Quick Takes
Wednesday roundup: Carolla settles podcast lawsuit; PBS Hawaii receives $2M grant
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Plus: Frankenstein M.D. launches, and the difficulties of regulating Elmos in Times Square.
Current (https://current.org/tag/podcasts/page/16/)
Plus: Frankenstein M.D. launches, and the difficulties of regulating Elmos in Times Square.
Plus: The legal fight over podcasting takes an odd turn, and Kai Ryssdal takes the Ice Bucket Challenge.
This American Life announced today that it will launch a new podcast this fall, titled Serial. TAL host Ira Glass said on the show’s blog that the weekly podcast will feature longform investigative stories broken into chapters, with a chapter per podcast. It will launch with a crime story that will run for 12 weeks. “Our hope is that it’ll play like a great HBO or Netflix series, where you get caught up with the characters and the thing unfolds week after week, but with a true story, and no pictures,” Glass wrote on the blog. “Like House of Cards, but you can enjoy it while you’re driving.”
In an effort to position itself as a national brand in public radio, New York’s WNYC is launching an ad campaign likening its programs’ listeners to Netflix-style binge watchers. The Smartbinge campaign will consist of targeted digital ad buys and a landing page on WNYC.org to encourage listeners from around the country to listen to substantial amounts of WNYC programming. Other elements include Twitter hashtags, geotargeted Facebook ads, paid search results and sponsored blog posts. WNYC is spending around $200,000 on the campaign, working with creative and public-relations teams Cataldi Public Relations and Eyeballs. As WNYC increases digital offerings with streams and a mobile app, it has its sights set on an audience beyond New York.
Blumberg, e.p. of This American Life and co-host of Planet Money, envisions a sustainable future for narrative audio journalism.
Mike Pesca has the next hit public radio show, and it’s not on public radio. That’s a problem.
The production company Radio Diaries, whose stories often appear on This American Life and NPR’s newsmagazines, is aiming to raise $40,000 in a Kickstarter campaign to fund new pieces and an expansion of its podcast. The campaign began May 28 and runs until June 27. As of noon June 3, the campaign has raised $19,280. Radio Diaries has turned to Kickstarter to diversify its fundraising methods, said Executive Producer Joe Richman. “We, like a lot of other small independent production companies are scrappy, and we’ve made it work with whatever money comes through the door and always will,” he said.
Plus: Sesame Street and the Great Society, and PRX looks at the technical side of distributing WFMT shows.
SoundWorks launched Thursday with four podcasts, and PRI plans to add more in coming weeks.
Death, Sex & Money, The Sporkful and The Longest Shortest Time join the station’s digital programming lineup.
• NPR sports reporter Mike Pesca is leaving the network to host a daily current-events podcast for Slate, Business Insider reports. The show will begin this April. Pesca has co-hosted Slate’s sports podcast, “Hang Up And Listen,” since 2009. He tells BI he will have more license to share personal opinions as a podcast host, something he couldn’t do as an NPR reporter. Slate earns upwards of 10 percent of its total advertising revenue from podcasts and expects to grow that share in coming months, according to BI.
Jason Calacanis is betting big on Swell, the five-month-old app that curates podcasts and news reports. The angel investor, who co-founded the blog network Weblogs Inc., the search engine Mahalo.com and the podcast network ThisWeekIn, announced Dec. 3 that he would invest $250,000 in the app. In a blog post on his tech website Launch, Calacanis cited the app’s pedigree, mission, design and focus on podcasting as reasons for his investment. He had been interested in the similar apps Stitcher and TuneIn, he said, but wasn’t able to invest in them in time.
Boston’s WBUR has joined Slate in producing a six-episode personal-health podcast, The Checkup.
The Truth, a podcast of fictional stories whose segments have aired on national pubradio programs, met its fundraising goal for a second 10-episode season.
A brewing legal fight initiated by Personal Audio, a Texas-based company that claims to have invented podcasting technology, has entered a new policy arena.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is waging a public battle against Texas-based technology company Personal Audio over a pending patent lawsuit over podcasts, and now it’s taking the fight a step further.
Peter Sagal, host of NPR’s Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me! and PBS’s upcoming Constitution USA, makes an appearance on the latest episode of comedian Marc Maron’s WTF interview podcast, posted April 3.
AUSTIN, Texas — When podcasting stars gathered March 11 at the South by Southwest Interactive conference to discuss the challenges facing their medium, the lack of diversity among creative talents in podcasting — especially the dearth of women in hosting roles — was cited among the most perplexing problems.
A Feb. 26 editorial by Third Coast Audio Festival Director Julie Shapiro provided impetus for the discussion among a panel of four podcasters — each with ties to public media in the U.S. and Britain and one of whom was female. In her commentary published last month by Transom, Shapiro questioned why only 20 of the top 100 iTunes podcasts are hosted by women. “There’s literally no barrier to entry, so I don’t know what that’s about,” said Roman Mars, creator and host of 99% Invisible, a podcast and pubradio series. Public media, which supports many of the most popular podcasts on iTunes, has a strong history of nurturing female talent, he said. He pointed out that the Third Coast Festival’s Award for Best New Artist has gone to a man only once in the past 10 years.
If you’re a public radio station without a plan for how to take advantage of the remarkably flexible and creative platform of podcasting — a platform that leverages your existing skills better than anything else in new media — you need to think again.
Personal Audio says it has a patent covering the technology used in podcasting. A representative for the company said no public broadcasters should have received contact from him, but that has not been the case.