The great Apple in the sky has spoken! Podcasting is saved! Long live our fruit-based overlords!

As I anticipated in my article 5 Predictions for Podcasting in 2021 (indeed it was prediction №1), Apple has awoken. At an event where they launched a new iPad Pro and a range of iMacs so skinny they finally understand how Kate Moss felt, Tim Cook delivered a bit of a bombshell for podcasters — a totally redesigned Apple Podcasts app, new Podcasts Connect interface, and, crucially, a subscription service to help podcasters paywall their content.

If you want to better understand the…

For my sins, I watch a lot of YouTube. I watch enough that, at this point, the algorithm is perfectly capable of serving me up a homepage buffet where I would willingly gorge myself on every item. Take now, for example, when I go onto YouTube.com I’m offered: Aliens in Fornite, extended highlights of the 2013 Wimbledon final, live World Poker Tour action, Europa League clips, and, perhaps best of all, a gorilla facing off against naturalist Steve Backshall.

Here in the UK, media watchers are obsessed by one thing: the launch of GB News.

GB News — when it hits screens at some point in the coming weeks/months — will be a news channel with a right-of-centre tilt, taking its playbook from the success of Fox News in the US and focusing on “original news, opinion and debate”. It’s funded by a variety of mass media companies, private investment firms, and Paul Marshall, who previously funded UnHerd, another sub-Spectator, free-speech obsessed right-of-centre outfit. Their big coup has been signing up Andrew Neil as a presenter and chairman. …

I’m always wary when people talk about a ‘new tool’ that will ‘change podcasting’, because, let’s face it, very few (maybe even none) have had any impact in the past decade. But I’m extra wary when the product that’s going to ‘change podcasting forever’ isn’t even a podcasting product.

I’ve been on Clubhouse, the new audio hangout app, for a couple of days now, which makes me an expert. It’s currently in some sort of mysterious invite only beta (thank you Bethany!) and is only for iPhone, so it’s hardly a pluralist tool. But it’s getting a lot of attention…

Ok, it’s now 2021 which means it’s time to cast the eye forward over the next 12 months in podcasting. What will it bring? Will this be a tough year? Or are we finally about to experience the proverbial ‘big year for podcasting’?

Here are 5 predictions that you can hold over my head next December…

1) Apple Awakens 

This is an easy prediction to make because, to some extent, it’s already happened. They’ve done some work in original podcasting and I would expect that to continue, along with a few exclusivity deals.

But I’ll be more ambitious with this prediction and say…

Oh God, I’ve been a professional podcaster for another year. I thought this was just a phase…

Well, that was a nice easy year. No drama, just steady consolidation for our growing industry. Bit of a snooze, actually. But for the hell of it, here’s a quick look at the big stories in podcasting from 2020 and some overall impressions of the health and vitality of our nascent industry.

Towards the start of the year — when the great clock that counts podcast feeds finally hit a million — I published a piece here on Pod Culture about what the…

My life would be so much easier — and happier — if I could avoid getting myself worked up about stuff that doesn’t, and never will, affect me. I am the old man railing at the clouds, except I’m in my late-20s and I’m screaming at super-mega-corporations in adjacent industries.

This week I’ve been exercised by Disney, HBO and the discourse in between. There are basically two threads to this — firstly, at Disney’s investor event they announced a massive slate of projects that are almost all doubling-down on extant properties from the Disney/Marvel/Star Wars universe that they’ve brought together…

There’s a meme — always good when Grandpa starts a story by describing a meme — featuring the protagonists of the film Withnail and I. In the scene, Richard E Grant says the famous line “we’ve gone on holiday by mistake!”, though in the meme version ‘holiday’ is replaced with whatever calamitous, hard-to-do-by-accident thing is topical. For me, the meme would read “we’ve created a hate group by mistake!”.

This story starts more than a decade ago, when, as a teenager, I got really into the hit 1970s TV show M*A*S*H. I won’t explain that any further: you know what…