Tag: Podcasting Industry & Community

Based on what data we have, a non-trivial number of you listen to one or more of our podfeeds via Stitcher.

Just in case you had not heard, Stitcher will be shutting down at the end of this month, on August 29th, 2023. They have created a Farewell FAQ to answer your questions.

If you subscribe to us via Stitcher, you can still follow any three of our podfeeds: Quorum, Rogue Tyger, and our all-you-can-hear audio buffet that collects all our shows, Jabberwocky Audio Theater.

We weren’t able to make it in person last year, but we’ve heard so many good things, we’re actually kind of glad that we can attend the Podtales online festival of audio drama and fiction podcasting.

In part to acknowledge the fact that it’s not going to be one, concentrated, in-person weekend, the events are spread over the first three weekends of November… and in fact, there’s stuff happening right now on their Discord server (yet another 21st century way to meet, mingle, and converse). They also have a showcase of podcasts going on throughout the festival you may want to check out.

We hope to see some of you there (online)!

The focus is more concerned with audio journalism than fiction podcasts, but Grace Gedye’s article in Washington Monthly nevertheless raises some concerns.

Having the default, and very open, nature of RSS feeds being supplanted by monetized gatekeeping is disturbing. Yes, we know, where is the line between mindful curation and corporate gatekeeping?

A good question to ask as the industry continues to change.

In a sign that the larger entertainment industry is re-discovering audio fiction, the Writer’s Guild of America, East (WGAe) has created a new agreement specifically for scripted podcasts, which you read all about on their website here.

The folks over at Radio Drama Revival have an in-depth interview with some of the people who have been organized the agreement for the WGAe.

Part of this organizing has been creating the WGA Audio Alliance, which includes creating a scripted writers’ database among other things.

While this doesn’t directly impact our work here at Jabberwocky Audio Theater, we’re interested to see how the industry continues to develop.

Over at Vulture, Boris Kachka details some of the latest moves by bigger and bigger business entities to monetize podcasting.

Here at our humble JAT headquarters in Deepest Springfield, we keep on watching these sorts of reports the same way YouTubers and others might look at news of changes to the streaming and on-demand video space.

One thing that’s frustrating is that the default definition of “podcast” seems to be mainly non-fiction shows. Don’t get us wrong, we love and listen to many a non-fiction podcast. But as all this money is entering the podcast realm, we can’t help but hope some of that can include full-cast audio stories… and we’d be more hopeful if fiction podcasts were mentioned with more frequency.

We’re still working on getting support through our Patreon campaign, but we absolutely won’t say no to additional revenue sources or, say, someone other than the BBC doing regular audio drama…

Just putting that out there.

As we mentioned last week, the 2018 season of Jabberwocky Audio Theater will debut on WERA-LP Radio Arlington on Sunday, June 10th at 4pm ET.

We’re excited to originate on broadcast radio, but of course when we started JAT (before the time distortion), we were thinking of doing distribution solely as a podcast… so it’s nice to see that people like this radio drama stuff, even if they’re thinking of a lot of examples of the non-fiction variety.