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?”
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