Tuesday 16th February: Podcasts are the next battleground for misinformation

February 16, 2021

Howdy! Today's Media Roundup is brought to you by Chris.

There's plenty to dig into in this longread about podcast moderation, but this is the sentence that stuck with me: "All of which is to say, one of the most high-profile podcast deplatforming incidents wasn’t even wholly effective". Misinformation, the modern scourge of rational discussion, is hard enough to eliminate in more traditional mediums - but what about in a booming audio space where the detection of misinformation is far more difficult?

For The Verge, Ashley Carman posits that although it is certainly technically possible to scan the deluge of podcasts across a variety of networks for misinformation, it's far from easy. Worse, there are disincentives to do so at a time when the big players jostle for position, and where there is yet no industry-wide acceptance on how it should be done.

Worse, the means of distributing podcasts means that solving the issue effectively means policing human nature: "because of the system’s open nature, there’s only so far the biggest company, Apple, can go in policing its platform. Asking it to remove a show from its directory is like asking it to make a specific webpage inaccessible in Safari - is that something people want?"

On this week's episode Peter and I sheepishly admitted that Clubhouse isn't doing it for us yet. But in this article Ben Thompson argues that it "will do for audio what Twitter, Instagram Stories, and TikTok did for text, images, and video." Best get experimenting on there, I guess...

As we said on Twitter, 'This second paragraph by @jeffjarvis is as firm a refutation of the idea that the Duopoly "owe" news outlets anything as we've ever read'. We agree that it would be nice if the tech giants supported news companies - just as it would be nice if the car industry, or any industry chose to - but they aren't beholden to us. This article explores that issue.

Good(ish) news for one of the UK's largest regional publishers after it launched a metered paywall across 70 titles in summer last year: "Newsquest has revealed record growth in the digital audience of its 160 local news websites, reporting an average of 41.5 million monthly unique visitors for the last six months of 2020". Now how directly is that growth translating into conversions, we wonder?

This week's podcast:

This week Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, Director at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, tells us where newspapers are going wrong in their subscription marketing, why there’s no easy solution to the need for internal change in newsrooms, and why Nordic countries outperform when it comes to the membership mentality.

Have you seen our shortlist? Despite a challenging year, over 100 podcasts made the shortlist of the 2021 Publisher Podcast Awards, underlining publisher commitment to podcasting. Check our shortlist here - and read why we're trialling a Pay What You Want ticketing system here.