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Podchaser now carries “political skew” data on podcasts

Podchaser has launched “political skew data” across 500,000 podcasts. It uses “a combination of AI-driven analysis and human verification to determine the political lean of each podcast audience,” and aims to predict left, right or neutral bias and the degree of lean.
- In an article, Mathew Passy highlights podcasting’s influence on the 2024 election.
ListenNotes is spotting podcasts produced using Google’s NotebookLM, and there are now 1,781. Yikes. Brianna Ansaldo listened to 200 of them, and concludes: “without authenticity, it’s just a bunch of noise.”
Spotify appears to have quietly changed its language about its analytics, dropping the claim that its definition of streams “align to the IAB definition of a download”. Specifically, stats for “streams” in Spotify are not de-duplicated by unique listeners - listen three times to an episode (from the same device), and you’d count for three “streams” but would be one IAB “download”. A “listener” in Spotify is de-duplicated through the life of your podcast; a “listener” according to the IAB guidelines works very differently. We’ve updated the section on Spotify’s stats in our article about how to understand podcast stats, as well as making other improvements to the article - feedback is always welcome.

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CBC News has talked to brain scientists about why some people enjoy sped-up podcast listening.
EarBuds this week post “five podcasts for hope in a polarised world”.

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The Tech Stuff

Enhancements to the podcast:location tag (from Daniel J Lewis and our Editor) are in Phase 8 of the new podcast namespace - specifically, it adds a new way to mark where an episode was recorded, as well as the subject matter of what it was about. Podnews’s RSS feed has the enhanced version in mark-up, in both the <channel> and <item>. Truefans supports it - look for the recording location in this episode.
Phase 8’s plan is currently just two tags, to avoid burnout. The podcast:follow tag is the other one; which is perhaps better placed in podcast websites, suggests our Editor. It won’t be the first time he’s been wrong.
The AI Podcast is a Python script to generate a podcast from a document you give it, much like NotebookLM does. “Inform your audience that the podcast is generated by AI”, it suggests.

Tips and tricks

Frank Racioppi writes Five Ways That Podcasters Are Their Own Worst Enemy, Way #2 says that podcasts have become 22% longer in the last five years: nobody likes a flabby, unedited podcast. We agree.
10 ChatGPT prompts for podcasting are either a genius idea or a set of tools to make beige, boring podcasts, depending on your point of view.

Podcast News

This Is Powerful With Paul Sculfor is doing a Men's Mental Health Month special this week. Given the detrimental effect alcohol and drugs have on mental health, he is sharing 5 tips (one tip a day) as well as personal anecdotes on how to get and stay sober.
The Better Call Daddy podcast has made it to episode 400 today - Reena Friedman Watts interviews people whose stories haven‘t been told, at least not through her unique lens, and then gets daddy‘s advice afterward like a good daughter does. The guest for episode 400? Hunter Biden's ex, Lunden Roberts.
The Sound Off Podcast has Amplifi's Steven Goldstein as a guest this time round. Host Matt Cundill says: "I asked him to critique my new audio promo. I won’t spoil what he said, but I will be creating a new audio promo shortly."
Slate's Slow Burn: The Rise of Fox News is now available to binge in full - how a cable news channel became a cultural and political force—and how a whole bunch of people rose up to try and stop it. The last episode looks at the 2024 US Presidential Election.
Libsyn's Rob Walch has put together this podcast playlist - Harris and Trump - Podcast Interviews - containing original links to podcasts with interviews with the US Presidential candidates. Like our podcast trailers feed, it contains direct links to each show on their original podcast host.

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