| | What shifts in podcasting mean for media, Tucker Carlson’s future, and an assault in Paris.͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ |
 | Ben Smith |
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Welcome to Semafor Media, where we break the news behind the news. One of the things you do as an editor, particularly a scoop-obsessed editor like me, is send politely-worded emails to your competitors demanding they acknowledge your scoops. This is something only journalists care about — but we care a lot. And Max and I have noticed recently that the internet-age practice of crediting your competitors is starting to fade. It’s not always deliberate. Just as I was sending grumbly emails last week to outlets that didn’t credit Louise Matsakis’s great scoop about a Chinese e-commerce giant, I belatedly realized that Adweek’s Mark Stenberg had beaten us by a few minutes on a small, wild story about embezzlement at Fast Company. In all cases, the lack of credit was inadvertent — we hadn’t noticed. And these little glitches are a feature of the new decentralization of media. Journalists aren’t all glued to the same social network any more, not staring at the same scoreboard, and not talking to the same giant audience. That splinternet, as some call it, is the true subject of Max’s great story this week on what’s happening to podcasting. It turns out that the audio darlings — from the The Daily to high-production iHeart podcasts — are in some cases being displaced by medium-sized shows most people have never heard of. And that’s fine with the producers, who are connecting directly to audiences and selling plentiful ads. Media may not exactly be a “long tail” business, but there’s a lot of action in the mid-tail these days. Read on for my thoughts on Tucker Carlson’s future, for more on the podcast biz, an intel section brimming with scooplets, for which we demand credit in advance, and for Megyn Kelly’s advice for Carlson. Also: It’s debt ceiling season in Washington. Sign up for Semafor Principals, your wired, concise, and sophisticated guide to the coming, self-inflicted crisis. Elite podcasts struggle while the podcast masses thrive |
 Breaking PointsTHE NEWS Some of the most listened-to podcasts in America are struggling to sell ads as the audio business shifts toward the vast, mostly independent, “mid-tail.” The New York Times has shipped episodes of the paper’s flagship show The Daily in recent months without a full slate of paid advertisements, opting to air promotions of other Times content or podcasts. A Times spokesperson said that The Daily has never not run without any ads. The paper isn’t alone in its fight to keep rates up as top prices decline. Some shows in the iHeartmedia slate —like Black Effect and My Cultura — have also run without a full slate of paid ads in recent months, as iHeart continues to pursue large seven-figure advertising deals for the whole group with mixed success. “The general trend you describe with the Daily has played out for our big shows at the top of the year, though there seems to be some better momentum month over month,” one audio executive from iHeartMedia told Semafor. MAX’S VIEW The podcast industry is in the midst of a deep transformation, away from expensive brand-name programming and back toward its roots in a wider array of, mostly, talk shows. Spotify recently cut its massive podcast spending, and Sony also confirmed to me that it is scaling back its nonfiction narrative podcast ambitions. But top ad executives say that despite a pullback in ad spending across digital media, podcast ad spending will increase this year, with the majority spent on shows airing on Spotify, YouTube, and Apple. The Interactive Advertising Bureau said last year that the largest growth in advertising over the past several years has been in advertising categories with lower advertising spend, many of whom are advertising on lesser-known podcasts with hyper-focused audiences. As was the case when Substack began to peel off columnists and writers from traditional news organizations, this shift in the podcast market has benefited creators and smaller media companies who offer cheaper ads directed at specific listeners. One case in point: Saagar Enjeti and Krystal Ball were hosts of a streaming show on the Hill, but left the company in 2021 to start their own media venture, Breaking Points. The show has thrived on programmatic ads, which are increasingly popular among independent podcasters and represent a growing portion of advertising in the podcast space. “The big guys all live and die by the CPM,” Enjeti said, referring to the pricing of direct-sold advertisements. ROOM FOR DISAGREEMENT Media companies aren’t getting out of the audio business. The Daily remains a uniquely successful force in audio with 4 million daily downloads. And Slate, which stumbled into becoming an audio company ten years ago off the back of its successful Political Gabfest, is using its podcasts to power its membership program at the expense of advertising revenue. The company told Semafor its Slate Plus membership revenue has grown more than 50% compared to last year, driven by an ad-free offering and additional segments. THE VIEW FROM CHINA Starbucks just launched a branded show into the world’s second-largest podcast market, debuting March 1 on Starbucks China’s official WeChat account. The 41-minute show reportedly “features the coffee chain’s history, the ever-rising nationwide coffee trend, [and] mysterious coffee stories.” NOTABLE - Podcasts are still a tiny fraction of the U.S. advertising market. Advertisers spent nearly $70 billion on TV ads last year, compared to just $1.5 billion in podcasts.
- News organizations are failing in their attempts to find audiences for their content on Youtube. While podcasts that include a video component tend to perform better on the video platform, audio-only podcasts from Slate, NPR, and the Times have all garnered low viewership numbers on Youtube.
- Unionized TV writers said this week that in addition to boycotting TV writing, they will not be writing for fiction podcasts during the duration of the ongoing writers strike.
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Megyn Kelly hosted The Kelly File in prime time on Fox News from 2013 to 2017.  |
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The founders of Curbed have a new media venture: FOUND NY. The project, which launched softly in April on Substack, calls itself “the secret club of the hyper-informed.” It was founded by Josh Albertson, a former Gawker exec, and Lockhart Steele, who launched Curbed and served as the editorial director of Vox before being fired in 2017. It reads like a welcome throwback to the hand-curated food and real estate blogs that predated spammy Tripadvisor links, and costs $25 a month. Who you calling old? President Biden joked during the White House Correspondents Dinner that Rupert Murdoch makes him look like Harry Styles. Now that’s the new line. Responding to a Fox News reporter’s question about Biden skipping an event last week, White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates asked to “please give my warmest regards to y’all’s 92 year-old chairman.” (Fox did not include the comment about Murdoch’s age in its coverage.) Kara Shrine: The New York Times handed its old Times Square building over to Snap in what used to be seen as a symbol of the changed times. We weren’t sure, however, what it symbolized about media when a room-sized pyramidal shrine to former New York Times columnist Kara Swisher turned up in the building last week. Hard times at Vice: A Vice executive editor asked Vice editors this week how the company was planning to cover its own bankruptcy…. All politics is local: The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that its own chairman, venture capitalist Josh Kopelman, gave $50,000 to a SuperPAC that has been attacking the progressive candidate for mayor, Helen Gym. An official at the Gym-supporting Working Families Party said the money “puts journalists in an impossible position.” Kopelman didn’t respond to a request for comment from the news organization he chairs, and the Inky’s publisher, Lisa Hughes, said through a spokesman that the board has “no oversight or influence over editorial content.” — Max Tani and Ben Smith |
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