The End of Phil & Holly, Cadwalladr’s Hefty Bill plus BBC Audio changes

Phillip Schofield leaves This Morning – what did for him? And how does the show steady the ship?

Recorded this week at The Podcast Show in Islington’s Business Design Centre, Matt Deegan is joined by audio consultant Brett Spencer and Audio UK MD Chloe Straw to review the week’s media news.

Also on the programme: Carole Cadwalladr faces a £1.2m legal bill in her battle with a Brexit funder… should the publishers be stumping up?

We also catch up with Dino Sofos and Ellie Clifford from Persephonica.

All that, plus in the Media Quiz… we get into everything that’s going on outside the conference.

Transcript

This is a semi-automated transcript, so do please check against what was delivered above.

Matt Deegan : Hello and welcome to the Media Podcast, I’m Matt Degan. We’re at the podcast show in Islington’s Business Design Centre to grab some of the execs milling around the conference. We’ll have all the key takeaways for the sector and maybe snuffle some pastries too. Philip Schofield leaves this morning. What did it for him and how does the show steady the ship? Carol Cadwallader faces a 1.2 million legal bill in her battle with a Brexit funder. Should the publishers be stumping up? All that plus in the media quiz, we get into everything that’s going on outside the conference. That’s all coming up in this edition of the Media Podcast.

In a news this week, Twitter buckled as it tried to welcome Ron DeSantis into Twitter spaces to announce his presidential nomination. A glitch has prevented many from hearing the announcement and pointed to the ongoing issues bought on by Musk’s recent restructure. Former Chief exec, Sly Bailey, has appeared at the Mirror Phone Hacking trial, saying she’s deeply regretful about what went on. She maintained she didn’t know about widespread use of unlawful information while she was in charge. Only hearing about it once she had left, the trial continues, and the Paul Foot Award nominees have been announced. The annual award for investigative journalism praised scoops, including the Guardians of the IP Lane and Michelle Mone’s stories. The Times’ British Gas Baylifts and the Sunday Times’ revelation of the former BBC chairman and the £800,000 loan to Boris Johnson. Today, we’re recording at the Podcast Show at the Spiritland Productions Studio, and I’ll have some more stories shaking up the media sector. And joining me for part one, we welcome back audio consultant Brett Spencer. Brett, your voice has gone a little bit.

Brett Spencer : The voice is gone from talking to so many people.

Matt Deegan : and you’ve been telling a lot of people about City University. What’s been going on?

Brett Spencer : Well, we’ve launched the first MA in podcasting, the first dedicated MA in podcasting. So we’ve got to stay in here at the show, talk to people about it, and try and attract some bursaries from the big companies, which has announced our first one today, which comes from Gary Lineker, where the guys at Goalhanger have given us a bursary to support a student for next term, so for the first term, which is in September, so thanks to them. But there’s been a huge amount of interest from across the board, from what? What are all the different parts of the industry?

Matt Deegan : It’s great that there’s going to be some proper academic courses for podcasting and also looking a bit broader than production, that’s right, isn’t it?

Brett Spencer : Absolutely. I mean, we gathered together a really great group of people. Last summer, we had people from Spotify and the BBC, Acast, Sony and loads of others. And indeed, Chloe was here with us. And they all helped us shape the course and where the needs were in terms of training in the industry. So the degree won’t just be about how to make a podcast. It will be about how to write a host read, how to work with brands, how to pitch to a commissioner, how to commission content, how to work with advertisers. Everything that the industry involves that easy addition to making a podcast.

Matt Deegan : So will it also include putting your content on Twitter spaces, something that obviously happened this week.

Brett Spencer : That doesn’t work as we know. With Ron DeSantis. Yes, that doesn’t work. Yeah, it was interesting last night that Twitter couldn’t get Ron DeSantis’ announcement to work in terms of audio on Twitter. But meanwhile, they’re planning to publish Ben Shapiro’s podcast and lots of other right-wing podcasts. And even apparently, try and do Tucker Carlson’s show. Well, he had three million viewers on Fox. So how Twitter will handle that sort of traffic? Maybe he shouldn’t have sacked all the people working on Twitter spaces.

Matt Deegan : Also joining us for a return to the Media Podcast is Chloe Straw, Managing Director of Audio UK. Who have you spotted whilst you’ve been here at the podcast show? Any celebs?

Chloe Straw : I don’t think I’ve seen any celebs, you know, I think I’ve seen any celebs, you know, I think I’ve seen any celebs

I find I sort of end up not seeing any panels, there’s so many people I wanted to see but sort of doing your own panels and obviously excellent things like this and we’ve got a stand here as well means that I’ve seen a lot of mates but perhaps not many celebs.

Matt Deegan : There’s quite a few indies here, aren’t there? What are they getting at being at a show like this?

Chloe Straw : a good question and in fact I was chatting to one of our members earlier about that. I think that it’s probably the same for everyone. I think there’s a lot of conversations that you have. There’s obviously a huge amount of potential business here in terms of brands and other creators. I think brand recognition is the biggest thing but I think also it’s just nice to see the conversations that they’re having. You know there’s different things that they’ve done, fresh air have a kind of area that they’ve got. Listen to the stage yesterday, TBI are here, Whistledown, I’ve got a booth, obviously Somethin’ Else here under Sony and I think everyone’s doing a bit of everything and that’s really nice to see.

Matt Deegan : Right, story number one, Philip Schofield has left This Morning, kind of after a slew of innuendo, laden tabloid stories over the past few weeks. Holly Willoughby returns after the holidays. Brett, ITV have kind of made this decision. You’ve got a background in working on breakfast television, that environment, it kind of combusts people.

Brett Spencer : It does, and it’s hard because I worked on GMTV for about five years, which is now Good Morning Britain, but as soon as you’re through a show at 9.30, you’re literally into the next one. So it is very, very full on doing a daily show that is of that length. I thought it was interesting in the ITV statement, the way Piers Morgan left. They said that Piers had decided to leave. But this quite clearly said that ITV has decided, so it was clearly their decision for him to go. So also the press have had in for him for a long time, it seems. Certainly it all went up during, you know, when the Queen passed away and we had that incident where they were supposedly jumped the queue. Or as Holly said, we would never jump a queue. Interestingly, we were discussing the merits of the story with a group of journalism students the other day, who was sort of doing one of their practice news days. And one of my colleagues said, you know, we all remember him when he started off in the broom cupboard with Gordon the Gopher. And the whole room for the students went, what? Gopher? Broom Cupboard?

Matt Deegan : Well, maybe a return to that could be on the cards. I mean, Chloe, it’s tough, isn’t it? And also, particularly relationships between two people. They seem to be a pair that got on really well, but issues have sort of strained it over the past few months. It’s difficult to manage that, isn’t it?

Chloe Straw : Yeah, I think it’s also an incredibly difficult situation to judge from the outside, you know, so it’s like with a lot of kind of celebrity feuds or celebrity problems, you know, we’re consumers of those stories, aren’t we? And I think it can be, you look at that story and it’s sort of all over the place, like this happened and, you know, that happened and was it ITV? I also think with those two, the impression that you get, particularly after Phil kind of coming out a couple of years ago, I think, is that they’ve sort of built themselves up as really good friends in real life, you know, you hear, sort of all they go on holiday together in, Holly was such a wonderful support and so on and so forth. And I think that it doesn’t feel like just a professional relationship that some picking, does it? It feels like a hugely personal one as well and an incredibly long-standing one. So I think it’s impossible to understand what’s really happening there, what’s going on. I’ll be back.

Brett Spencer : I’m enjoying all the agents trying to get their clients into the newspapers as they’re the hot tip to take over, you know, secret talks going on.

Matt Deegan : I mean, agents is an interesting point, isn’t it? Because both of them, I think, used to be repped by YMU. I think Holly went and sort of created their own kind of management company. I mean, managing the press around around any talent can be quite a challenge, can’t it?

Brett Spencer : It is often the best agents that their skill is keeping stories out of the paper rather than getting stories into the paper and there may be a lot more in this story to come. We don’t know yet.

Matt Deegan : It’s really strange because obviously there’s a lot of innuendo about it and things that have gone on. He had some unfortunate things happen with his family as well. He hasn’t been able to control the narrative or talk about it really yet. Has he just got to go away and re-emerge after the air’s cleared?

Brett Spencer : I think so, we’ve seen people go away and come back, and we saw with Piers Morgan, Piers Morgan had to go away for a while before he came back to talk TV. So I’m sure down the line, he will be fine and he’ll appear somewhere else. And I’m sure his agents currently putting out feelers elsewhere to find him that next highly paid gig.

Matt Deegan : Moving on, some interesting audio news this week that the BBC’s announced that shows including Desert Island Discs will move from in-house production to BBC Studios. Chloe, tell us how does this work? Is there a big difference?

Chloe Straw : I think that remains to be seen. It’s probably the best way to put it. So at Audio UK, we talked to the BBC quite a lot. So we kind of knew that they’d been undergoing an internal speech review for a while, which was kind of the news this week was the conclusion of that speech review. Obviously, it still has a way to go in terms of going through Ofcom and everything like that. But their recommendation was that a certain percentage of their speech output moves to studios. So I think the really significant thing, particularly for the independent sector, is that means that a percentage of speech audio that wasn’t there before will now be able to compete in the open market. So obviously, studios compete to an extent already and has the ability to have podcasts on Audible, Spotify, Amazon Music. But I think the really big thing for us is that there will be a much bigger chunk. How big that chunk actually is, I think still remains to be seen. And I think you hear different percentages or different numbers, but I think the proof will be in the pudding in terms of what that actually looks like.

Matt Deegan : But is this sort of a replication of what happens in television and basically all non-news has been sort of shoved into BBC studios?

Chloe Straw : not all of it. And again, I think that’s something that we probably need some clarity on. We’ve kind of heard different numbers, but in terms of what that actually looks like. But it is a similar model to TV. And I think the kind of the Audio UK point of view and the kind of indie standpoint on it is that if more of BBC comes out into the open market, then more of that obviously represents increased competition for the indie market. And you know, the BBC is a big production superpower. It’s not like it’s kind of a small entrant to the market. And obviously, historically, that’s been built up through public funding and the training that their staff can get. If that comes out into the market, then actually more of the BBC’s speech output or general output needs to be opened up to indie competition. And obviously, not to go too much into the ins and outs of it, which I love to do. But currently 60% of relevant hours, which is effectively non-news output is open to competition, that’s quite is very nuanced. It’s very complicated.

Matt Deegan : So something like a Radio One daytime strand might not be up for competition, but a 6Music daytime strand might be.

Chloe Straw : Exactly, so there’s a lot of different kind of rules and percentages and I think I would love to see the audio model replicate the TV model. I think the TV model where 100% of TV is open to competition between indies and studios is, and the BBC is really clean cut. And I think something that we hear from the BBC is the kind of different percentages are very hard to administer people, you know, they’re a commissioner, they’re also trying to manage in-house teams and so on and so forth. And I really like the TV model because it just opens it up entirely to 100% of competition.

Brett Spencer : You know, I was up with some like 6Music. I think everything’s already open for 10 years and you have to put everything out. The other point I wanted to make was to ask how hard a show like Desert Island Discs is to make. I mean, you’ve got to book a great guest. And to be honest, I’m not so many people will say no. You’ve got to find the eight records. And then you’ve got to throw it into the mix. The best broadcaster and interviewed I’ve ever worked with. So, you know, the three of us could probably make it good with. So, I’m not sure how difficult it is, but actually what they’ll be about is who can do it cheapest, I would suspect.

Matt Deegan : And the move to the sort of TV model would be quite a shot for the people who work in BBC audio at the moment making things for networks or sitting in the network building.

Brett Spencer : So during my time at BBC, people in BBC were already able to get used to things going out and being in competition, they wanted to learn how to pitch, so that was an interesting time because programme-making of the BBC weren’t experienced at pitching in the way that people for indies were. I think the key difference here with ours is that you would never imagine a show like this on a desk, which is one of the crown jewels would go out. So I imagine that is the big shift for them actually. It’s not just kind of the part work shows or stuff on the fringe of the schedule that major BBC properties like Desert Island Discs, which it was always quite hard to do stuff with because Roy Plumley estate had the rights. So it was very difficult to do anything around Desert Island Discs. I know having tried to do something around it some time ago, so that’s quite a shift.

Matt Deegan : Chloe do you think some of it is actually BBC studios getting their hands on some formats that they can do other things with both in the UK and outside of the UK?

Chloe Straw : Yeah, I mean, 100% of the BBC’s got to look towards the commercial future, right? And see how they can kind of prepare for that. And, you know, we’re at The Podcast Show. We’re surrounded by Audible and Spotify and Amazon Music and Acast, who’ve all been distributing on a kind of global stage for quite a long time now. And 100%, you know, studios, it’s really important for them to look at how they can monetize their content. I think it is really tricky because the BBC is a PSB organisation. And how do you balance that with the commercial needs of that organisation? And I think also thinking about contributors, you know, if you’re a writer, you might do something a bit more cheaply because it’s the BBC and it’s PSB. If that content suddenly commercial, then how does that work? So I think they’ve, you know, they’ve got a tricky time on their hands in terms of seeing how that all plays out. But absolutely, you know, they should be doing it. I think it’s really important to think about how it interacts. And I also think that, you know, one of the huge things about the BBC is it’s the best ideas for the audience. And we know that greater competition breeds greater ideas, which is why more competition makes sense. And also greater diversity of ideas, you know, in terms of our members there from all around the UK. And I think it’s really important that the audience gets, you know, the best ideas. So that’s why I’d like to see more.

Matt Deegan : While speaking of money, Carol Cadwalladr has been hit by a bill for £1.2 million after a judge ruled she must pay the legal cost of Aaron Banks. The billionaire Brexit donor successfully argued that a TED talk by Cadwalladr should not have been streamed once a public interest defence had fallen away. Carol says that she didn’t have any control over the content and couldn’t have taken it down if she wanted. This case gets a bit complicated and in some ways they’ve both won and they’ve both lost. Is she right, Brett? It’s not been down to her?

Brett Spencer : I think it’s difficult when you’re individual and you’re fighting a well-funded operation, isn’t it? And essentially, it isn’t down to her because it was published by somebody else, but effectively it was her that said the words. So it’s ultimately down to her. Once you’re saying something in any public arena, it doesn’t matter whether there’s three people in them or if it’s being streamed, you’ve said it in the public arena. So she has got responsibility for that. But you are always going to be at risk if you’re doing something like that and you’re paying up against some big haters.

Matt Deegan : I mean, seeing her tweets about it, I feel that she feels that she’s been somewhat let down by the Guardian and other people who’s been left to sort of deal with this on her own. I mean, as you get kind of big columnists or big characters, I mean, we’re going to see more of this, I guess, aren’t we, Chloe?

Chloe Straw : Yeah, I think it’s really, again, it’s a very tricky situation, isn’t it? And I, you know, I sort of, I agree with Brett to an extent. You, you’re, I’m a big fan of accountability. Just talk to my children about accountability and support children. So, you know, taking responsibility for what you say, but I think it’s so much more nuanced than that, isn’t it? And I think you’ve got these big potential supporters of her and you sort of think, should they have been more behind her? Is there this sense of like, we’re just going to step back and let it go? I mean, it’s, it’s very complicated in terms of what’s happened and the kind of who’s responsible. And I think it’s a really tricky case. I think it’s really hard to judge kind of who’s responsible, who should have supported you. But absolutely from a personal point of view, you can imagine her feeling let down, can’t you? I think you can imagine that feeling from her. It’s, you know, tricky to know sort of, I don’t know, why do you think those organisations didn’t support her more? We’re simply…

Matt Deegan : I mean, broadcasters want kind of edgy content and this is in the in the journalism spaces, investigative journalism, this is hard work. You also see it with talent and be that even like the Joe Rogan end of things and just doing stuff that gets some notoriety. I mean, if you’re going for that, have you got to back your talent more and more?

Brett Spencer : You have, and we saw an incident around Schofield with GB News where they broadcast something that was potentially liable, that was taken down. So you know, if you’re unleashing your broadcasters to be controversial, you’ve got to expect to run into trouble. It’s a sort of fighting time for freedom speech, though, isn’t it? Because she’s speaking her mind there, and therefore it’s going to cost her over a million pounds. And it’s the same as the Elon Musk story we talked about earlier. Here’s somebody who controls the algorithm of what we might see. So it is a worrying time. It’s all a little bit Succession, isn’t it, if anyone that’s watching that series?

Matt Deegan : She’s raised almost a million pounds from the public with her crowd funding and that also shows that if you’ve got a great relationship with your audience you can activate them especially when it’s very obvious that they that they need the dash.

Chloe Straw : Absolutely. I mean, that’s the ultimate subscription-based model, surely, is that you’re making money from not from your content, but from your case sort of thing. But, you know, absolutely. It’s a, you know, you never like to see a case where someone’s got a huge amount of money and someone else doesn’t. So there’s obviously people who really support her. And I think for anyone, whether that’s a, you know, a podcast or a journalist, we live in a world where we’re far more individual now, aren’t we? That’s a great thing about the kind of creator economy and everything like that. But you’re right, how does that work within the world where those big organizations are kind of supporting those people or not? But great that she’s raised so much money.

Matt Deegan : We’ll be back with Chloe and Brett after this.

This podcast was recorded at the podcast show by Spiritland Productions. You can record your podcast at Spiritland, a state-of-the-art podcast studio with full three camera visualization in the heart of London’s Kings Cross. Just visit spiritlandproductions.com to see their studio and to book in your recording. All right, let’s head into the throng. We sent producer Matt Hill into the conference to pick out some key takeaways from the show.

Katherine Templar Lewis : My name is Katherine Templar Lewis. I am the co-founder of Kinda Studios, a creative neuroaesthetics studio based in London, UK.

Matt Hill : Now you’ve been here sort of repping Fresh Air Productions, is that right?

Katherine Templar Lewis : We have indeed, so my background is neuroscience and we’ve been working with Fresh Air to really dig into the neuroscience of podcasts and why our brains love the audio format so much.

Matt Hill : And so this has been written into a report that Fresh Air have used to get brands to basically say, podcasting is persuasive, podcasting is a great way to sell your message, go and work with us.

Katherine Templar Lewis : It has indeed. We basically want to look at what actual engagement is. Everybody says they want engagement, but from a sort of scientific perspective, what is that? So we work with Fresh Air to produce a series of blogs, a podcast, and reports, looking at what happens in the brain and body when you listen to podcasts, and it’s absolutely wild. Most people think that the visual formats watching films and stories on films are the most engaging format, but that’s not actually true. There’s some wonderful research that’s come out of University College London quite recently by Daniel Richardson and his colleagues that shows that if you listen to the same story once as a visual format, in fact, this study was done with an episode of Game of Thrones and also then listening to it as an audio story like a podcast. What happens is even though you think you are more engaged watching the film, your brain and your body show otherwise, they saw increased electrical activity, sort of engagement, attention in the brain. This encoding of memory seems to be stronger when we’re listening to stories.

They also noticed that within the body, which is actually where we can measure emotions, if you think about it when you’re scared, you’re heartbeats, when you’re nervous, your stomach turns, and people were showing stronger emotional reactions when they were listening only. They also saw that people felt more connected to each other when they were listening. This idea of synchronicity, which can often be very chemical in the body, bonding you with other people seem to be greater. All in all, despite being a very visually dominant culture, storytelling had the biggest impact. Now this actually makes sense if you think about it because our brains evolved in a world where we told each other stories to help us face and navigate the unknown. If you think about it, when we lived back into the prehistoric times where we evolved, you have met a mammoth and defeated it. So I meet you sitting around the fire, you belong to my community, and you tell me the story of how you defeated this mammoth, and I inhabit it and almost lay down memories of myself. So then, maybe a week or so later, I encounter a woolly mammoth. I’ve never seen one, I’ve never fought one, but I can actively access your memories that I’ve learned through your stories, and I’ll know how to defeat it. And that’s the basis of learning. Where can people find your stuff? So if you go to kindastudios.com, we have a lot of links through there.

Dino Sofos : Hi, I’m Dino Sofos, the founder of Persephonica.

Ellie Clifford : Hi, I’m Ellie Clifford, I’m an executive producer at Persephonica.

Matt Hill : What have you enjoyed over the last two days of The Podcast Show?

Ellie Clifford : I really enjoyed Dish, the talk that they did about the podcast I went to see this morning. I thought it was great. A lot of the talks that I’ve been to have been really informative, but what I loved about that is it was informative and entertaining, so I really liked the insight into how they got it all going and actually hearing from the team behind it about the way that they sort of reimagined what a podcast could look like and almost work backwards then to then record it. So I found that really insightful, thinking about what podcasts in the modern era now look like.

Matt Hill : I speak to a lot of other producers and companies who look on that show with a certain level of jealousy because it’s a real outlier in terms of a branded show that has cut through to find a wider audience. Why do you think that is?

Ellie Clifford : I mean, from listening to it and from the talk this morning, I think there’s a real warmth there. That’s great that you can really hear. So I think they’ve got the talent absolutely right. The way they’ve set it up, you know, they talked about the fact that the guests don’t wear headphones as a way of actually making it feel when you look at the clips, it feels really inviting. It actually feels like a dinner party. And I think setting that tone just makes it feel like something that listeners really want to be a part of. And I think there’s a real boon for kind of food podcasts and thinking about it in a different way has really allowed them to cut through the market. And they’ve done it in a way that means that, although they did say Waitrose about a thousand times in the talk this morning, it still didn’t feel all that heavy-handed.

Matt Hill : Did you see that Nick Grimshaw is actually going to be covering for Chris Evans on Virgin Radio?

Dino Sofos : Well, look, I love Grimmy. He’s an amazing broadcaster. I think he’s been off our airwaves for far too long. And I just think that’s a really great fit for him as a show. I’ll be tuning in. I think it’s great. He’s such a great broadcaster. And great to have him in the podcast space, but radio is his home. So that’s amazing. In terms of the podcast show, I think it’s a tale of two festivals, if we’re going to call it a festival. It’s much bigger than it was last year. You’ve got Sky News broadcasting live, which is just so bizarre to turn on Sky News and they’re broadcasting from a podcast show. And I think for a statement about the industry and how it’s grown and how many people are here in brands and media organizations and amazing content, right, that people are shouting about. Incredible.

But there are also a lot of people walking around here tearing their hair out about the lack of money in the industry because I think this time last year it was a completely different market. You still had people, streamers, making big investments in shows and that has just disappeared as we know. And I think the Megaphone Spotify talk was the most interesting thing I’ve been to and watching Jack from Goalhanger talking about how they’ve gone with Megaphone and how Spotify have pivoted. So they’re not chucking money at shows, they’re going to help successful shows and smaller shows grow in a kind of more responsible, realistic way, I think. And to be honest, that’s kind of Persephonica’s approach to podcasting anyway. I think the people who seem to be really tearing their hair out are people who have spent a lot of money or spend a lot of money on short-term, limited-run narrative shows. It was interesting, I was on a panel with Kerry Thomas from Tortoise yesterday and one of the questions is about how you make money from podcasting. And he was asked, oh, it’s all about IP and getting your shows optioned. And he said, yeah, that’s actually can be a bit of a red herring because, it’s not always, the money’s not always as great as you think it’s going to be. But also, if you’ve got five or six of these shows and only one gets optioned and you can’t really build an audience and the rest of them or sell the ad revenue or there aren’t the opportunities that we’re seeing with other big shows to take them live, it’s really tough. And again, to what you were saying about Dish, Ellie, I think that’s the thing here with The News Agents. It’s not just a podcast, it’s a brand. The social video numbers, I mean, Emily Maitlis laying into Guto Harry on last night’s episode is going mega viral on Twitter at the moment. Everybody’s sharing that video, commenting, engaging with it. The conversation goes on way after we published the episode. And I think what everybody’s learning here and what all the talk is about is about video podcasts, social marketing strategy. You cannot just record six episodes of a show, put it out there and hope for the best. It’s just a completely broken model.

Matt Hill : Would you say then that, you know, one of the themes this year, you know, you would have walked into this thinking that it was just going to be a whole load of conversations about AI and fake voices and everything, but really, you’re saying always on is one of the bigger trends of this, is that’s what people want now.

Ellie Clifford : I think there’s a lot of conversations around talent and around conversational shows. So you’ve seen more talks that are on things like, though there’s a funny one about not being divorced as a kind of presenting duo, and things like the role that creators have to play. And I think I will say that a lot more of the conversation has been around this more conversational model of podcasting. It’s interesting I went to a talk about how you sort of turn your podcast into a live show. And somebody actually asked the question saying, well, I actually make a narrative show, and we’ve been thinking about how we can expand it and how we can go live. And actually the advice was really like, we think it works better when it’s a conversational show where that’s what you’re getting is some extra insight by turning up to that live show, which is much harder in the narrative space. I mean, I’m a massive lover of narrative podcasts, but I would definitely say that the conversation this year has been much more around that sort of round table bringing people in, having a chat, having a conversation, but informing them at the same time.

Dino Sofos : I think what we’re looking at as a company when we’re looking to create narrative shows which we have in development, it’s such a great medium. I don’t want to suddenly say, oh, you know, narrative is dead and we don’t want to hear those. That way of storytelling is amazing. But I think from a business point of view, you have got to be thinking about the feed, the strand, you know, recur the opportunities to, once you’ve had one great story in that space to build out other stories. I think a really, a person who’s done this really, really well is Danny Robbins with, you know, Battersea Poltergeist. What he’s done there with Uncanny and having created a strand and he can spin off limited series off that, which obviously he’s had great success with IP, you know, people, lots of people interested in buying Battersea Poltergeist and there was a fight over that. And that’s great. But he’s also got a community and live shows. That is the model. It’s not just, this is a really good idea for a narrative podcast. Let’s put it out there and hope for the best and then try and sell it. I just think there’s a lot of people who are realizing that that is a bit of a broken model. So be honest, just in terms of from the podcast industry point of view, how expensive those shows are to make and hiring the amount of staff you have to hire to make them. So yeah, it’s been fascinating being here and the podcast industry is in rude health. It’s great, but it’s a different world to what we thought we were in last year.