The end of podcasting, chapter 59

This week, a Substack newsletter was posted about problems that podcasts from former podcast studio Gimlet Media were experiencing (getting cancelled). In 2019, Spotify purchased Gimlet Media for $230 million dollars (more here on other Spotify podcast acquisitions). Why did people think being acquired by a big company was going to allow them to keep their artistic freedom and continue to do things the way they had done them? Demonstration of control of the channel (a la CBS/NBC/ABC of the 60s/70s/80s – you had to convince them to approve your show to get on the air) – maybe go back to producing podcasts yourself? After all, you must have a lot of money after that acquisition. Chapter 57 of this story discusses the Joe Rogan move to Spotify, and I wrote in 2019 about how to avoid the corporate takeover of podcasting. As Joel Grey and Liza Minelli sang in the musical “Cabaret“, money makes the world go around. If people want to produce podcasts to make money, there are ways to innovate, but the best place to start is to make great podcasts.

Wrapping up the January 6th Committee hearings

My wife and I watched the final hearing this week from the House January 6th Select Committee on the insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 (also, see C-SPAN archive collection. It was a day that I remember well, having kept a liveblog of the day’s events (also see posts here and here). I think that the committee has done an excellent job of telling the story of what led up to this event and how Donald Trump was the central figure in trying to overturn the 2020 election. My fervent hope is that the Department of Justice is going to pursue Trump and hold him accountable for his crimes (i.e., indict, arrest, and convict him!). The site JustSecurity.org has a January 6 clearinghouse of information on this event, well worth checking out, as well as a citizen’s guide to the evidentiary record.

The most striking part of the hearing was the documentary video of the congressional leaders at Fort McNair filmed by Alexandra Pelosi (Nancy Pelosi’s daughter). CNN also carried more of this footage the evening of the hearing (also here). It was riveting. One question came up in my wife and I discussing the hearing – how was it that Alexandra Pelosi came to be there that day? And for myself, how is it that this is the first time this footage is coming to public view? Was she planning to make a documentary with this? Her Wikipedia page says she works for HBO, but she has not released any documentaries since 2020. I hope that some journalist will dig into this a little more.

Using non-violence techniques to achieve goals

In a recent post on Waging Nonviolence, organizer George Lakey related a story about use of non-violence training and techniques in a boycott of South African sport teams during the apartheid era. Through these trainings, anti-racism and anti-apartheid groups were able to work together to come up with a plan to stage de-centralized civil disobedience events. The New Zealand government could not handle this approach, and cancelled a tour by the South African rugby team.

With the upcoming mid-term elections, there may be problems resulting from election protestors and disrupters. These techniques may be of use in this troubled time. We will have to wait, watch, and perhaps take action to preserve our democracy through civil disobedience.

Upholding our democracy

The United States is having challenges in maintaining and upholding democracy. In Oregon, all of the candidates for governor have all called each other “extreme” for one reason or another. In many states, people who deny the results of the 2020 presidential election won their primaries and are candidates for high office. The Democracy Day journalism collaborative held an event in September 2022 to highlight issues and seek solutions. In a post on Waging Nonviolence, the group outlined seven ideas for coming together as partisans for democracy:

  • Look beyond electoral politics
  • Define “anti-democratic” behavior beyond partisan identities
  • Bridge the understanding of “anti-democratic” behavior to mobilize against it
  • Calling out toxic othering
  • Now is not the time for neutrality
  • Partisanship for democracy versus bipartisanship
  • A cross-ideological democracy movement is both necessary and possible

This post is excellent reading, with many links to supporting material. As for each of us, let us do what we can to help uphold our democracy.

The Victorian Internet

I read this post from FEE (Foundation for Economic Education) about the commercial development of the telegraph. The main premise of the post was that government efforts to start/promote use of the telegraph were unsuccessful, but entrepreneurs took the ball and ran with it. The response of the British Admiralty was that they were going to continue to send messages via semaphore, which reminded me of this Ken Smith tweet about the use of semaphore in communication and this reflective post. The article has some good links, including the book “The Victorian Internet”, hence the title of this post. We have come a long way in communication, but it is good to be cognizant of our roots.

Some choices for how to host a podcast and create a podcast feed

I was talking with Ken Smith about hosting audio files and how to make them available. Here is a summary of the tools/techniques we discussed.

The key elements of a podcast are the audio file and a RSS feed which points to where the audio file resides. If you are using the Old School blogging tool in Drummer, you have a way to create a RSS feed which can reference audio files. The Drummer Change Notes blog has a post on specifics for referencing an audio file. Now, the audio file has to be hosted somewhere. If you have an Amazon Web Services account, you could store static audio files there and point to those files. Amazon Web Services has a page on how to host a static website (which could just be the audio files, or some website as well).

The method I use for my podcast Thinking About Tools for Thought is to use a standard self-hosted WordPress weblog to create the RSS feed and host the audio file. To my disgust, I could not find a single page with the minimum info needed to add an audio file to a WordPress post, so here is my short list (this assumes you are using a current WordPress install with the Gutenberg block editor):

1. Create a new post

2. Add whatever text you want

3. Click on the Audio block in the Gutenberg block editor and navigate to the audio file on your computer, then select the file. WordPress will display a player in the post.

4. Publish the post. Once the post is published, you can load the feed URL for the WordPress site (https://site/feed/) (example) to a podcast player, and the player will pick up the episodes.