Our podcast: What’s changing in the world of news podcasts?

In this episode of Future of Journalism we look at some of the fundamental shifts that are taking place in the world of news podcasts. How are people consuming them? What formats are proving most popular? What business models are news organisations and podcast studios finding most effective? 

The podcast

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Speakers:

Nic Newman is a Senior Research Associate at the Reuters Institute. He is also a consultant on digital media, working actively with news companies on product, audience, and business strategies for digital transition. He is the author of the report The changing shape and new economics of news podcasting: From listening to watching, from podcasts to shows.

Our host Mitali Mukherjee is the Director of the Reuters Institute. She's a political economy journalist with more than two decades of experience in TV, print and digital journalism.

The transcript

Why podcasts are enduring after 20 years | How podcast formats are changing | The shift towards video podcasts | Making money from podcasts | News publishers' podcast strategies | How newsrooms are adapting the new podcast era

Why podcasts are enduring after 20 years ↑

Mitali: Let's do a little bit of scene setting, as we always do in these conversations. Nic It has been a quite long journey for podcasts over the last few decades, but I think as we've been tracking in our research over the last four or five years, it's really become more and more a growing segment. What was the catalyst of what you were looking to explore in your report?

Nic: Yes, indeed. We published actually two previous standalone reports on news podcasting in 2019 and 2020, and that was a time of great change as well. That's when daily news podcasting really took off. And when we also had this boom in narrative podcasting with Spotify putting money in and new companies emerging. And this feels like another real moment in podcasting, which is why we've come back to it where again, everything is changing. So that's, the growth of video podcasting. So podcasting is not just audio anymore when platforms and business models are changing as well, including a shift on the business model side towards more paid models or hybrid models. So it just felt like a really good time to revisit it, and specifically to look at the appeal of video podcasts, as well as attributes to whether people might be prepared to pay in different ways. And so to that end, we used in terms of methodologies, we used some of the in-depth qualitative study we did with fifty heavy podcast users in the US, UK and Norway. We also use survey data from our 2025 Digital News Report, where we asked a number of questions, specifically around podcasts. And then we interviewed about a dozen of the leading publishers in podcasting, so including New York Times, Guardian, Die Zeit, Schibsted, many of these kinds of companies just to find out how they're navigating these changes really.

Mitali: And we will talk about those individual examples, Nic, but to the minds of the news organisations, are podcast users a separate category. How important are they in the mix of the audience base that they have?

Nic:I think in general, podcast listeners are the same people who also consume text content, but they are a particular breed. They're very heavy users of news. They're very loyal to brands and personalities. They tend to be better educated often living in urban environments as well. And they tend to be younger as well. So this is absolutely a group that publishers are interested in, partly because they are also because they're more loyal and they're heavier news users. They're also more willing to pay for content, but they're also a group of people because they're younger that advertisers are interested in as well. And just to say also that, we know from publisher data that, people who use podcasts are particularly loyal to brands. So really it's podcasters and newsletters that drive renewal of subscriptions and greater engagement in multiple ways. So broadly, people who spend a lot of time with podcasts they spend a lot of time with podcasts and that tends to increase the loyalty to the brand.

Mitali: That's fascinating. And let's dig into that a little bit more, Nick, because we have been documenting, as you said, in the digital news report and other reports, the change in mood for news media. So a shift away from traditional forms like newspaper television moving to online, of course, but then platforms and social media. And what is the appeal of podcasts specifically for those that use them, and how do they fit into users routines? And this is important because we've talked about the lack of appointment viewing or that fixed time that audiences no longer have while engaging with the news.

Nic: Yes. I mean, I think, as I said, the people who use podcasts tend to be heavy users, so they're actually using podcasts as part of a wider diet. And where it fits in is podcasts are often providing control, as you say, because you can schedule them when you like, but also people really enjoy the extra depth, and entertainment. So, for some people, it's about depth. It's really digging deep into a subject. For others, it's entertainment. And in the Digital News Report, when we asked podcast users themselves, 75% of those users said that they felt that podcasts offered more depth than other forms of media. And we talked to a number of individuals in detail. But just to pick out one example. So a 21-year-old who uses social media just to be alerted about the news and then would use maybe a couple of times a day, would go to a news website just to catch up at specific times. Uh, radio was something that was useful in the car. And then podcasts was something that was really for active learning, making himself feel smarter going into greater depth. So I think this complimentary sense is really at the heart of it.

How podcast formats are changing ↑

Mitali: And from 2020 to now, Nic, what's the changed landscape like in terms of the types of podcasts being produced today? Because as you said, there's very different needs that different podcasts are catering to.

Nic: Right. And I'm going back to the reports we wrote in 2019, 2020. We came up with a typology, and we're still broadly using that today. So firstly, you have these daily news podcasts. That's a category which is about explanation in many ways. It's about analysis. Quite often this is not led by a personality. It's kind of more brand led. It's very resource intensive. So quite often these daily news podcasts have five, six, seven people who are working on them and sometimes they deal with a single subject. Sometimes they're sort of briefing you on the day, they tend to be shorter. The second category is more conversational or chat-based podcasts. So this is about accessible current affairs. It's often mixing entertainment and news in different ways. It tends to be personality led or host led or multiple personality led. And it tends to be cheaper to produce and easier to produce. It works well in audio, but we're also seeing, a huge amount of the conversational formats being converted into video. And then finally you have limited series or documentary style podcasts. So things like this started with Serial, the, the US true crime series. There was a whole boom around that. Uh, you have big series about historical events tends to take a lot of money, very expensive to do. And generally what we've seen is the, the decline of limited series and the stabilisation in daily podcasts. And the, and the growth has really come in these chat-based podcasts because they're easy to convert to video, because the algorithm likes the volume that they can produce as well. And to some extent, that is squeezing out, daily news podcasts and also some of the limited series.

The shift towards video podcasts ↑

Mitali: Let's talk a bit more about the video first podcast. So that odd term ‘vodcasts’ as you said, a staple in people's diets for those that consume it. Uh, some of the biggest podcasts are now kind of video-first, it's almost expected that a podcast will have a video version of it. Do they sit alongside each other when you examine this ecosystem? Are they quite separate? What does it look like in 2026?

Nic: I mean, first thing to say is there's a lot of country differences. So where we've seen this, most extensively is in the United States, where some of these video first podcasters like Joe Rogan Tucker Carlson are reaching, really significant numbers of people. In many ways, it's traditional cable television comes to YouTube and so it's like a transfer of what, what's primarily a video format. I think a lot of Europeans who've grown up with audio podcasts, it's kind of a bit confusing. Why would you want to watch a podcast? So I'm very audio based personally and that's very much my view. And one of the things we wanted to find out is why and under what circumstances do people embrace video podcasts? And so, talking to people, particularly in the United States, we find that, very significant numbers of people actually use podcasts in both audio and video. So the data shows that the majority of podcast users in the US consume in both. So it depends on the context to some degree. So some people we talk to were very heavy YouTube users. And so because they were on YouTube already then it just felt natural to watch the podcasts, although the context also plays a part. So maybe if they got in the car, they wouldn't be watching it. They'd be using it in audio. So this dual format. And then for other people, certain types of shows, they preferred to see the host. So people talk about the parasocial relationship where you feel like you're intimate with them and video to some degree supports that. You really see the interaction between the guests, for example, and a lot of people talked about really enjoying that. So those are some of the reasons why people feel that they want to consume in video. Sometimes they want to consume in audio at other times.

Mitali: I was speaking to a news creator based in Chile, and he made exactly that point where I think they had to appeal to their audiences to not watch the video first podcast while they were driving, because there was an audio version of this, and they should lean into that. But for publishers more generally, are there benefits of thinking about video podcasts? I mean, of course there is kind of, the production benefit of doing both in one go, but what did they point to as the benefits and perhaps even challenges to this, to this medium.

Nic: Yeah, definitely. I mean, in terms of benefits, I think it's really about new audiences and discoveries. So discovering podcasts has always been a problem in audio, and video just does that better - the YouTube algorithm finding new audiences. And that's a real challenge for the news industry generally because of the difficulty of getting referrals from search and social media. So, so this is a real driver, I think, for a lot of publishers. Secondly, retention, I talked earlier about loyalty and video deepening this so-called parasocial relationship. So building engagement and loyalty is something that publishers are really looking to do. And then finally, revenue. Video advertising volumes, video advertising rates are significantly higher than audio ones. And so the format offers potentially greater financial returns, though, of course, there's also greater competition. And also, we should say, a relatively affordable route into television. So as more of these video podcasts appear on YouTube. YouTube's also on the front page of many smart TVs now. So, we're starting to see that really pick up as well. So I think part of it is publishers don't want to lose out on a trend that a., the platforms are investing in, in video and they want more video, but also audiences are turning that way as well.

News publishers' podcast strategies ↑

Mitali: What was fascinating in the report, Nic, was that it's a catch all term, but there's very different strategies for different brands in terms of how they are approaching the podcast world. The New York Times is doing something wholly separate from what The Guardian attempts to do. And then Goalhanger is, a different case study. Walk our listeners through some of the fascinating examples you came across.

Nic: Yeah. So I mean, I think some of these publishers have very established audio businesses and they're doing really well and they don't want to upset those. So you take something like The Daily. So the original single subject, daily briefing podcast, it's got a really loyal audience. It brings in younger listeners and they don't want to disrupt that, but at the same time, they can see the potential maybe of doing experiments around that brand in video. And the Guardian's actually doing the same. So Today in Focus, which is the audio brand, they've just done a an extender and a daily YouTube first video, broadcast in the afternoons, for example. So that's kind of one approach is experimentation with existing brands and brand extensions. Other approaches are to turn, you really go big on a few personality led brands. And most of the publishers we talk to said that the easiest thing to do would be to take those personality-led brands like Ezra Klein, for example, for The New York Times, and do full video versions of that. So you do an audio version, a video version which is broadly the same, and then you cut little promotional clips for Instagram and TikTok. So these are standard playbooks. But then, as you say, we also have different kinds of publishers who are trying to sell podcasts to film and TV companies. Like the Observer has a very good track record of doing that. You have Goalhanger, which has essentially gone all in on video. So all of its shows are now available in audio and video and it’s also moving into Netflix. So the Rest is Football, for example, they've just done a deal for the World Cup. Gary Lineker and the team are basically taking that to Netflix. So you can really see how this has expanded out from those very traditional audio-first not very commercial models of 20 years ago.

Mitali: Just one question on what you think has been the the inflection point for podcast since 2020 to now, Nic, is it the fact that these platforms have become hugely more popular. So YouTube is in some ways for small organisations, the new CMS. It's where they work. It's where they produce content. Is it a preference amongst audiences to go to, audiovisual platforms, or is it that publishers have decided to spend more time on these mediums, or is it a combination of all.

Nic: Yeah, I think it's definitely a combination of all those things, but probably the platform incentives are the biggest factor. So what you've seen generally, and we've talked about this before in our research is social media has got less social, so fewer people are actually sharing content that comes from people they know. And more of the platform incentives are about pushing viral content. So content that they think other people are going to enjoy and consume. So it's more about content. And the platform incentives are increasingly about videos. So we've talked about YouTube, but Spotify has also gone all in on video and supporting a whole load of video models. Apple just six, eight weeks ago did the same. So previously Apple Podcasts was basically about audio and now they support the video formats as well. Amazon, I think this week announced something similar. So essentially the platforms are all in on video as well. And as a result, the publishers are joining. And that means there's more content for consumers to consume in video as well.

Monetising podcasts ↑

Mitali: Which brings us to the not small ‘M’ question, which is monetisation. How are publishers trying to monetise their podcasts if they are?

Nic: It's worth remembering that, I guess at the very start, podcasts didn't have a monetisation model at all. It was this grassroots approach to distributing via, this obscure format called RSS. And no one was trying to make any money out of it. But over the last decade, we've really seen an advertising market developed specifically for podcasting. It's still relatively small, but, you have, spot advertising. You also have host-read advertising which is a podcast-first approach. And you have brand advertising or sponsorship of podcasts and all those things together have really been the story of the last few years. I think what's changing now is this sort of extension, diversification of different kinds of business models. So advertising works in big markets like the US, UK, Germany, but is much harder to pull off in small markets because the size of the market is not sufficiently big. So in those markets we've seen more subscription models. Uh, so for example, Schibsted in Norway has its own platform called Podme, it has hundreds of thousands of subscribers to that platform. It includes news, it includes entertainment. Uh, and then it's bundling some podcasts in the traditional models as well, so different models in different places. And then you also have digital first subscriptions. So the New York Times has one, audio first subscriptions, The New York Times, Politiken, Die Zeit, The Economist all have subscriptions just to the audio product. And now you have membership as well. So some some podcasts like the Rest is History, which is a Goalhanger product has around 120,000 members and they're paying for access to the talent. They're getting close to the talent, bonus episodes, these kinds of things. And finally, you have live events. So loads of these podcasts are now filmed or you have these, yeah, shows essentially. So Goalhanger has in September, something called the Rest is Fest on London's South Bank, all of the podcasters coming together and it's a whole festival of podcasts. You meet them, you get close to the people you're listening to every week.

Mitali: And you have seen brands like The New Yorker and shows like This American Life actually leaning into a lot of the models that you referred to. A two part question on whether audiences are prepared to pay for this, keeping in mind the two tethering forces that you pointed to. One, that they tend to be quite loyal, but also that they tend to be consuming a lot of news in any case. So are news audiences prepared to pay for podcasts? And then is there any differentiation you found in terms of, ability to, or openness to paying for video versus audio?

Nic: So I think generally people are reluctant to pay for news content in general. And this is a something we find generally in our research. And the same applies to audio, essentially. On the other hand, I think that the relationship with the hosts and the fact that people are spending a lot of time with the podcasts mean that they really have a connection which is more monetisable now, that maybe that's not subscription, maybe that they will turn up to a live event or, or they'll pay for some bonus content or they will, give us a tip or, a donation to a podcaster that they like. In the research we found that people said that if they had to give up a podcast that they really, really loved, they would pay something to get it back. But people are reluctant to have lots and lots of different subscriptions. They already subscribe to lots of entertainment channels. They subscribe to a lot of news as well. So I think, as we see elsewhere, convenience bundling, flexible packages that include podcasts, are certainly one way in which publishers are trying to monetize this connection that I talked about.

How newsrooms are adapting the new podcast era ↑

Mitali: What does this mean for what's happening inside the newsroom? Because, a podcast or a vodcast, if you will, is certainly about the talent that you see on screen or that you listen to, but it's also got a fairly large production team. There's a news producer, there's other talent that goes into putting this together. And any implications for kind of thinking about new structures where in the olden days, if you will, there was quite a separation between the technical department and the news editorial department.

Nic: Yeah, I think I think this whole sort of convergence of social media and audio and video is quite challenging for audiences to make sense of, but definitely for publishers internally as well about how you organise this stuff. Uh, so the conventional model is you'll have a separate podcast department, which is audio, and then you've got a video department maybe doing short form video for social media. And that doesn't really work anymore as the formats are converging. And so what we're starting to see is more of a show or talent-based model. So around the talent or around the show you will build a team who will also support the video, audio and other kinds of monetisation. And so this show-based model famously, Goalhanger and these podcasts first companies are really driving this, but actually even the New York Times now talks about audio and video shows. And I think the future in many ways is, how do you take a model that is built around websites and apps and using podcasts as a funnel? How do you transfer that into something where you still have your audio, your websites and apps, but you're also developing these additional models that have their, their own monetisation and their own teams working on them. And I think that that's one of the challenges that most of the publishers we talk to are really thinking through, how do we structure for this? How do we structure for growth? How do we structure for shows and for, personalities and how do we build that alongside our existing models?

Mitali: Nic, thank you very much for joining our podcast today. You and I didn't record video, but we hope this has been a good lesson for our loyal audio audience. Thanks as always for joining.

Nic Pleasure. Very nice to talk.