Monday 16th October: Podcast and platform experiments at the New Statesman

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We love how open Chris Stone is on LinkedIn about the New Statesman’s podcast strategy. If you’re at all interested in the intersection of publishing, podcasts and video, he’s well worth a follow. So when we were brainstorming guests to share how they’ve navigated the past 12 months in podcasting, Chris was an obvious choice.

In this episode, he talks about some of his strategic moves like consolidating all the New Statesman’s podcasts into one feed, through to navigating YouTube’s algorithms as YouTube Podcasts launches in the UK. He also gives some advice for publisher podcast teams who may be facing tightened budgets at the moment.

It’s hard for me to pick a favourite moment as this is a topic I could geek out about FOR AGES but I did particularly like how willing he is to try new things early. Figuring out podcasts on YouTube involved making some pretty big mistakes this year, but they’re now in a really strong position of growth at a point many others are just starting to grapple with the platform.

This is a really detailed piece we found thanks to the author pitching in on one of our recent community topics on levels of power and dominance in UK media. It turns out just 16 companies dominate much of what we find in Google’s search results. Given these are (mostly) reputable publishers who have worked hard to build trust with Google and consumers, I don’t necessarily see this as a problem, but I’d be interested to see the same study in a year or so as the impact of GenAI on some of these types of content kicks in.

I wish I’d seen this before we recorded this week’s episode with Chris Stone as I’d have loved to get his take on it! “Using a voice that audiences already recognised as a basis to train the robot voice made the transition from a real voice to an automated voice easier,” said Schibsted’s Karl Oskar Teien. It makes sense - if people are too time-pressed to read excellent content but can listen to it on the go, why not offer it as an option?

Don’t worry, this isn’t a hint - I work with two excellent team members who can pick up the slack when I need a break. But for solo newsletter writers, there is some great advice here on communicating when you need a break to your readers, and what happened to these five publishers when they came back.

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