Media Skeet Shooting: does the manic news environment expose digital media?
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“Apparently we need to re-record now,” announced a WhatsApp message I received a couple of days ago, just a few hours after the weekly recording session for one of my podcasts.
We had diligently reported on the ongoing trade war between the United States and, well, the rest of the world. It was an interesting, considered conversation and it was extremely true to the facts of the situation — or, at least, true to the facts of the situation at 13:14 BST on Wednesday. By 19:06, when my phone pinged with that message, the facts had changed. Should we append a voicenote explaining, with due apology, that the episode was recorded by prior to Donald Trump’s latest reverse ferret? “But most of our analysis still stands!” we’d, inevitably, find ourselves trying to convince listeners.
Working in news and current affairs podcasting, right now, is like skeet shooting. The targets are moving too fast, the facts are spinning through the wind. “Pull!” Fire. Sometimes you hit your mark, sometimes you miss; either way, there’s another clay pigeon heading into the air, another target to hit.
Podcasting is extremely ill-equipped to deal with the pace of the news right now. Even at its leanest, podcasting is still a multi-step publishing activity. You have to pin your hosts and guests down to a record time (which, in a landscape dominated by the ubiquitous “emergency” podcast, can be tricky). They you record the conversation — true to the facts of that moment — for 30 minutes (T+30mins) and send it straight over for mixing and editing. Even the fastest teams doing the most light touch edit will usually need an hour (T+90mins), from the completion of the conversation, before the show is ready for distribution. This slick team get the title, description and show notes prepped while the show is being edited, and then upload all of that in about 10 minutes from the completion of the edit (T+100mins). The process is now complete at the creator end, but far from complete when it comes to distributors and audiences.
Apple and Spotify make shows available pretty much simultaneously after upload (certainly within a few minutes, T+105mins). But ‘available’ is very different to downloaded. Apple Podcasts’ push notifications, to my iPhone, often come through hours, if not days, after a podcast has been released. They are not an effective way of alerting your listeners to a new episode, instead you rely on two things. Firstly, preparing a social media push to champion your latest episode (let’s assume this is a quicker socials team than I’ve ever worked with, and that they get that all prepped and posted within 25 minutes: T+130mins). But for the bulk of your audience, you will have to rely on the labour of listeners themselves in manually opening their podcast app and checking to see whether there are new episodes. This could happen anywhere from 1 second to 1 year after the episode has dropped. But let’s assume it’s a pretty pacy news day and most of your listeners are junkies for current affairs content. They check their podcast app of choice twice a day for new episodes. Once in the morning, as they head out on their commute, and once, again, after work. This means that really, you only have one same-day slot (unless you’re recording early AM) and it’s probably 2–3 hours post-publication. So even after all that effort to take just a couple of hours, from conception to publication, you’ll be dragged into a 5-hour time delay by your own bloody listeners.
Which is fine, normally. But we’ve witnessed several crucial instances, in the past few years (elections are always a tough time for this sort of thing, but think also of the January 6th insurrection or the ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza) where the pace of change makes podcasts a frustrating news mechanism.
But it’s not just podcasts. Take newsletters too. If you want to talk tariffs on your Substack, you better keep those posts short. If it takes you more than an hour to write, the factual basis of the article has probably rotted already. And then you have to hope that your readers are engaged enough to be regularly checking their email, finding time to read, and aren’t going to defer that exercise until they have a few minutes during their lunch break, by which time Mr Trump will have launched a brand new trade war with the lost city of Atlantis.
It’s no coincidence that these two mediums — podcasts and newsletters — that suffer so much in a fast-paced news environment are also the mediums best placed to nurture independent, non-establishment journalism. Their premise is based on a heavy opt-in premise: listeners have to actively subscribe, download and listen to your podcast, while readers have to subscribe, open and read your newsletter. Big legacy multimedia types, like cable news or radio, favour an ambient passivity. Leave the TV running, tune in or out. That is a luxury afforded to organisations that can afford the satellites, licenses and other infrastructure required to launch a TV channel. They can tell you the news at 13:14 and then again at 13:24 and, again, at 13:34. As the facts change, their coverage changes.
Obviously, there have been attempts to bridge this gap for new media. The rise of video streaming — on services like YouTube, Twitch and even Rumble, the home of disgraced celebrities — has meant that launching what amounts to a cable news channel, but online, has never been easier. But there’s a catch. In the world of independent media, every cent counts. And to double your chances of generating revenue, you run your livestream for a couple of hours, and then carve up that content for YouTube or podcasts or a newsletter. It’s a sensible business decision, allowing you to create two revenue streams from one creative outlay (as the ancient proverb says, “he who chops the wood is warmed twice”). The issue is that you end up serving two masters: the immediacy required for the live broadcast (“it’s just after 1 o’clock and the tariffs are looking nutty!”) and the longevity required to milk this content down the line.
Cable news has always understood the power of being disposable. You broadcast, it’s watched, and then it’s never seen again (and if it is, that’s probably not a good sign). New media is still struggling with accepting that premise, either as a journalistic endeavour, technical feat or a business model.
The argument that is often made is that formats like podcasts and newsletters suit analysis, rather than news. You can still tune into Fox or CNN to get breaking updates on the shit-show that is de-globalisation, but you then listen to some boffins from the New York Times or The Economist breaking it down for you on a podcast. Similarly, with newsletters, you go on Twitter for that breaking news (“HUGE SCOOP NOT BROKEN ANYWHERE BEFORE: Trump has changed his mind”) and then you sit and wait for Paul Krugman or Sam Freedman to give their verdicts, straight into your inbox. The news is a continuous thing, a never-ending, untameable tangle, whereas analysis is there to tease out a sense of reason, to plait the news into a handsome braid. Not all mediums are equipped for the same tasks, Nick, and the frustrations you feel are because you’re choosing the wrong tool for the job, trying to brush your hair with a paperweight.
The problem with this idea is that it places far too great a separation between ‘news’ and ‘analysis’. Proponents of this idea are fetishising a sort-of dispassionate delivery of the events (“X has happen in Y country, meeting Z reaction”) that can then be picked over for partisan consideration. Present us the facts (news) and we will create the narrative (analysis). But, as everyone really knows, good analysis is based on those exact same facts. You might introduce context or bias or a fruitful combination, but the foundation is always facts. A has happened in B country, causing C reaction amongst D group, which has E consequence and F long-term ramifications for G ideology.
It’s also a delineation that ignores the fact that the world has turned against news. Consumers want analysis. Fox News, for its sins, is a highly analytic cable news channel. It’s a constant, roiling tide of outrage but the idea that it presents facts and then leaves the ‘news’ there to percolate is for the birds. Here in the UK, we have a genuine news service, the BBC, which is mandated in its charter to be neutral. That is the exception, not the rule. Even then, their schedule is chock full of ‘balanced’ analysis, inviting guests to provide both sides of the analytic coin. And so, most people consume their news with a heavy dollop of analysis. Furthermore, most people don’t have the time to ingest both a diet of news and a diet of analysis; they seek out the fusion cuisine that combines the two. And so when you release your podcast ‘What Do Trump’s Tariffs Mean For The World?’ you cannot cover one eye and tell the world this is just analysis, that you’re not there to deliver the factual reality of the ever-changing world. You are, necessarily, a news service.
It is not an easy problem to square without huge structural overhaul to how these things work. The architecture that lies behind podcasts and newsletters — RSS on one hand, email on the other — is almost as old as the internet itself. So how can new media creators exploit these formats without falling short when it comes to rapidly changing news cycles?
I was speaking, a few months ago, with a producer on the New York Times’s The Daily podcast, one of the biggest (genuine) news podcast out there. He explained that when they record their daily show (and the other shows in the broader Daily universe too) they swiftly publish a first draft of the show, and then tweak the episode through the day with minor amendments and additions as the information changes. People who listen straight away get the first version, but if you’re listening in the afternoon you might be listening to the second or third iteration of that podcast. It’s a process that harks back to the days when newspapers would have an evening edition to reflect the news that had happened, during the day, which was missed by the morning’s publication. This is a process that works for podcasts, but not for newsletters — once the email is in someone’s inbox, that’s the final take.
I don’t doubt that in the coming years we will see innovations related to two of the most important technological developments in podcasting: artificial intelligence and dynamic insertion. I suspect that I will soon, for example, be able to insert a marker in a show designed to tell my audience what the FTSE 100 levels are at time of listening. Instead of being held hostage to easily outdated figures, there’s a chance that technology can work as a live ticker. The human analysis, either side of that sort of thing, still has to be general enough to survive changes in market fortunes.
Above all else, perhaps, digital media needs to have more avenues that embrace disposability. Substack, for example, has features like the reader chat, which allow for more time-sensitive debate and discussions. There are a number of independent creators who use platforms like a Discord server — a private text and audio discussion room — to have rolling coverage. These are both community focused ideas that divest some of that authority, but certainly we will see more creators operating like old school news channels, broadcasting on social media platforms. The ratio of engagement:authority on social media is deeply problematic, but there are still gains to be made. The MeidasTouch network in the US, for example, is managing to straddle that divide. Here in the UK, the (slightly daft) GB News has managed to bring a cable news feel to what must now be seen as a digital-first operation.
But I think podcasters and newsletter publishers need to be conscious of this balance when the news is in the frenzied mood it’s been in of late. Emergency voicenotes, afternoon amendments or subsequent retractions and/or clarifications often serve to weaken the proposition. There is no true difference between news and analysis anymore; we need to serve listeners and readers the best of both worlds. It is an environment that could allow volume producers to flourish. Daily podcasts, twice-daily newsletters: once you get over the idea that content must be good and lasting, you can start to serve the demands of the news environment that you actually operate in.
Follow me on Bluesky for my — up to the minute — thoughts. And apologies for sending this at the weekend, I simply ran out of time during the, sigh, work week.
