Understatement alert: news podcasts are a pretty big deal.

Just how big of a deal? After revealing that The Daily was pulling in an average of 4 million downloads per day (up 100% since 2019), Michael Barbaro, the show’s host, made a comparison that really stuck with me - pointing out that the pod was drawing just as big of an audience as a show on Fox News.

We know that news podcasts are connecting well with audiences and really punching above their weight in terms of listenership - The Reuter’s Institute suggests that 30% of the top pods in the US (and 15% in the UK) are news-based even though news podcast only make up 7% of the podcast ecosystem.

So I wanted to try and unpick the magic here: How do podcasts power-up news stories? What do they add to the news mix?

Read on to hear what our experts think…

The Editor

James Shield

Senior Audio Producer at The Times and The Sunday Times

“If you live in quite a complicated world – and you feel that you're being hit with all sorts of news all the time – it's quite useful to have someone hold your hand, zoom out a bit and go, 'here's what matters' ”

I think what a podcast like ours brings to the news environment is an ability to tell a story properly from the beginning – to give the full context of a piece – in a way that you just don't have the space to do on a lot of broadcast news.

Occasionally, you can watch broadcast news and it feels like you're watching Season Four, Episode 12 of the show that you didn't see the previous seasons of - it's like, how did we get to this point? With a podcast, we just have more space to tell the story.

If I think about this morning's episode, it's about the Bashir scandal around Princess Diana and the BBC, which continues to rumble on. This week, a select committee of MPs questioned current and former Director Generals of the BBC. If we were covering that on a TV news channel, you'd have to move quite fast and share just the key clips.

In contrast, for Stories of Our Times, I watched the whole thing - all three and a half hours - and then picked what I thought would be the most interesting parts of that for our listeners. I also had the time to go talk to the Sunday Times journalist who had first broken that story in October; and we called up a former Panorama journalist who covered it as well. And then that's all packed into about 30 minutes.

I just think, if you live in quite a complicated world – and you feel that you're being hit with all sorts of news all the time – it's quite useful to have someone hold your hand, zoom out a bit and go, 'here's what matters'. And that’s what I think we provide.

Krista Almanzan

John S. Knight Senior Journalism Fellow at Stanford University

“No constraints on length opens up the door to get in all the details…”

Podcasts create the opportunity for news reporting to go way more in depth on the story.

It changes everything when you can talk about one news story over the course of several episodes, or even one episode, versus trying to fit it in a few minutes for radio.

No constraints on length opens up the door to get in all the details, let people talk longer and paint a more complete picture.

That being said, this benefit can also be the downfall of podcasts if the producers don’t embrace editing…