Tuesday 28th May: Podcasting needs to be more aggressive in its search for stars

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The Press Gazette Future of Media Awards celebrate the best websites, podcasts, newsletters and commercial innovation in news media. They are FREE to enter and the deadline for submissions is 14 June.

Podcasts live or die on the ability of their hosts to keep audiences engaged. Regardless of subject matter, sector or vertical, or the commercial strategy – if you don’t have good hosts you don’t have a hope. That’s why, in recent years, the platforms that sought to own the ecosystem bought host-led shows.

But now, although hosts are still vital, they’re being brought in with large followings from long before they entered the podcasting space. This may be a smart strategy from publishing houses to mitigate the risk of building up an audience from a cold start, but as Chris writes, it smacks a little of timidity and short-termism.

“Media companies should be stretching to discover new audiences by taking a chance on smaller creators, otherwise they eventually exhaust the single audience seam they’ve mined for so long,” he writes. “For the podcast industry to grow – and to actually be as democratic and open-to-all as it used to promise – we need to bring back incubators and more aggressively search for new talent again.”

While the podcast is on a break we’ve been hard at work assembling the industry’s best and brightest publishers to share the strategies and learnings behind their successful podcasts and newsletters, from top newsbrands launching paid podcasts to indie newsletters nailing their commercial strategies. Ahead of the final agenda reveal, we explain why we’re running a dual-track Summit dedicated to podcasts and newsletters, and pick out which sessions we’re most looking forward to.

Remember how Meta/Facebook have spurned news on their platforms for the last few years? Well now, Meta’s new chatbot, Meta AI, is happy to scan news outlets and summarise their latest stories and headlines for anyone who asks. It’s even doing it in Canada, where the company banned links to news sources on Facebook and Instagram in August to get around a law that could require it to pay publishers.

Some really interesting thoughts in this one about a more optimistic future of the internet, which also makes this point: “Imagine how much money creators could have made in the past couple of decades if the work they did on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok resulted in their getting 90% of the advertising revenue that those platforms instead keep for themselves.” Hear hear.

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