Thursday 20th June: Five tips for making a successful 'vodcast'

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Here’s a lovely write-up from our friends at journalism.co.uk of a panel from our Publisher Podcast & Newsletter Summit. In the intro to the session that’s been written up I noted that video podcasts aren’t an experiment any more — they’re part and parcel of commercial strategies for podcasts and need to be treated as such. So we were especially lucky that Paul Doyle, head of editorial video at Immediate Media, was able to come along to the summit and provide some practical tips about what it takes for a video podcast to be successful.

"Pick topics and subjects that audiences will empathise with and connect to. A good example of this is when The Radio Times Podcast spoke to pop star and actress Lily Allen about her struggles being a woman in a male-dominated sector. Podcasting is great for letting these topics breathe, but they hit harder when guests are on screen. Stories like these can turn your podcast into a community where viewers feel seen and heard.”

There are other great tips in there that help with video podcasts’ biggest problems, namely discoverability and how you actually stand out amid the rush to make all podcasts more visual. One thing Paul didn’t explain, unfortunately, is how you convince your two Media Voices co-hosts to agree to do more video podcasts! One day, listeners… one day.

No wonder the Barclays were so keen to retain control…

This is a ridiculous one. The Canadian Government currently requires some tech companies (Google and Meta mostly) to pay news publishers for use of their content — even though the value exchange between publisher and platform is murky i.e. massively misrepresented by both sites. By contrast, AI startups are explicitly receiving value from their use of publishers’ content, but the Canadian government doesn’t have a position on whether they should pay? It’s all politics.

How’s the relationship between publishers and AI-powered search companies developing? Well, not well, as you can probably tell from this Wired headline. What’s interesting here isn’t just how brazen a lot of Perplexity’s activity is — ignoring robots.txt among other things — but how its investors seem to see potential infractions and fines as just part of the cost of doing business.

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