The Wall Street Journal’s Benjamin Mullin reports that Serial Productions “is exploring a sale,” with New York Times Co. “among the potential buyers.” Serial’s namesake podcast is often credited with putting the entire medium on the map, while NYT’s crown jewel podcast, The Daily, has clocked over a billion downloads.
“[…] any transaction would likely be small for the Times or another major media company,” Mullin points out, referencing Podtrac statistics: It’s “the fourth-largest podcast publisher by audience, with over 10 million monthly listeners in the U.S.”
Market share aside, the influence of Serial Productions and This American Life is formidable. Small transaction or no transaction, it’s another case of podcasting’s cultural and financial consolidation.
Podcasting’s well-documented discoverability problem includes “finding what you don’t know you want to hear.” Poynter’s Ren LaForme details the tool Headliner, which has been taking a creative crack at the issue: “It’s like a well-curated bookstore shelf for podcasts.”
On the creator side, Headliner acts as a “promotion machine,” generating audiograms which can be posted to social media. Users can turn full episodes into video clips, as well as set up automatic video creation and export when episodes are uploaded. YouTube and Vimeo, once unlikely discovery hubs, are the target platforms.
To illustrate the concept, the company built HeadlinerFlix, a site that “mashes together podcasts with video previews and a riff on the Netflix interface.” It’s an interactive automation experiment that takes the well-worn ‘Netflix of podcasts’ idea literally. In any case, curious visitors won’t have to ‘discover’ how to operate the dashboard.
Lindsay Harris Friel of The Podcast Host makes a strong case for practicing far outside the recording studio. “There are skills you will need to make a podcast that hooks listeners, keeps their attention, makes them want to hear more, and recommend your podcast to their friends,” writes Friel. “All of them are skills you will learn in a good improvisation class.”
Spontaneous storytelling skills, like the exercise of “accept and build,” undoubtedly pay off behind the mic. “An improvisation class will help you pay close attention to what’s happening immediately around you, so that you can build on it,” Friel explains. Communication skills, like listening closely and reacting to a guest’s words, are key to success in improv. Adapting to unexpected circumstances and holding conversation can be one and the same.
Happy Thursday, readers, and happy scrolling. The full schedule for PM Evolutions is live on the event page, as a convenient PDF, and on the official Evolutions app — now available for iOS and Android.
Join us for an app tour webinar next Thursday, January 30 at 3:00 p.m. ET/noon PT. See you there!
Cheers,
Team PM
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