Daniel Hills, a data scientist at the BBC, began with a question. “In-episode trailing is a great way to recommend shows to listen to next — but how do we know if it’s working?” The ultimate goal is to improve ‘onward journeys’ on the BBC Sounds app, or pathways that lead listeners to new podcasts they’ll like on the platform.
Hills demonstrates the methodology used to study a campaign for a popular football show, That Peter Crouch Podcast. Two versions of the audio and several weeks later, the little introductions were proven a success: “[…] the actual results from the trails showed significant results across each episode. So basically, trailing works!”
The tests revealed much more than a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer. Listeners turned out to be more adventurous than expected, responding similarly to football-specific previews and those for broad-appeal comedy. “It was promising to see uplifts across the board,” Hills says. Turns out, onward journeys don’t need to be direct.
Why are publishers calling newsletter writers “hosts” and “anchors” now? Sarah Scire of Nieman Lab tracks a telling pattern across major publications. In April, The New York Times named David Leonhardt the “new writer, host and anchor” of a flagship newsletter. Sounds like TV, but that phrasing is all podcasts.
Scire's colleague Joshua Benton traces the trend back to The Daily. “[…] perhaps its most distinguishing [quality] is how it foregrounds the personalities — the person-ness, really — of Times reporters,” he wrote last spring. “The other Times reporters that Barbaro interviews are also rendered realer than bylines.”
Consumers respond well to the language of personality. Earlier this week, The Washington Post announced the hiring of political reporter Olivier Knox “to anchor The Daily 202.” (It’s a newsletter, though Scire suspects it’ll soon be a podcast.) The way news is consumed, and sold, now has a lot to do with the voice behind it.
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