PodMov Daily: Monday, May 24

Episode 436: Your Monday Mix

In 2021, Great Podcasters Can Change Their Minds

“The podcast industry as a whole is like an elephant in a dark room,” says Edison Research SVP Tom Webster. Download rankers or platform stats can never truly measure the big picture. However, Edison’s Podcast Consumer Tracker shows what 8,000+ weekly listeners said were the “services used most often.” 

Webster recalls Isaiah Berlin’s “The Hedgehog and the Fox” to explain the mindset of a creator that will adapt to the changing landscape of listener behavior. In a nutshell: To survive, podcasters need to strengthen their “ability to continually take in new information, and change your mind, if need be, to act on it.”

‘Reality versus expectations’ is an uncomfortable feeling best embraced with a growth mindset: “The data that I showed you here today will challenge you to unroll, let go of fixed ideas, and become a more fluid thinker in podcasting — to embrace the show, not the format,” Webster says. “It's time to be a fox.”

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Interview Transitions: How to Break Repetitive Habits

Podcasters are notorious for habitually using the same interview transitions, writes Shani Silver (A Single Serving). Your guest or co-host has finished answering your question. Now what? “In that moment, you don’t know what the hell to say, your mind is a vacant cavern, so you just say: “I love that.”

This example is Silver’s nemesis, and she hears it often. “I love that,” or any similarly weak, overused response “is an indicator that you’re a bit stuck in terms of progressing as an interviewer,” Silver says. She suggests that planning your questions more thoughtfully will create useful improvisational tools.

Silver provides some alternative interview transitions and tricks, but this one will take podcasters the furthest: “It’s wild, but you don’t actually have to have an opinion or personal reaction every time your guest stops speaking. You can just let their answer stand on its own so that the listener can soak it in.”

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Here's what else is going on:

• Fresh air: Tomorrow at 8:30 am CT, The BBC Academy will host “Opening the Doors.” The live panel discussion will explore how new voices bring much-needed “truth, authenticity and power” to podcasting. Led by Miranda Wayland, Head of Creative Diversity at the BBC. Free registration.

• Admit one: Ticketed Spaces, Twitter’s paid live-audio rooms feature, will soon take applications from US users. Charges are steep, says Ashley Carman of The Verge. “If you sell a $10 ticket, Apple would presumably take a 30 percent cut, leaving you and Twitter to split the remaining $7.”

• Tape loop: An NPR podcast subscription benefits all listeners, Joel Sucherman, VP of New Platform Partnerships, tells Amplifi Media CEO Steven Goldstein. “As a nonprofit, it's really important to remember that what we do when we get new revenue is funnel it back into the journalism.”

• Stress test: “I wanted listeners to feel what the divers felt like,” says Teamistry showrunner Pedro Mendes. The veteran producer tells Aparita Bhandari about his cinematic approach to sound design, accompanied by example clips from “Mission Impossible: The Thai Cave Rescue.”