PodMov Daily: Wednesday, September 25

Episode 51: Midweek Mindset

Ford Backs a Spotify Initiative at Brazilian Newspaper Estadão

A new Spotify initiative from Estadão, “one of Brazil’s biggest newspapers,” will offer “audio versions of the outlet’s news stories” each morning. Adweek reports that Ford, the project’s sponsor, has been heavily promoting an SUV to Brazilian “executives who need reliable news on the go.”

Both newspaper and automaker are going all in. José Alves, business director of Estadão’s mobility unit, says in a campaign video: “We built a new editorial structure fully dedicated to this project with producers, proofreaders and editors all exclusive to […] the new audio platform.”

André Savastano, a creative copywriter who worked on the project, said that Ford ‘is considering expanding the terms of the contract to a broader, permanent brand sponsorship’ after the campaign. As podcasting in Brazil picks up speed, the major advertisers will follow.

Real Resilience: Stories of Philadelphia Families and Prison

This past spring, Crystal Wyatt launched her podcast Real Resilience: P.W.L., for “Prison Wife Life.” 7 years earlier, she started a prison transportation service. “My main goal was to rebuild families impacted by incarceration,” Wyatt writes in an essay for WOC Podcasters.

Now, she’s released 11 episodes devoted to telling the stories of the women who support their loved ones who are incarcerated in Philadelphia. Since attending a former advisee’s podcasting course, Wyatt has spent “over 10,000 hours on the road,” recording stories of “trauma and resilience.”

The women she interviews help their family members survive and re-integrate at enormous personal cost, but their role has been part of prison’s “backstory.” Real Resilience: P.W.L. brings their experiences to light.

70 Million's Third Season: Call for Long-Form Audio Narratives

The criminal justice reform podcast 70 Million has announced a call for “long-form audio narrative” pitches. Excerpts from a press release via Podnews:

The award-winning open-source solutions journalism podcast will begin production on its third season in January 2020. [It] will raise the bar on reporting on criminal justice reform through the lens of the local jail. We’re looking for long-form audio narratives that: explore local solutions, inside or outside the walls of the actual jail; introduce compelling characters who are system-involved; and immerse listeners in sound and scene-rich audio storytelling. Ideal reporters live in or are from the area they’re reporting on; report on their own communities [and] have previously reported on criminal justice.

If interested in contributing, please read the guidelines in full.

Last Day, a new podcast released today from Lemonada Media, in partnership with Westwood One Podcast Network, is about the things that are killing us. The New York Times recommends the intimate and inspiring show about “the why and the how of America’s most massive epidemics.”

Season 1 opens with the opioid crisis, which is personal to host and Lemonada co-founder Stephanie Wittels Wachs. Her brother, the comedian and writer Harris Wittels, died of a heroin overdose in 2015.

Guests Aziz Ansari and Sarah Silverman join Wittels Wachs to share about the loss of their friend. It’s also personal to Lemonada co-founder and CEO Jessica Cordova Kramer, who lost her brother, Stefano, to a fentanyl overdose in the winter of 2017. Stefano’s story will be told in Season 1.

Talking about addiction is hard, but Last Day is anything but bleak. Wittels Wachs’ quest for progress zooms in on one person’s last day of life, exploring, with plenty of humor and humanity, how they got there. Zooming out, it helps us understand the big picture, and what can be done.

Join the conversation with wit, empathy, and hope. Subscribe to Last Day wherever you get your podcasts.

Here's what else is going on:

• Audioboom has subscribed to Nielsen’s Podcast Listener Buying Power Service from Nielsen Scarborough. The service “allows clients to profile shows” using exclusive “insights from podcast listening,” including “program titles collected from subscribers.”
• The Asylum Entertainment Group is launching Audity, an “audio-forward” podcasting company. Parent company AEG says that Audity will develop “equitable financial partnerships that allow creators to take advantage of AEG’s back-end operations.”
• Cincinnati’s podcast festival, now called PoD Discovery(s), is back on October 23 with a new venue and lineup to accommodate a growing community. Workshops, presentations, and live performances will focus on “frontier technology” primarily for creators.
• Veritonic’s Audio Score, the company’s rating standard for audio creative content like “ads and voiceovers,” has new “predictive capabilities.” The “technology generates an instant, comprehensive score” for marketers to “make fast, informed decisions.”