This week, media analyst Nic Newman takes us through the findings of his report into News Podcasts and the Opportunities for Publishers for the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, which looks at the future of news podcasting and the state of the medium across five different countries. Among other things, we discuss how young people are fuelling the growth in news podcasting, whether podcast revenue will start cannibalising other revenue streams, and whether the podcast explosion has already plateaued.
In the news roundup the team discusses Apple News’ new newsletter (about news), the realities of running a journalism awards show, and runs a gauntlet of other stories after a busy news week.
News in brief:
- Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are stepping down, with Google CEO Sundar Pichai assuming the role of both Google and Alphabet CEO. Their joint letter said “We believe it’s time to assume the role of proud parents – offering advice and love, but not daily nagging”
- Recently-formed advertising group Privacy for America has released guidelines to help shape future legislation around data collection, in the hope of influencing national regulations
- The Telegraph has launched a digital recipe channel called ‘Cookbook’, perhaps with the aim of replicating some of the success the NYT has seen with cooking subscriptions (the site and newsletter are currently free). It has also launched ‘The Briefing’, a two-minute show updated for the morning and evening commute. In a very busy week for the publisher, it also announced it now has more paying subscribers online than in print for the first time in its 164-year history, reaching 420,000 subscribers. Subscriptions are apparently currently growing at their ‘fastest rate ever; double what it was last year’
- Podcast listeners on Spotify have grown more than 50% since the start of this year, with a 39% increase in podcast hours consumed by listeners since last quarter
- Barstool Sports has topped more than 30,000 paying subscribers to its Barstool Gold program, which debuted this January
- National World, set up by newspaper entrepreneur David Montgomery, is in talks to buy JPI Media (formerly Johnston Press)
- Report for America, a programme which launched in 2018 to place journalists in newsrooms across the US, has announced it will field 250 emerging journalists in 164 news organisations in 2020 – the single biggest hiring wave of journalists at a local level
- After last week’s news that Michael Bloomberg’s media organisation wouldn’t investigate Democratic candidates but would continue to criticise Trump, Trump’s campaign have said they’ll deny press credentials to Bloomberg News as they’ve ‘declared their bias openly’
- “Relatively favourable” advertising market conditions and growth at Mail Online and Daily Mail TV helped revenues at DMGT climb by two per cent underlying to £672m in 2019. Print revenue, unsurprisingly, is down again
- Remember when the Lib Dems aped the style of a local paper for an ad and we couldn’t understand why they’d done it? Well, turns out the Tories had also done it in Coventry and were wisely keeping quiet about it. (the News UK CEO David Dinsmore called for political parties to end this practice in Press Gazette this week)
- The British Journalism Awards announced the shortlist for their Political Journalist of the Year category, the nominee list for which contained more men called John than women. While organisers Press Gazette rightly noted that they can only work with the nominations that get sent in, it nevertheless produced a big backlash. It actually led to the Words By Women awards being brought back at incredibly late notice, to be held a day before the BJAs, with organiser Marie Le Conte stating they had received 661 entries in just over 36 hours
- British GQ put China’s President and Thailand’s King on its ‘worst dressed’ list in print, then quietly removed them online so as not to cause offence
