"When you look at what Ian, Johnny, Ryan, Glenn, Tyler, Liz, and Joe have built, you see creators who didn't wait for permission, they went and found their audiences and earned their loyalty." - Stephen Perlstein, Senior Vice President of Business Development, Libsyn
DoKnow, born Daniel Lopez in Los Angeles, is a comedian who torpedoed the glass ceiling by podcasting his relatable, laid-back way of looking at the world.
Molly O'Shea is a name-dropper. There's good reason for that. I count 29 big names in tech mentioned over our hourlong call. She told me about recently moderating a panel with Kalshi cofounders Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara. Ken Griffin took the stage after her. O'Shea breezily referenced talking about the state of new media with the TBPN bros in Peter Thiel's house.
In podcasting, knowing how your audience stacks up against the competition has always been a bit of a guessing game. And BBC Studios, the content production arm of the British public broadcasting corporation, was tired of guessing. Around two years ago, BBC Studios started working with digital audio monetization and measurement platform Triton Digital, and benchmarking was at the top of its wish list. Triton made good on that request on Thursday with the addition of benchmarking features to its Podcast Metrics publisher analytics dashboard.
There was something different about this one, though. Something about how visible the whole act was. Something about this one coming so soon after the last one. Whatever it was, the Alex Pretti killing seemed to spark a different reaction online. Meanwhile, the counternarrative seemed to move just as quickly, and AI imagery became so ubiquitous that it might have been hard to trust your view of such a heavily documented event. How is anyone supposed to make sense of any of it?
"It's not great, if I'm being honest. From amending my answer to the question "how ya doing Roth" at the very beginning of this week's episode of The Distraction, it is clear that things are not going great. But for the second straight week, we found a way to split our episode between the Not Great stuff and being stupid about sports, with the result being one of the most enjoyable hours of my week."
Three women residents of an elder care home in Birmingham, UK have launched a podcast called "Do You Remember the Time?" They discuss how life has changed across the decades. Known in the home for their entertaining and interesting banter, their podcast grew out of informal and unstructured conversations. The home has been supportive, investing in microphones, lights, cameras, and a visual logo. None of them had heard of podcasting before producing their own.
Spotify Partner Program, launched a year ago ( is widening its participation requirements, intending to bring in more podcasters. Three new criteria now define which podcasts are eligible: One thousand listeners over the last 30 days Two thousand Spotify hours consumed over the last 30 days Three published episodes All three are required. While the new criteria make up the headline news from Spotify, other meaningful updates are in the announcement:
Public media outlets entered 2025 on a wave of unease between declining on-air audience, waning underwriting revenue, post-election news fatigue, and the looming uncertainty about federal funding. The latter sadly became a reality on July 18 when Congress voted to claw back $1.1 billion in public media funding, leaving NPR, PBS, and more than 400 member stations across the country to figure out what to do next.
And since that article was published, I haveseen more teams start to recognize and implement audio as an essential channel for embedding important ideas into the culture. University centers, institutes and nonprofits are launching shows, and some are even building podcast "networks." HigherEdPods, a community for higher ed podcasters, already counts 133 members, and its directory lists 1,205 podcasts from 210 colleges and universities. This is good, and it should definitely be happening.
Emma Ledden began her career in children's TV, working on shows like RTÉ's 'The Den' and BBC One's 'Live & Kicking'. She then became the first Irish presenter for MTV in the UK and Ireland. MTV is now facing the end of an era, with the closure of 24-hour music video broadcasts in every country except the US on December 31.
As such, the Washington Post announced this week that it's launching an AI-based podcast service that allows listeners to pick their own format and even their own disembodied AI host. The "Your Personal Podcast" is now available to users on the newspaper's mobile app as of today - but whether anybody will pick up on the company's offer to be inundated with potentially misinformed AI slop remains to be seen.
