The day after Trump’s Access Hollywood video leaked, I saw something completely unprecedented happen in my podcast feed. Despite The Washington Post’s story breaking on a Friday afternoon, by the time I was cleaning my apartment the next day, my favorite shows had already released episodes responding to the news. On a Saturday!
Because podcast discovery remains labyrinthine for our listeners, many shows are designed to have a long shelf life. If I discovered The Moth Radio Hour or Modern Love this week, I’d be able to deeply binge on their entire back catalogues without hesitation. And while part of the joy of listening to the first season of Serial was following along “week by week,” the show is still being consumed with ravenous energy by fans who continue to discover it years later.
This is how personal storytelling set to feelings-rich organ music became an unshakeable cliché of the podcast medium. Those stories are what brought me here, but it’s not what’s kept me around. I love that podcasts are a way to take in news and information without being tied to a screen or a chair. Unlike my favorite public radio shows, my favorite podcast hosts are given license to explain and argue their opinions. In 2016, my favorite podcasts were ones that would help me digest the day’s news.
On that Saturday, October 8, podcasts broke from their regular schedules all at once, starting with FiveThirtyEight releasing an episode at 11 a.m. Their elections team became known this year for late-night emergency broadcasts and informal chats in diners over omelets. This specific episode featured a conversation taped before a live audience in Chicago the night before. From stage, whiz kid Harry Enten responded to the Access Hollywood recording: “If you’re a decent human being, it’s not something that you say.” The audience replied in affirmative applause.
At 1:30 p.m., the NPR Politics Podcast came out with their “Trump on Tape” episode. Three of their panelists gathered in NPR’s D.C. offices, and Ron Elving joined from home. New remote recording tools make these kinds of rapid response episodes more possible. Around 4:30 p.m., Slate’s The Gist released their episode “Trump’s Comeuppance?” down the feed. To make that episode, host Mike Pesca recorded 5 minutes of narration into an iPhone mic. Then the Report-It app automatically uploaded his file onto an FTP server, where his crafty producer across town, Mary Wilson, downloaded necessary elements, mixed and published the episode. In this episode, Pesca memorably compares Billy Bush to Chester the Terrier from Warner Bros. cartoons and uses audio to highlight the pup’s breathless deference and kiss-uppery.
Exciting new podcast publishing platforms such as Panoply’s Megaphone offer podcasters dynamic ad and promo insertion. To me, it seems inevitable that this same technology has the potential to be used for a regularly updated newscast. While I’m not privy to any plans in this area, I could imagine many podcast networks offering newscasts like this, with the option to geographically target and customize the content to different audiences.
As podcasts become better known as outlets for breaking news analysis, not everyone will want that. I have a friend who finds comfort in listening back to podcasts recorded before the 2016 election, before Terry, Marc and Dan knew the full threat to our liberal democracy. But soon podcasting’s forest of evergreen content won’t be able to stay the norm.
As our audiences continue to grow, many new listeners will arrive seeking refuge from Facebook’s fake news buffet and Twitter’s ideologue clutter, while expecting the speed of news they’ve became accustomed to from over-the-air radio and television. With more production staff, original programming, and audience demand, in 2017 we’ll see the rise of more news shows than ever, all experimenting with how quickly they can respond to breaking news. Let the race begin.
Andrea Silenzi is host of Why Oh Why.
Javaun Moradi What can we own?
Mathew Ingram The Faustian Facebook dance continues
Annemarie Dooling UGC as a path out of the bubble
Juan Luis Sánchez Your predictions are our present
Jim Friedlich A banner year for venture philanthropy
Dannagal G. Young The return of the gatekeepers
Matt Karolian AI improves publishing
Sarah Wolozin Virtual reality on the open web
Carrie Brown-Smith We won’t do enough
Bill Adair The year of the fact-checking bot
Lee Glendinning A call for great editing
Caitlin Thompson High touch, high value
Ståle Grut The battle for high-quality VR
Mandy Velez The audience is the source and the story
Amie Ferris-Rotman Вслед за Россией
Tanya Cordrey The resurgence of reach
Megan H. Chan Cultural reporting goes mainstream
M. Scott Havens Quality advertising to pair with quality content
Mario García Virtual reality on mobile leaps forward
Rebekah Monson Journalism is community-as-a-service
Kawandeep Virdee Moving deeper than the machine of clicks
Corey Ford The year of the rebelpreneur
Alice Antheaume A new test for French media
Peter Sterne A dangerous anti-press mix
Andy Rossback The year of the user
S.P. Sullivan Baking transparency into our routines
Sue Schardt Objectivity, fairness, balance, and love
Sara M. Watson There is no neutral interface
Tressie McMillan Cottom A path through the media’s coming legitimacy crisis
Katie Zhu The year of minority media
Melody Kramer Radically rethinking design
Reyhan Harmanci Bear witness — but then what?
Rubina Madan Fillion Snapchat grows up
Doris Truong Connecting with diverse perspectives
Almar Latour Thanks, #fakenews
Nushin Rashidian A rise in high-price, high-value subscriptions
Renée Kaplan Pure reach has reached its limit
Erin Millar The bottom falls out of Canadian media
Mira Lowe News literacy, bias, and “Hamilton”
Mary Meehan Feeling blue in a red state
Amy Webb Journalism as a service
Christopher Meighan Unlocking a deeper mobile experience
Tracie Powell Building reader relationships
Vivian Schiller Tested like never before
Andrea Silenzi Podcasts dive into breaking news analysis
Emily Goligoski Incorporating audience feedback at scale
Ken Schwencke Disaggregation and collection
Nicholas Quah Podcasting’s coming class war
Claire Wardle Verification takes center stage
Liz Danzico The triumph of the small
Scott Dodd Nonprofits team up for impact
Asma Khalid The year of the newsy podcast
Ray Soto VR moves from experiments to immersion
Keren Goldshlager Defining a focus, and then saying no
Priya Ganapati Mobile websites are ready for reinvention
Taylor Lorenz “Selfie journalism” becomes a thing
Andrew Ramsammy Rise of the rebel journalist
Steve Henn The next revolution is voice
Libby Bawcombe Kids board the podcast train
Jonathan Stray A boom in responsible conservative media
Sydette Harry Facing journalism’s history
Valérie Bélair-Gagnon Truthiness in private spaces
Mike Ragsdale A smarter information diet
Burt Herman Local news gets interesting
Emi Kolawole From empathy to community
Umbreen Bhatti A sense of journalists’ humanity
Liz McMillen The year of deep insights
Margarita Noriega From pinning tweets to tweeting pins
Joanne Lipman The year of the drone, really
Lam Thuy Vo The primary source in the age of mechanical multiplication
Aja Bogdanoff Comments start pulling their weight
Laura Walker Authentic voices, not fake news
Ariane Bernard Better data about your users
Ashley C. Woods Local journalism will fight a new fight
Matt Waite The people running the media are the problem
Errin Haines Chaos or community?
Gabriel Snyder The aberration of 20th-century journalism
Millie Tran International expansion without colonial overtones
Tim Griggs The year we stop taking sides
Olivia Ma The year collaboration beats competition
Maria Bustillos “It’s true — I saw it on Facebook”
Amy O'Leary Not just covering communities, reaching them
Andrew Haeg The year of listening
Adam Thomas The coming collaboration across Europe
Mary Walter-Brown Getting comfortable asking for money
Eric Nuzum Podcasting stratifies into hard layers
David Skok What lies beyond paywalls
Rachel Schallom Stop flying over the flyover states
Zizi Papacharissi Distracted journalism looks in the mirror
Jon Slade Trusted news, at a premium
Francesco Marconi The year of augmented writing
Juliette De Maeyer and Dominique Trudel A rebirth of populist journalism
Dhiya Kuriakose The year of digital detoxing
Ryan McCarthy Platforms grow up or grow more toxic
Michael Kuntz Trust is the new click
Erin Pettigrew A year of reflection in tech
Helen Havlak Chasing mobile search results
Ole Reißmann Un-faking the news
Samantha Barry Messaging apps go mainstream
Guy Raz Inspiration and hope will matter more than ever
Pablo Boczkowski Fake news and the future of journalism
Carla Zanoni Prioritizing emotional health
Hillary Frey Forests need to burn to regrow
Ernst-Jan Pfauth Earn trust by working for (and with) readers
Jonathan Hunt Measurement companies get with the times
Richard Tofel The country doesn’t trust us — but they do believe us
David Weigel A test for online speech
Molly de Aguiar Philanthropists galvanize around news
Andrew Losowsky Building our own communities
Alberto Cairo Communicating uncertainty to our readers
Sarah Marshall Focusing on the why of the click
Moreno Cruz Osório The year of transparency in Brazilian journalism
Sam Ford The year we talk about our awful metrics
Dan Colarusso Let’s make live video we can love
Jeremy Barr A terrible year for Tiers B through D
P. Kim Bui The year journalism teaches again
Robert Hernandez History will exclude you, again
Bill Keller A healthy skepticism about data
Elizabeth Jensen Trust depends on the details
Kathleen Kingsbury Print as a premium offering
Dan Gillmor Fix the demand side of news too
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen News after advertising may look like news before advertising
Julia Beizer Building a coherent core identity
Michael Oreskes Reversing the erosion of democracy
Cory Haik Navigating power in Trump’s America
Anita Zielina The sales funnel reaches (and changes) the newsroom
Geetika Rudra Journalism is community
Cindy Royal Preparing the digital educator-scholar hybrid
Tim Herrera The safe space of service journalism
An Xiao Mina 2017 is for the attention innovators
Alexis Lloyd Public trust for private realities