Skip to main content

Hear all about it: how daily news podcasts became publishing's new hope

In the US, daily podcasts recapping events have become big business by providing income streams to newspapers while making stars out of their hosts. Could they cross the Atlantic?

Morning news podcasts are having a moment. While storytelling such as Serial and Dirty John and good-quality interviews such as The Adam Buxton Podcast and WTF with Marc Maron have become a reliable route to an audio hit, listeners are now warming to a weekday news briefing too. The New York Times’s The Daily has become the genre’s breakout hit. With its bold claim that “this is what the news should sound like”, it promises a 20-minute bulletin by 6am (ET time) every weekday. It made a podcast star out of former New York Times political reporter Mike Barbaro soon after it launched in February 2017, and a year later it had been downloaded 200m times. Next week, its audience will be boosted even further with a move to public radio.

Barbaro credits word of mouth for part of its rapid growth and is proud of the show’s global reach. He has become something of a cult figure, with Buzzfeed dedicating a listicle to him. When Barbaro was approached to host it, The Daily was supposed to just cover the last three months of the US presidential election campaign, but, he says, “We had an epiphany right away. Suddenly we realised that if we had these highly compelling Times reporters on, people wanted to hear them every week and imbibe this insider understanding. If we can do this twice a week and we can develop a significant audience, could we do it every day?”

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2GXdpnH
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

One giant leap: meet the new generation of male ballet stars

Beauty, strength and bags of energy: BBC Four’s Men at the Barre documentary gets up close and personal with the Royal Ballet dancers on the rise ‘It’s a golden era of male ballet dancers.” So says Emma Cahusac, the commissioning editor behind a new documentary, Men at the Barre, part of BBC Four’s dance season. It’s not just hyperbole. The young men rising up at the Royal Ballet are some of the most exciting in dance right now: principals Matthew Ball and Marcelino Sambé, first soloists Cesar Corrales and William Bracewell, and first artist Joseph Sissens all feature in Men at the Barre. With the majority of them British or UK-trained, it’s a giant leap from the grumblings of a decade ago about the lack of local dancers making it to the top. I spoke to Ball, Corrales and Sambé by phone, all staying resolutely positive during this enforced break from their intensive dancing lives, but all desperate to get back to work with colleagues they’re certain are something special. “I see so m...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dita Von Teese: ‘Even when I was a bondage model, I had big-time boundaries’

As the star dives into a giant glass of fizz for her first online extravaganza, she talks about this new golden age for burlesque, why the French Strictly gives her costume problems – and how #MeToo has changed her Dita Von Teese is looking divine. Her lips are that signature red, she’s wearing 1950s cat eye glasses, and her black hair falls in a thick wave across a Snow White skin – and all this on the unglamorous stage of a glitchy Zoom call. Only knowing Von Teese from her femme fatale image, her teasingly aloof burlesque performances, and her time in the tabloids as former wife of goth rocker Marilyn Manson , you might expect an icy demeanour, an impermeable mystique. So it’s surprising to discover quite how normal she is: chatty, self-deprecating, not very vampish. It’s easy to see traces of Heather Sweet, the “super shy” girl from small-town Michigan who transformed into Von Teese. The reason for our conversation is a new film, Night of the Teese, made with director Quinn Wils...
Post a Comment
Read more