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Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is issue 246, dated February 18, 2020.
The Podcast Academy. Last Friday, a group of podcast publishers and related operatives announced the formation of something called The Podcast Academy — not to be mistaken with what appears to be a semi-amateur Australian resource for podcasters of the same name — which they described as a nonprofit organization dedicated to “elevating awareness and excitement for podcasts as a major media category and advancing knowledge and relationships in and around the business.”
Its activities will involve things like holding webinars, organizing networking events, and publishing white papers, but its flagship endeavor seems to be an awards program called called the Golden Mics. (Between “Golden Mic” and the use of the word “academy,” the whole nomenclature strikes me as a little derivative and cringe-worthy, which perhaps doesn’t bode well for the endgame effort of “elevating excitement.” Then again, “Hot Pod.”)
The newly formed body, which will be driven by membership, pitches itself as for both industry professionals and independent podcasters, however you define those terms. Its founding members include executives from Wondery, Stitcher, NPR, PRX, Tenderfoot TV, Spotify, and Sony Music, along with Criminal’s Lauren Spohrer, Spoke Media’s Alia Tavakolian, UTA’s Oren Rosenbaum, and Rekha Murthy, a former PRX exec turned independent operator. From what I can glean from how the idea originally came across my plate (not to mention the framing in the Bloomberg report), Wondery’s Hernan Lopez seems to be leading the charge on this.
As the Variety writeup highlights, a number of major podcast publishers haven’t declared allegiance to the Podcast Academy, at least just yet. That list includes iHeartMedia (which, by the way, operates its own competing podcast awards), The New York Times, Entercom (which owns Cadence13 and Pineapple Street), Westwood One, and Luminary. The academy will start accepting applications for membership later in the spring.
The response to the announcement seems to have been broadly accommodating; a handful of independent podcast sources have explicitly cited the involvement of PRX, still an indie darling in certain circles, as a reason to be somewhat optimistic. But there are nonetheless pockets of skepticism, much of it rooted, understandably, in a familiar anxiety: that the academy and its...