In depth, on the go: where podcasts & journalism meet

In depth, on the go: where podcasts & journalism meet

Alex Bryson 

17th October 2024

Podcasts listenership is huge, and growing – enabling the listener to relax, to learn, to participate in fandoms and, increasingly, to stay informed on world events. 

What does it mean for podcasts to serve as a channel for news? From the standpoint of media brands, it means gaining access to time and attention that might otherwise have been spent exercising, commuting or performing menial tasks. This can open up new audiences, or simply expand the degree of interaction with an existing audience. 

If the appeal for media brands and publications is clear, what’s the draw for the audiences?

Clearly podcasts, which are a ‘slow’ medium relative to many others, are not a channel for breaking news. Instead, it’s more instructive to view them as fulfilling a particular function within the broader news cycle – one that has traditionally been assumed by analysis or comment pages.

To illustrate this, we’ve chosen as an example the media conversation taking place around polluted waterways.

 

The chart plots the English language podcasts to have produced an episode mentioning water pollution between June and August 2024. For one thing, it gives a sense of just how active news podcasts are within the space. 

It also visualizes the split between broadcasters (ie, owned by media bodies such as the BBC and WSJ, or podcast publishers Crooked) and independents. The latter are almost as populous, but on this topic cannot match the former for visibility (a proprietary Pulsar metric that captures the reach and impact of a given piece of content).

Much of the content that reoccurs across these platforms exists to provide an analytical ‘take’ on an event that might have taken place hours (elections), days (geopolitics) or even years before (in the case of longstanding socioeconomic trends). 

This last mode of analysis harks back to the genre that first catapulted podcasts into the mainstream: true crime. In terms of presentation, the genre stands diametrically opposed to much of what we see today on news podcasts – the aim being not to communicate quickly and effectively, but rather tease out a single narrative over successive weeks.

But it proved that there was a significant appetite amongst listeners to hear stories communicated via the medium, and to cast an analytical eye over such stories. 

Naturally, just because a news media brand possesses both an online news presence and a podcast, it does not necessarily mean they will focus both channels on a topic over a given period. 

We can visualize this over the set period of time to establish: first, which news media writing on the topic also have podcasts; second, which online news srouces dedicate more time and column space to the topic; and third, which of these have utilized their podcasts in their reporting over this period. 

 

 

It surfaces several insights of note, one being the outsized impact of left-wing publications like The Guardian in the reporting of polluted waterways. This is unsurprising on one level, given how the topic touches on progressive issues, such as environmentalism and accusations of corporate profiteering.

At the same time, the degree to which The BBC and The Guardian (both UK-based but with significant global presences) impact global discussion around this topic is striking.

Both these brands paired their extensive writing on the topic with output on podcast channels. Titles such as The Washington Post or ABC Australia did not, however.

In the case of The Washington Post, this is likely due to the US election keeping other topics from being discussed in the same level of depth over the period. In Australia, meanwhile, domestic news coverage around waterways tended to focus on small-scale viral outbreaks - the Australian podcasts that covered the topic, on the other hand, focused on the Seine and its cleanliness for the Paris Olympics. 

Given how many news consumers are increasingly reliant on podcasts to provide go-to analysis, such editorial decision-making (invisible and unnoticeable in most metrics or media monitoring) can have a significant and unforeseen impact on the number of people engaging with a topic.

Podcasts are a vital channel for modern journalism, opening up new audiences and types of consumption. Traditionally more difficult to measure than other channels, podcast monitoring on Pulsar TRAC enables PR & Comms pros to get a sense of how editorial decisions and channel visibility across the medium impact how audiences perceive a topic.


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This article was created using data from TRAC

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