpretation of "premium" being some mix of celebrity power, a handful of not-quite-blue-chip podcast assets, a small spread of native high-upside podcast-talent that might have needed more time as free options in to further increase their stock value, and some side projects from publishers that continue to do most of their business on the open ecosystem. It's not that any of these portfolio pieces are actively bad; in fact, most of them are decent-to-quite-good. They just don't collectively form any identity. Ask me what a Luminary Original is supposed to be and I'll be damned if I could tell you. (I should also add that this critique doesn't exclusively apply to Luminary; it applies equally to Stitcher Premium too. And I love Headlong!)

It's worth restating that the power of a creative identity - à la Pixar or pre-AT&T HBO - is only one of the many reasons that someone might choose to pay for a content subscription. Yes, exclusivity might be another, which I suspect was part of Luminary's thinking, though the proposition is less potent in the face of endless free alternatives. A track record of creating buzzy culture-driving hits could be another, though nobody in podcasts seems to have exhibited that edge just yet. Also, as I've mentioned before, I still very much believe in subject specificity - e.g., I'd like more sports podcast content in my life, therefore I would invest in a service that would continuously meet my needs on that front.

And then there are all the reasons for smaller sustainability-seeking operations, principally the whole "I'd pay so-and-so dollars a month because I want to support this publisher" value proposition. You know, much like how some very nice people choose to pay $7 per month to help the continued production from a newsletter about podcasts. *cough*

The nexus of paid value and podcasting gets more interesting, I think, when you try to squish Spotify into the equation. Spotify, of course, is already a platform rich with paying subscribers. It practices a freemium model, which gives paid subscribers an ad-free experience and access to more consumption features. At this point, the company hasn't talked much about pushing hard into exclusive podcast content, but I mean, come on, does a bear crap in the woods? It's going to happen. And when it does - well, doesn't it seem that they would basically have the business Luminary and Stitcher Premium want to have? Plus they've already cleared the fundamental hurdle: giving people a reason to pay and getting enough of them to build a formidable base. Hell, this race might already be over.

Anyway, that's it on the check-in front. Oh, I'll toss in one more thing: my Best of the Year (So Far) list for Vulture. Okay, let's move on.

Guy Raz to step away from the TED Radio Hour (plus star power in podcasting). This came in just before the long weekend: Guy Raz, the wildly industrious purveyor of wonder and enthusiasm, will be stepping away from the TED Radio Hour as host and editorial director at the end of this year. In a statement, NPR, which co-produces the popular "podcast about ideas" with TED, announced that they will soon be kicking off a national search - "looking inside NPR and across the media landscape" - for a new host. The show is said to be one of NPR's most downloaded podcasts, and it is currently aired by more than 600 public radio stations. Raz will continue working with NPR on How I Built This and Wow in the World.

I reckon Raz is probably one of the few battle-tested talents in this business. By which I mean, he's one of the very few people who has a track record of driving audiences for new podcast projects, again and again. He's had an interesting path: Now 44, he spent most of his professional career at NPR, where he started out as an intern on All Things Considered and rose up through the ranks over the next two decades, with pit stops as a correspondent for CNN and as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard. In 2013, he became host and editorial director of the TED Radio Hour, which would become the starting point for Raz's adventures in empire building. He would go on to launch two other projects, How I Built This, the wildly popular business interview podcast, and Wow In The World, NPR's first foray into kids' programming. Last year, he was attached to a Spotify exclusive project, a music interview show called The Rewind.

If we're keeping on brand with TED, one big idea this makes me think about: Have we had a proper conversation about star power in podcasting yet? Specifically, "star power" as a show development mechanism where a particular talent, native to podcasting, can be plopped into a project and have the name currency of that talent actually mean something on a material audience conversion level. I think we've seen this very rarely so far; the most recent example I can think of 99% Invisible's Avery Trufelman being recruited to host a new Vox Media property, Nice Try. Frankly, I probably wouldn't have rushed to check it out if Trufelman wasn't attached to the project.

Anyway, it feels like star power in podcasting has largely interpreted so far as an importing strategy: "Let's pay Celebrity So-and-So with not that much experience behind the mic a million dollars to make a podcast and maybe attract their fans." With few exceptions - the Conan O'Brien crossover, in particular, turned out pretty well - I don't think that has really worked out. I'm fairly convinced there's more value to be found cultivating that currency within the community.

Here's a thought exercise: If you had to make a list of podcast talents you'd feel comfortable betting a good portion for your personal bank account on, how long would that list be? I mean, don't actually bet your life savings on podcasting, of course, but hypothetically? Me, I think I have...15, maybe 16 people? Six, if we're talking about ones who aren't already making gobs of money?

Anyway, more power to Raz, who will presumably use his newly freed-up time to make even more podcasts. And for what it's worth, I hope NPR documents its search for a new TED Radio Hour host. This is the stuff of reality programming.

Director's commentary, but for podcasting [by Caroline Crampton]. We love a good director's commentary track in my house. I still buy DVDs most of the time for the extras, and when it comes to films I really love, I sometimes play them while I'm writing with the commentary track going in the background with the screen dimmed so there's no picture. There's something about the focused energy of the filmmaker's voices analyzing their own work that I find really conducive to productivity. It's a quirk. (Also: I will never get over the fact that in the first few seconds of the commentary track for the 1995 adaptation of Sense and Sensibility, Emma Thompson pretends to review her own "appearance" as the woman in the Columbia Pictures title card. A highly formative piece of metafiction.)

There are a lot of similarities between the classic film commentary track and your average pop culture podcast, superficial and otherwise. They usually feature people who know each other well and who've come together to talk about a film or TV show in extreme detail. Banter and chemistry are as crucial to good commentary tracks as they are to good culture podcasts, along with earnest and enjoyable tangents.

Above all, they're primarily audio products. Most of the time you don't really need to be able to see the film under discussion in order to enjoy the conversation. Given this, it's been frustrating and somewhat baffling for me, as a fan of the classic commentary, that this format has been slow to make the leap to digital and streaming technology. It feels obvious that platforms like Netflix and Amazon should have a "toggle commentary on/off" button - it can't be that complicated technologically, surely? - but it's yet to turn up as a widespread option.

That's not to say that they haven't experimented with it a bit. On Netflix, there was a version of "House of Cards"' opening season that you could steam with commentary, though it's no longer available to play nowadays, and on Amazon Prime, you can watch the first season of "Transparent" with commentary audio from creator Jill Soloway, although you have to stream it as a separate title.

Now, it looks like Netflix is scratching this itch a little deeper with the launch of Watching With, a podcast where each episode can also double as an alternate audio track for the film in question. The two episodes out so far feature director Kaytin Robinson discussing her film Someone Great, as well as director Nahnatchka Khan and producer/actor Randall Park talking about Always Be My Maybe. It's a bit of a jerry-rigged solution - the show is accessible as normal via podcatchers, and host Jarett Wieselman just counts the listener/viewer down from three so that they press play at the same time and therefore have their picture synced up with the podcast's audio.

Netflix, of course, isn't by any means the first to use podcasts as a handy workaround for the inbuilt commentary track - from Simpsons show Four Finger Discount to the experimental audio show Imaginary Advice to Rebecca Lavoie's HGTV & Me, various podcast folks have been playing with this construction for a good while. Shows like The Ringer's Binge Mode and your classic episode-by-episode TV recap podcasts sit in an adjacent space to the pure commentary podcast, as does an awful lot of other pop culture podcast discussion and critique. (Sidenote: I would also put podcasts about podcasts, e.g. Before It Had a Theme, which covers This American Life episodes, in an adjacent category to all this. Did I mention that I love all things meta?)

Plenty of audio producers I've spoken to over the years have expressed interest in formal commentary accompaniments as a potential format for podcasting, but the issue of rights and permissions is mostly what stops makers from testing out these waters. To make such podcast commentary more comprehensible for listeners who aren't playing the film in front of them, or to help sync it up when they are, you'd ideally need to be able to play good chunks of the film's audio - far beyond what's usually acceptable to qualify for fair use - under discussion. And that's just not something that's typically possible.

This, of course, is where streaming giants like Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu have a huge advantage over your average independent podcaster. These days, they not only license and distribute a lot of content - they also make their own original shows and films, which are therefore much easier to create additional extras around, since there are no ownership negotiations required and they already have easy access to the talent involved. It's no accident that the first two episodes of Watching With cover Netflix originals - it works both from a rights point of view, but it also makes the podcast commentary a handy branded publicity extension for the works being discussed.

It's this last aspect that makes sense of the commentary podcast as part of Netflix's budding orchestrations around audio as a marketing channel. (Nick recently wrote an overview of their podcasting endeavors so far for Vulture, which you should check out.) Netflix doesn't appear to be making any moves on becoming the "Netflix for podcasts" - that title which so many other recent entrants into the industry crave - and has instead focused on launching shows that aim to get viewers spending more time with the platform's properties (and presumably strengthening their relationship with their Netflix account). This commentary-as-podcast show fits right into that, giving fans another way of connecting with a Netflix original.

Although I still have hopes that the built-in commentary track will still make the leap to streaming platforms as a default feature, releasing them as podcasts is a canny first step. It comes with little-to-no development costs and operates as a handy marketing tool, since the audio is accessible to those without a subscription. I'd be curious to see if the likes of Netflix will do something like loosen restrictions around outside podcasters using their materials to create commentary podcasts...though I realize that's unlikely because, well, capitalism. Still, I live in hope.

The long-tail news peg. When the first two of earthquakes hit Southern California last week, I instantly thought about two things. The first was Kathryn Schulz's "The Really Big One," which I've reread every six months for the past four years and which crosses my mind at least once every other week. The second was: "Man, that KPCC earthquake project was really well-timed."

I'm referring, of course, to The Big One: Your Survival Guide, KPCC's service-journalism-meets-speculative-fiction project, published earlier this year, that endeavors to help listeners in southern California and beyond with earthquake preparedness and give them a tangible sense of what to do if/when the big one hits.

And well timed it was. "We did see a spike in downloads, and there we were again in the top charts in Apple," Arwen Champion Nicks, who leads KPCC's podcast team, told me over email. "What was great to see was how many people who had listened to it tweeting about it and recommending it to people." Indeed, I saw that last bit for myself. All across Twitter, in communities far outside podcasting, I spotted the podcast being passed around.

There's a programming lesson in here somewhere. I think it's this: "Newsiness" as an editorial strategy tends to be associated with the bleeding edge, the infinite present: what's happening right now, what happened in the last 24 hours, here's what you need to know today. The Big One's past week suggests that strategy could be reinterpreted as a series of forward-facing investments: Here's what people might need to know in the near future. "What to do when the coastline catches up to your house," "what to expect for your community when there's a constitutional crisis," "how to prepare for the next recession."

Morbid food for thought.

Tracking

T.J. Raphael, senior producer at Slate, is leaving to join the Sony-Davidson-Mayer venture, which still doesn't have a name?

1/ Some personal news 🗣️ I am thrilled to announce that I am joining @adamdavidson and @lrmayer in their joint venture with @SonyMusicGlobal! Details on that are here. 👇 https://t.co/Nh05WD3M8a

- T. J. Raphael (@TJRaphael) July 8, 2019

Bill Irwin, Stitcher's director of audience growth, is leaving the company to...well, the destination doesn't appear to be officially disclosed just yet. (Don't worry, I'll get it.) I think this is a low-key important development - not a lot of people have held that job at a high level.

Keep an eye on ESPN. Connecticut's finest appears to be on the move, podcast-wise. Here's a Jody Avirgan tweet, with curiosity-piquing job postings for an upcoming flagship daily project and editorial lead.

Folks, there are many cool podcast-y things on the horizon at ESPN, which means there are some great jobs opening up too. Here's one to be the editorial lead on a new daily flagship show. Based in NYC. Spread the word! https://t.co/i9ddpaQ84w

- Jody Avirgan (@jodyavirgan) July 8, 2019

Louie Media, the French podcast studio founded by Mélissa Bounoua and Charlotte Pudlowski, has struck an exclusive partnership with Acast. Here's the report from Pere La Fouine, in French.

Podfund has announced its second batch of content investments.

From NPR: "Podcasts Are Providing A New Way Into Poetry."

From TechCrunch: "Podimo raises €6M to become Europe's 'Netflix for podcasts.'"

This is peripherally interesting. From The Verge: "Mozilla has started teasing an ad-free news subscription service, which, for $5 per month, would offer ad-free browsing, audio readouts, and cross-platform syncing of news articles from a number of websites." Emphasis mine.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Six months into 2019, what new do we know about the state of podcasting?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is issue 217, dated July 9, 2019. A midyear check-in. I feel like I've been somnambulant. How is it already July?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Ghosts of Football Past | Radiolab | WNYC Studios

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In anticipation of Super Bowl LII (Go Eagles), we're revisiting an old episode about the surprising history of how the game came to be.

# data[].attributes.body
Listening to Radiolab (Ghosts of Football Past): http://www.wnycstudios.org/story/ghosts-football-past/

In anticipation of Super Bowl LII (Go Eagles), we're revisiting an old episode about the surprising history of how the game came to be. It's the end of the 19th century -- the Civil War is over, and the frontier is dead. And young college men are anxious. What great struggle will test their character? Then along comes a new craze: football. A brutally violent game where young men can show a stadium full of fans just what they're made of. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Penn -- the sons of the most powerful men in the country are literally knocking themselves out to win these gladiatorial battles. And then the most American team of all, with the most to prove, gets in the game and owns it. The Carlisle Indian School, formed in 1879 to assimilate the children and grandchildren of the men who fought the final Plains Wars against the fathers and grandfathers of the Ivy Leaguers, starts challenging the best teams in the country. On the football field, Carlisle had a chance for a fair fight with high stakes -- a chance to earn respect, a chance to be winners, and a chance to go forward in a changing world that was destroying theirs.   Support Radiolab today at Radiolab.org/donate.  

# data[].attributes.body
Listening to Radiolab (Ghosts of Football Past): http://www.wnycstudios.org/story/ghosts-football-past/

In anticipation of Super Bowl LII (Go Eagles), we're revisiting an old episode about the surprising history of how the game came to be. It's the end of the 19th century -- the Civil War is over, and the frontier is dead. And young college men are anxious. What great struggle will test their character? Then along comes a new craze: football. A brutally violent game where young men can show a stadium full of fans just what they're made of. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Penn -- the sons of the most powerful men in the country are literally knocking themselves out to win these gladiatorial battles. And then the most American team of all, with the most to prove, gets in the game and owns it. The Carlisle Indian School, formed in 1879 to assimilate the children and grandchildren of the men who fought the final Plains Wars against the fathers and grandfathers of the Ivy Leaguers, starts challenging the best teams in the country. On the football field, Carlisle had a chance for a fair fight with high stakes -- a chance to earn respect, a chance to be winners, and a chance to go forward in a changing world that was destroying theirs.   Support Radiolab today at Radiolab.org/donate.  

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
After spending years making do without measurement, the podcast space is suddenly swimming in it. In June, the medium's largest platform, Apple, announced it would begin giving creators consumption metrics. Weeks later, the Slate-owned podcast producer Panoply announced a partnership with Nielsen to offer audience targeting for the ads it dynamically inserts into podcasts using Megaphone.

Measurement has been one of the big missing pieces in the podcast space. With the medium growing steadily and measurement improving, we asked attendees at the 2017 IAB Podcast Upfront to assess the impact of this increased measurement.

Sandro Roco, director of strategic initiatives, Bombfell
In general, Apple is going to give you as little as they can on the publisher side and the advertiser side. That said, I think it could help accelerate things. [Podcasting] still does have a measurement problem. We talk to our agencies about being among the first couple [ad] spots because we don't know about [podcast] completion rates. Right now, at least for our buying strategy, we're going with the greatest hits. We're being a little more aggressively cautious.

Janine Venturini, media buyer, Wieden+Kennedy
We have a battle, always, with buying podcasts because you can't measure them. I think it's a stepping stone. I don't think they're going to release every detail. You're not going to know that a 29-year-old from Staten Island who likes dogs is listening to a podcast.

Will Flaherty, head of growth marketing, Rent the Runway
Measurement probably benefits some advertisers, but some it doesn't. The ones that have succeeded with it have realized the arbitrage opportunities. It will benefit the space largely, but some [direct-response] advertisers will see those arbitrage opportunities dry up.

Russell Lindsey, president, Ad Results Media
There's a lot more advertisers here than there were last year. It verifies what we're seeing. Almost all our clients are direct-response. Some of the places brand advertisers are going [to invest in podcasting] are not the same place that direct-response advertisers will be going. Sure, it's going to make the space a little more crowded, but I think it's going to be a very narrow set of podcasts.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
'It's a stepping stone': What increased measurement opportunities mean for podcasting - Digiday

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
After spending years making do without measurement, the podcast space is suddenly swimming in it. In June, the medium's largest platform, Apple, announced it would begin giving creators consumption metrics. Weeks later, the Slate-owned podcast producer Panoply announced a partnership with Nielsen to offer audience targeting for the ads it dynamically inserts into podcasts using Megaphone.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Welcome to The Podcast Payoff, our series on how marketers are taking advantage of the audio revolution. In the coming weeks we'll roll out episodes that tackle how brand marketers are reaching new audiences, building new content, and measuring results through podcasting.
Episode One - The Audience Episode Two - The Content Coming Soon Episode Three - The Metrics Coming Soon

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Welcome to The Podcast Payoff, our series on how marketers are taking advantage of the audio revolution. In the coming weeks we'll roll out episodes that tackle how brand marketers are reaching new audiences, building new content, and measuring results through podcasting.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The social audio app Anchor is on Thursday introducing a new feature that allows users to easily publish podcasts to major podcasting platforms, including Apple Podcasts and Google Play.

Users can initially set up the podcast through the app by choosing a name, art, and more, and then subsequent episodes will be automatically added to the feed.

"They'll be able to control everything about the podcast that they need to control from Anchor," cofounder and CEO Michael Mignano told me. "Our hope is that we can remove all of the technical and difficult aspects of the process to the end user. If we had it our way, the user would never even need to know what an RSS feed is. It's an older piece of technology that we think most creators don't need to even be aware of."

Even though users will be able to upload podcasts through the app, they'll still be subject to the requirements of each of the podcast platforms, and Mignano said podcasts created through Anchor should be available on the various podcast apps within a day or two of the initial upload.

While Anchor wants users to create audio and listen within the app, Mignano said the company was adding the ability to export audio as podcasts because it wants to encourage users to create longer stories that might be better suited to listen to as a podcast rather than in the app, which was designed for shorter audio.

"For us, anything that removes friction or enables creators to make something is a win for both the creator and for us," he said. "If we can bring people over to the platform by offering them tools they can't get anywhere else, than we feel we've done our jobs."

Anchor launched in 2016 and was designed to try and make it easier for users to record and share audio while also fostering discussions. The app was incubated at the New York startup accelerator Betaworks, and it has raised more than $4 million in venture funding.

Anchor has yet to begin monetizing the app, but Mignano said the app will likely introduce advertising or subscription offerings. He declined to offer a timeline, but said the company is committed to eventually sharing sharing revenue with users.

In March, Anchor relaunched the app with an array of new features, including integrations with Spotify and Apple Music that lets users import song and tools that simplify the interview process and enable listeners to call into shows.

At the time, Nick Quah wrote in his Hot Pod newsletter that the additions put Anchor in competition with Bumpers, an audio creation app founded by Ian Ownbey and Jacob Thornton, formerly of Twitter:

In my head, I've come to place Anchor and Bumpers in one bucket, given both these apps' focus on serving as the mediating space between users and other users, while establishing another bucket specifically for short-form audio app 60dB and the AI-oriented Otto Radio which seems, to me at least, primarily occupied with developing a firm grasp on the interface between professional publishers and listeners.

Mignano wouldn't say how many users Anchor has, and it remains to be seen if social audio can take off when apps such as Facebook and Snapchat already dominate many users' time and homescreens. Still, a number of outlets, including The Verge and The Outline, are publishing on the platform, and as the app continues to evolve, Anchor wants to ultimately make it easier for users to create and share audio clips.

"People can both create and listen freely, much like open platforms for other mediums like photos, text, or videos," he said. "We want it to be a conversation, we want it to be multidirectional, just not one way like broadcast. I think a way for us to get there is by opening up tools, creating utilities and tools that empower creativity."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
You can now use social audio app Anchor to publish podcasts

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The social audio app Anchor is on Thursday introducing a new feature that allows users to easily publish podcasts to major podcasting platforms, including Apple Podcasts and Google Play. Users can initially set up the podcast through the app by choosing a name, art, and more, and then subsequent episodes will be automatically added to the feed.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
How to make local listeners care about your story

If you've ever wondered if your listeners were hanging on every word of your story or podcast, we now have some hints.

Data from NPR One provides a rare glimpse into how people listen. This is the sort of data podcasters have been begging for from Apple (and they're finally getting it). But at NPR, we've been examining and sharing this kind of data for the past two years.

Not only do we know what stories people listen to, we can see if people listening and for how long. By examining second-by-second data, we can tell when a user stops listening, taps the "share" button or marks the story as "interesting."

The greatest value in this information is not what it tells us about one story's performance. It's in the lessons it holds for future stories. How can we frame and write them so that they become must-listens?

We have already shared some lessons NPR One data can teach podcasters . Now, we have some key lessons for audio journalists. We're previously written about local stories that inspire passion in listeners .

We did a little more experimenting and found that the stories that hold people's ears typically have at least one of the following frames at play:

"Things are changing for us:" These stories are about something with a big impact on lots of people in your community. They make that impact clear from the start.

"It matters:" This kind of story may not obviously matter to listeners, but the storytelling makes the case for what is at stake right from the beginning.

"The real deal:" These stories break down what is going on. They're explainers, fact checks and stories that make it clear they are going to tell you what you need to know.

"What the what?!:" It's the kind of story that uncovers something unexpected or surprising. These stories overturn conventional wisdom or show someone acting contrary to how listeners would expect. It helps listeners see that their world isn't quite how they think it is.

"Who we are:" These are stories about something that impacts a community's identity. They surface an element of local pride or a particular way of life.

The experiment

Across the country, public media stations offer hundreds of stories on the NPR One app each day. That's a pretty large data set. We wanted to design an experiment to understand which of those stories performed best. So we decided to evaluate stories based on "completion rate" (the rate at which listeners hear the whole story).

We gathered a working group with representatives from NPR Member stations in Maine, Michigan, Missouri, South Dakota, Vermont, West Virginia and Wisconsin, and analyzed 921 stories they placed in the NPR One feed over three months. To measure performance, we considered the actual completion rate versus the expected completion rate for stories of similar duration. Then we zoomed in on the stories that emerged with higher-than-average completion rates.

While we can't know for sure why listeners finish any one story, data tells us something in the aggregate.

Some lessons became crystal clear:

Start strong

Whether we look at feature stories, interviews or podcasts, we see more and more evidence that the first few sentences of your story are crucial.

Former NPR One Managing Editor Sara Sarasohn drew on app data and her editorial experience to show how a story's lead sets it up for success. Leads that begin with big, "grabby" ideas outperformed those that started with time pegs (e.g. " Today, the Senate voted on health care ..." ) or convoluted connections to news events.

We saw the same phenomenon in this latest experiment. Here is an example of a "grabby" intro for a Michigan Radio story that performed well:

"Now, a mystery of missing money. A Republican campaign committee is facing big fines and lots of questions over how it lost track of many thousands of dollars during the last election."

We don't typically think of stories about campaign finance as captivating for listeners, but the power of the introduction - and the framing of a mystery - made the difference.

NPR One data shows us that in the opening seconds, listeners make decisions about whether to skip or pay attention to a story. They need to understand why they should care before they know what happened. The news peg might be important to us as journalists, but the data suggests our listeners are more interested in why the story matters to them.

Use frames that set your story apart

As we searched for patterns in the top-performing local stories, we saw that certain types of frames kept emerging. These stories made their frames clear from the opening moments.

We saw time and again that successful stories started strong by quickly helping listeners understand what the story means for their communities.

Respect your listeners' time

In this research and in other analyses we see that length is a factor in the success of a story. We've found that for all stories - local and national - 3.5-5 minutes is a sweet spot. The performance of pieces longer than 5 minutes varies wildly.

While people will listen to longer stories, the quality has to justify the length, and that bar is high. Beautifully told stories and stories that are of great importance can do well when they are long, but our data suggest that when in doubt, keep your stories short.

How to use these lessons

NPR One might be a mobile listening app but these lessons have broader applications for all audio stories.

Emily Alfin Johnson, the head of Vermont Public Radio's Digital Creation team, says when VPR reporters wrote story intros using insights from NPR One, they saw improvements in how the story performed with both listeners on the app and readers on the station's website. She said it meant "there was more good stuff at the top of stories" because reporters worked to include grabby ideas and explain what was at stake.

Johnson believes NPR One data has strengthened her ability to say, "You need to make a change and I can show you why." In turn, her colleagues' work can have more impact.

Ultimately, none of these findings are radical departures from what good editors have long known about effective audio storytelling. Renita Jablonski, Senior Editor of NPR's All Things Considered , says NPR One data "hammers home why good writing matters and hammers home what resonates with people."
Tamar Charney is the Managing Editor of NPR One and Nick DePrey is the Digital Programming Analytics Manager for NPR One.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How to make local listeners care about your story

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
If you've ever wondered if your listeners were hanging on every word of your story or podcast, we now have some hints. Data from NPR One provides a rare glimpse into how people listen. This is the sort of data podcasters have been begging for from Apple (and they're finally getting it).

# data[].attributes.body
How to hook your audience

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
How to hook your podcast audience

As more and more people create podcasts, there's a lot of competition for listeners' ears. But there's a reason so many public radio producers are finding success in the podcasting space - we know how to tell a good story!

Platforms like NPR One also help provide clues and recommendations for how you can hook your potential podcast audience.

Start strong

We can't understate how important the start of a podcast is. NPR One's Innovation Accountant, Nick DePrey, examined the data and found a typical podcast episode loses 20-35 percent of the listening audience in the first five minutes.

The rate of the drop-off is higher in the first five minutes than any time until the credits roll. Listeners are making a decision to commit in those crucial opening moments. A mediocre episode with a good introduction will almost always perform better than a great episode with a poor intro.

Only established shows with loyal followings can overcome uninteresting or non-engaging beginnings. Read more about how great audio stories begin.

Re-engage your audience every 2-5 minutes

Not only do the podcasts that work on NPR One start strong, they also use techniques to re-engage the audience every few minutes.

When you are creating a radio piece, you can count on having a fairly constant number of people listening throughout the piece, even if it may not be the same people at the beginning of a story as at the end.

But podcasts have their biggest audience at the beginning and smallest audience at the end. This means you have to set up tension and keep forward momentum all throughout your podcast in order to keep as many listeners as possible, and you should not save your best or most important point for the end of a podcast.

Some of our evidence suggests that 18-30 minutes long in podcasts might be a sweet spot for holding the audience's attention. Just because you can go as long as you want on a podcast, doesn't mean you should.

Use good artwork and write strong descriptions

Unlike radio, your artwork and the language you use to describe your podcast are both important to your success. Your podcast artwork has to draw people in. The podcast's description has to function like a headline that makes someone click to listen.

We've seen great podcast episodes fail to do well because the title and description didn't entice people to give the episode a chance. Read more about headline tips to help you write titles and descriptions.

Think about your audience and how you will find them

When it comes to producing station podcasts, it helps to have thought very intentionally about your audience and to have considered how to reach that audience.

Is your podcast geared generally to a national audience, such as Member station podcasts like Death, Sex, and Money or Modern Love? Or is it a local story for your local audience?

A third possibility might be that you have a local story that is actually relevant to people elsewhere. For instance, the topic your podcast is exploring in your community might be relevant elsewhere or perhaps, there are people who live in other places that are still connected to your community.

The producers of St Louis Public Radio's We Live Here and Milwaukee Public Radio's Precious Lives tell stories set in their community about issues facing people in the area, but their stories also speak to much larger issues experienced in many communities throughout the U.S.

We've also seen stations find success with podcasts that build on some inherent interest in their community such as WWNO's Katrina: The Debris and WBEZ's Curious City.

Both of these approaches allow stations to create a podcast that is - on one hand - local, but is also able to reach an audience size that has sponsorship revenue potential.

Watch your data

Podcasts are a growing way to reach new listeners both inside and outside your terrestrial broadcast signal. They are a great place to try out new ideas and let new talent show what they can do. These tips can help you make the most of your podcasts. But as we always recommend here at NPR One, watch your data.
Note: A version of this post was originally published on NPR's Digital Services blog. Tamar Charney is the Managing Editor of NPR One.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
As more and more people create podcasts, there's a lot of competition for listeners' ears. But there's a reason so many public radio producers are finding success in the podcasting space - we know how to tell a good story!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Journalists, scientists, historians, and judges all share one key attribute: the need to work with information and evidence to find and test facts. Talking to all of the above about their process is the premise of a new podcast, , from science journalist Brooke Borel. Borel has worked as a fact-checker, research editor, science reporter, and is author of The Chicago Guide to Fact-Checking.

In its three-episode pilot season in early August, Borel talks to a marine biologist who "talks" to dolphins, a journalist covering an international climate-change lawsuit, and an author about how journalists should cover conspiracy theorists.

In an interview with CJR, Borel reveals the inspiration for Methods and the importance of putting a spotlight on the behind-the-scenes processes of those who work with facts. In an era of "fake news," she hopes fact-checking will become as an integral part of all forms of journalism.

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
You studied engineering as an undergrad at Boston University. So what eventually led you to journalism?
I ended up in a grad program at NYU. It wasn't a journalism program, more of a "build your own curriculum" thing. I was mainly focused on the history of science and science studies, which looks at science from a cultural and social perspective. I really enjoyed writing about science, so I fell into journalism, specifically science journalism. One of my first jobs was as a fact-checker. I worked as a fact-checker for this magazine called Science Illustrated (which doesn't exist anymore in English, as far as I know) and ultimately got promoted as research editor there. I've been a journalist for about nine and a half years now.
You a wrote book about fact-checking. How did that come about?
In addition to reporting on science early in my career, I wrote this book on bedbugs called . As I was working on the book, through a chance conversation with my editor, I learned that they were seeking someone to write a fact-checking guide for their writing guide series. We got into this big conversation about fact-checking because I was talking about fact-checking Infested. I ended up submitting a book proposal and writing the guide.

The way I approached that book was I was pulling from my own work as a fact-checker and a researcher, but I also interviewed I think 90 people from different publications- The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, GQ, people who fact-check books for a living, reporters, etc. So I pulled all that information together. It's intended really for anyone doing non-fiction writing, and for early career journalists who are dealing with facts, but maybe don't have a certain expertise in the beat they are covering, or don't have fact-checkers readily available. The guide helps them be able to do these things themselves.
TRENDING: 'She was alive in ways that most of us can only dream of being alive' How did the Methods podcast come about?
The guide got published a month before the 2016 election, in this really interesting swirl of fake news and alternative facts and all the things we've been talking about since. Because of that, I've been writing about these things much more than I expected to. I wrote an essay for FiveThirtyEight about how fact-checking is not going to save us from fake news. And as I was doing all of this stuff, a friend of mine, Ben Lillie, was launching an event space and publishing company called Caveat [that] would be producing live shows and podcasts.

He and I had been friends for a long time, and we talked in the past about wanting to do a podcast together, and Methods sort of came from those conversations. The goal is to have each episode where we are talking to people who are professional fact-finders-whether that's a scientist, journalist, historian, and maybe as we go further into the show, I'd like to talk to, for example, a jury foreman or a psychologist helping patients understand themselves, or any person who is using some form or reasoning and fact-checking to understand the world around them. I want to really get into their process and see how they do what they do.

The 2016 election really exposed a counter-intuitive problem in journalism- the conflict between truth and balance. On one hand, if journalists "tell the truth," or at least the best version of the available facts in context, they still are accused of bias (not showing "opposing views" or "both sides"). But on the other hand, if we show too "much balance," we run the risk of giving inaccurate or misleading information the same platform as "facts." Where do you see the podcast being able to help address this conflict?

Look, I'm very excited about this podcast, but I don't think one podcast or piece of writing will solve everything. Just because a person is an "expert" or a journalist doesn't mean we get everything right. Scientists and journalists see themselves as these very objective people, but as human beings, we have biases and there's no way around that. I think that bias is something journalists need to be aware of, acknowledge, and [work] to curb.

But I'm hoping that the podcast will do a few things. I hope it shows the behind-the-scenes processes of an article or a scientific study. That stuff doesn't always end up in the final piece, and as we have many people in the public questioning the media, questioning science, questioning expertise, I think talking about the process is important. It's not like a scientist just sits there and says, "Hey, climate change is a thing." It's based on a rigorous scientific process that led them to that conclusion. Same thing as a journalist: There's a rigorous process that we go through to put an article out, but we don't talk about the methodology that goes into it. I think talking to people about these processes will show others how to apply these steps, too.

There's a rigorous process that we go through to put an article out, but we don't talk about the methodology that goes into it.

In Episode 1, you interviewed author and filmmaker Jon Ronson, a screenwriter on the critically acclaimed film Okja about how journalists should cover conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones. Ronson's stories were captivating, but I also felt conflicted about some of his points, for example, where he addressed mainstream media's "failure" to understand its own biases. As journalists, how do you think we should have this discourse when our viewpoints on news media come into conflict?

I hear what you're saying. There were some things that Jon said during our interview that also made me uncomfortable. But this is going to come up. Truth and facts are different things, right? You can have different reporters [with] the same facts, but the things they write in the story [can] be totally different. There is no totally objective human being who is going to have the perfect answer to everything. And there's always some other bit of information we need for more context, and it's impossible to build out that context at every single moment. Figuring out the type of people and perspectives we bring to the show is an ongoing process. And there will be many times when we have guests where some people will be like, "that guest was great," and others will be like, "well, actually..."

But that's kind of the nature of getting these different perspectives. It's so much more complicated than "this is right" and "this is wrong." So that is going to be one of my biggest challenges on the show, trying to navigate that, to show these nuances in creative ways and ask the right questions to lay all that out for the audience in an honest way.
Do you think news organizations need to invest more in fact-checking?
As far as fact-checking goes, there has been research on how when publications issue corrections, there's only a tiny number of readers who read the original article who actually read the correction. So does it reach the people it's suppose to reach? Nightly news shows don't always have the luxury of live fact-checking, since they operate at a much faster pace. But also, since they operate at such a fast pace, hypothetically, they can correct themselves more quickly than a print magazine. But I would love to see at these outlets, someone who's almost like an ombudsman-someone to do quality control, run corrections, and provide more context.

Journalists are seen as "jacks of all trades"- people with working knowledge about many things. As someone who has a specific expertise in science, do you think there needs to be more journalists who have worked or studied in the field they cover?

I can speak mostly about that in the context of science journalism. Long before I got here, there's been this conversation about whether people should have a science background when they are writing on science. I do think there should be people with that level of scientific knowledge and formal training; they have deep understanding of a scientific field they have a PhD in. They can pick out someone's bullshit, right?

On the other hand, there are many science journalists who don't have a science background and are at the top of their field. I think that any journalist who is a good journalist is going to have that ability to ask questions and get to the bottom of something. In fact, not having that in-depth knowledge can also be helpful, because if you have it, you may not think of the questions that actually the audience may be interested in understanding, because they seem "too obvious" to you.

That said, I do think journalists don't interview historians enough. You don't need to have a degree in history to know that history is important, and to seek out historians for historical context in your pieces. It's just a matter of training journalists how to identify and reach out to the right experts.

Journalists don't interview historians enough.
One of the questions you ask at the end of each episode is, "If you could tell your listeners one fact that you want everyone to know, what would it be?" How would you answer that question?
The fact that I would want everyone to know is, whatever news you're consuming, know that each piece of information does not exist in a vacuum. Just reading something and saying, "Okay, now I know that," and moving on, is not the way it works. Every little bit of information in every article you read, every documentary you see, anything you consume when it comes to media, is part of a much larger context. No single form of media provides the definitive answer on anything. Continuing to be open minded and curious is important. I would tell them to always ask questions.
TRENDING: "It will follow me to the grave," unnamed editor says of botched investigative series

Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by joining CJR today.

Joshua Adams is a writer, journalist, and adjunct instructor at DePaul University. He holds a B.A. in African American Studies from the University of Virginia and a Journalism M.A. from the University of Southern California.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
A journalist's new podcast explores the secrets behind fact-finding

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Journalists, scientists, historians, and judges all share one key attribute: the need to work with information and evidence to find and test facts. Talking to all of the above about their process is the premise of a new podcast, Methods, from science journalist Brooke Borel.