The New York Times released “The Daily” in February of 2017. A podcast that dropped early in the morning and proved that this medium could go beyond cold cases and interviews with comedians to play a role in disseminating fast paced daily news. Just months later NPR put out their first episode of “Up First.” The ball was rolling. Within a few years most major news outlets had a daily news podcast. KQED was there too. We started producing “The Bay,” our thrice-weekly local news podcast, barely a year after the first episode of “The Daily” was released.
But for a long time “daily” is where it ended. While radio audiences know that they can tune in at the top of every hour and get the new news, podcast audiences had just one shot at it. This meant breaking news or developing stories had no place in the podcast space unless you did the hard work of trying to change listener behavior. For instance, you could easily serve an ongoing stream of constantly updating news if you had your own app and could make people download it. This is exactly what NPR very successfully did. But KQED’s goal with “The Latest from KQED” was to create a platform-agnostic experience. We wanted to bring podcast listeners the latest news, when they wanted it, and, to coin a phrase, wherever they got their podcasts.
It took A LOT of trial and error, but here’s a somewhat simplified version of how the sausage gets made: When our newscaster walks into the studio the operator on the other side of the glass turns on the mic. That signal flows to the mixing console, where it’s sent out over the airwaves, but it’s also sent to a separate feed that’s recorded, archived and sent out again to a cloud-based computing platform that trims off any silence. That cleaned-up audio file is then sent AGAIN to our audio library where it gets a tag that identifies it as a newscast. While all this is happening more than a dozen times a day, the team at “The Latest” is compiling a bunch of other content from all over KQED to make the rest of the show. Basically if it isn’t nailed down (i.e., has another digital home) it’s going in “The Latest.” The team is also creating new custom-built pieces like interviews with our reporters, or features where we can make use of something that may have ended up on the cutting room floor because it didn’t fit into a short news hit.
Everything is uploaded to the content library and tagged. Then, we use our custom show creation software to update the show. When there’s something new in the library the software finds it, drags it to the correct place in the episode, and then automatically pushes a new audio file to our RSS feed. The time between that anchor walking into the studio and the audio file hitting the podcast feed is just minutes. But it’s not just ADDING another episode to the feed, that would get overwhelming quick! No, what we’re doing is updating the audio file that the RSS feed is linking to for that episode. This means, your feed stays clean but your content stays new.
For decades the podcast industry has struggled with RSS because it’s a double sided coin. It’s simple, effective and available everywhere. The joke today is that everyone has a podcast, and the reason that’s possible is because of open RSS. But being built on this protocol comes with challenges too; it can be hard to monetize because it’s almost impossible to get information about listener behavior. It does one thing, serve content, typically chronologically, which makes it inflexible. And some have argued that continuing to favor RSS means that it’s impossible to innovate on the listening experience. We wanted to test that theory. We wanted to push the boundaries of what you could do with an RSS-based listening experience and help new digital audiences build a local news habit …wherever they get their podcasts.
