Podcasts proving a competitive daily ritual
FEBRUARY 10,2020
Nicholas Adams-Dzierzba
It’s been a gruelling 18 months, but Claire Kimball and Kate Watson have carved out a business based on providing busy people with a shortcut to the news. Each night Kimball drafts an email tracking the news of the day, and Watson turns that into a podcast script. They’re up before 5am to record, produce and edit the day’s episode and release it by 6am.
Their podcast, The Squiz, is one of several daily news offerings available to podcast listeners in Australia. Podcasts increasingly are occupying the time of journalists and budgets of media companies searching for viable business models.
From the Newsroom, recently relaunched by news.com.au, presents top stories succinctly in several minutes. There are the hard news reports: The Sydney Morning Herald/The Age’s Please Explain; Schwartz Media’s 7am; and The Guardian’s Full Story, which can considered loss-leaders for the mastheads.
Careful to avoid making radio on the internet are the broadcasters, ABC’s The Signal, and weekly Network 10’s The Professor and The Hack.
Domestic daily news podcasts also contend with international juggernauts such as The New York Times’s The Daily.
Then there are a la carte podcasts many listeners pick and choose over daily news, true crime investigations and personality interview shows. The Australian has pioneered investigative and true crime podcasts. Also regularly among top rating podcasts on the Australian iTunes charts are the Joe Rogan Experience and The Tim Ferriss Show. “Our competitors are global now,” says Rob Loewenthal, CEO of Whooshkaa. The podcast hosting platform previously featured
The Australian’s podcasts — including global hit The Teacher’s Pet, which had more than 60 million downloads. The business’s current catalogue hosts 7500 users and Loewenthal thinks the market can support five times more news podcasts.
“In the long run, the most successful podcasts will be the storytellers, the journalists and the
investigators. They’re the ones that create a “lean forward listening experience rather than lean back like traditional audio,” Loewenthal says.
The Squiz duo both work from home in the morning and have an office to come into later in the day. “We’re a start-up so we’re pretty tight on costs. We don’t have glamorous recording suites,”
Kimball says. In 2006, Kimball, 45, was working as Tony Abbott’s media adviser when she met Watson, 31, who was working in the former member for Warringah’s elector- ate office. Their current offering is daily news with Squiz Today, Squiz Shortcuts, providing more context, and recent addition Squiz Kids.
They’re primarily funded by advertising, with Commonwealth Bank the first to come on board. What advertisers want from The Squiz is access to their listeners, “a really valuable audience of smart busy women, and to talk to them directly,” Watson says.
Schwartz Media entered the daily news podcast market a year ago with 7am. It uses reporters from The Saturday Paper and The Monthly. Until December it was hosted by Elizabeth Kulas, who previously worked in the US at Gimlet Media on the Planet Money podcast. Kulas, 31, says podcast audio suffers from the idea it’s a low bar- rier to entry and it’s relatively cheap. But good editing, drafting, preparation and production “takes time and expertise and costs money ... That’s labour, wages, and that’s expensive.”
The New York Times’s The Daily is the north star for how news podcasts work: “An A1 page, a front page used to be the best thing you could get. Now a Daily episode, for many reporters, is the best thing you can get,” Kulas says. But the reality is that daily podcasts usually require a print masthead behind them. “Shifting or balancing the calculus of those two things is hard on a day-to-day basis,” Kulas says.
The Guardian’s news podcast, Full Story, seeks to distin- guish itself using a documentary style. Executive producer Miles Martignoni thinks short, sharp news podcasts are the closest thing to a radio news bulletin, and they will be the easiest to get outmanoeuvred. Delivering three episodes a week, Martignoni says the four- member Full Story team is capable of producing an episode in a day and a half, but more comfortably three days compared to The Daily’s 17 staff making five episodes a week. “It’s difficult to scale a large audience quickly. I don’t know if you’ll ever see a 17-person, daily news podcast in Australia,” Martignoni says.
How to convert true crime listeners into daily news consumers is the million-dollar question.
Some people might only be interested in true crime, but The Australian’s Hedley Thomas, who created The Teacher’s Pet, thinks if you are a convert to podcasts, you will want to “sample lots of different delicacies from the buffet table. One day it might be true crime, the next day it might be a deep dive into the bushfires. The next day it could be a cross to the best journalists in the Canberra’s press gallery to unpack the sports rorts scandal.”
Most podcasts do not divulge listener numbers, unless they reach a critical mass of 2 million listeners an episode like The Daily, or 60 million for Teacher’s Pet. Podtrac in the US only sup- plies aggregate publisher numbers publicly and ranks the individual shows without disclosing downloads per show. The Australian Podcast Ranker, an alternative list to iTunes’ podcast chart, has 10 participants.
There’s reluctance about revealing listener numbers until audience tracking is more representative of the whole market, because it could lead to a trading war, says Ainslee O’Brien, general manager of commercial networks at News Corp Australia.
O’Brien agrees it is a challenge for podcasts to make money. Adobe Digital Insights 2019 found that, of 72 per cent of podcast listeners who heard an ad while listening, a third found ads
to be more engaging than on other mediums. Further, 40 per cent found them less intrusive than other type of ads. Sponsorship is the preferred model of sale because it’s more valuable. Optus has sponsored news.com.au’s relaunch of From the Newsroom. Harvey Norman, the sponsor for The Teacher’s Pet, had CEO Katie Page voicing a personal message at the start of each episode.
The subscriber model of further content, extended interview access and related articles behind a news organisation’s paywall is a subscriber draw.
A third rail of funding is grants. The Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas provided 7am funding for a features and field producer. It also enabled Claire Kimball and Kate Watson to develop The Squiz Kids for children.