Newsonomics: Is The New York Times Now, In Part, A Radio Station?
The Times and American Public Media announced Tuesday that the paper’s podcast The Daily will now be a broadcast radio show too. The news further certifies The Daily as a phenomenon. Host Michael Barbaro and his expanding stellar crew just celebrated their one-year anniversary, with the Times announcing huge audience numbers.
Now, American Public Media and the Times can pair Marketplace with The Daily in a one-hour, five-day-a-week syndication package.
First published at Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab on Feb. 15, 2018, as part of “Newsonomics: 11 questions the news business is trying to answer in 2018“
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Expect that many stations in the top 25 markets will carry the new joint hour. The Times gets big branding benefit, of course, but also compensation in the form of some combination of licensing fees and/or advertising extensions.
Takeaway: The podcast revolution has stunned us in its intensity, claiming hours per month of media time, and redefining audio and radio. It may seem confusing to see a podcast morphing into a broadcast radio program. But others have pioneered that shift — especially, recently, NPR.
You may have heard the more recent crossovers. They include Planet Money, How I Built This, Hidden Brain, and It’s Been A Minute with Sam Sanders. NPR launched each as podcasts and transformed them into radio shows for weekend programming — often replacing dear, departed shows like Car Talk.
Critically, podcasts have literally broken the public radio clock. That clock — invisible to us as listeners — has long been as confining as limited number of newspaper or magazine pages or a 30-minute TV newscast. Podcasts, of course, know no such limits. As low-cost, testable concepts of topic and of talent, they’ve introduced many new voices and faces in the world of news and newsiness.
Finally, it’s a case of innovation supporting innovation. “It’s Been a Minute is an interesting case study as it piloted on [the NPR mobile app] NPR One, where we got tons of data and feedback that helped us perfect the concept,” NPR’s Isabel Lara tells me. “Then it became a podcast in June 2017 and ultimately a radio show in October of 2017.” It’s now on 155 stations.
