Big audiences, little revenue (original) (raw)

2020, British Journalism Review

Podcasting is the thing on everyone's earbuds right now-little audio special deliveries of essential news updates, dramatic true crime, comedy gabfests and thought-provoking documentaries. By many accounts, radio is in its second golden age, with more opportunities to reach audiences who are hungry for more content. But what has inspired this switch to sound? And how are news organisations pushing the boundaries of what's possible? As with so many disruptive innovations, the answers lie at their heart in the democratisation ushered in by the digital revolution. A podcast is a thing made of the internet: something that could only exist because of the weirdness of the nature of internet-based things when compared to their pre-internet counterparts. To get back to basics, a podcast is a digital file made available on a server, just like a webpage. The publisher, however, also publishes an RSS feed-a very small file that points to a site's new content. Your podcast app only needs to check that RSS feed periodically, and then download any new episodes it finds listed there. The point here is that distributing audio content via an RSS feed, as a podcast does, combines the inexpensive, geography-ignoring, user-tracking, no-broadcast-licenceneeding nature of the internet with the immediacy of broadcast radio: a podcast app generally checks its feeds at least hourly. This hybrid nature was immediately appealing to its innovators. And while some people had been manually uploading audio files to their websites since the 80s, and streaming internet radio established its foothold in the alternative music and talk scene in the late 90s, both of these alternatives