Talking points
Luminary, the paid-for podcast app that hopes to become the medium’s answer to Netflix, endured a slightly rocky roll-out this week, with several high-profile pods, including The Joe Rogan Experience and The Daily, withdrawing from the platform. Luminary, which boasts exclusive podcasts from Lena Dunham, Russell Brand and Trevor Noah, costs £6.99 a month and does not feature any adverts.
Mark Zuckerberg has gotten into the podcasting game with a series considering the relationship between technology and the wider world. Two episodes of the Facebook co-founder’s ever-so-slightly robotically named series Tech and Society with Mark Zuckerberg are available to listen to on Spotify, and feature conversations with Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittrain and the CEO of publishing group Axel Springer.
Attention John Wick fans: a new podcast devoted to the ludicrously entertaining action film franchise has launched. With a Pencil sees Ringer contributor Shea Serrano and friends dissect each of the films in detail over the course of six episodes. “It’s going to be good. Or bad. I don’t know. All I know is a lot of people are going to die,” Serrano says. Gwilym Mumford
Picks of the week
Running from Cops
Dan Taberski, the creator of lovable/controversial podcast Missing Richard Simmons is back with the third part of his Headlong trilogy. This time, the focus is on Cops, the US reality series that has been running for 30 years. Taberski’s sure watched a lot of it. He has spent 18 months investigating how accurate its portrayal of policing is and whether the criminals featured are exploited. As ever, he’s a man who leaves no stone unturned – and he isn’t afraid to challenge the majority view. Hannah Verdier
The Beautiful Brain
This Audible podcast starts out on the football pitch, examining the effect of CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy) on the brain. Patients who have suffered blows to the head and are left with the condition suffer from memory loss, depression and sometimes suicidal tendencies. What is really devastating is to hear from the family of footballer Jeff Astle, who developed early onset dementia at 54. His widow Laraine recalls how there was nothing the doctors could do when the disease “hit him like a juggernaut”. HV
Guardian pick: Chips with Everything
In January 2019, the website for a chain of local radio stations in Texas published a story. Unexpectedly – to the web editor who published it at least - the story would end up becoming Facebook’s most-shared story of 2019 thus far. Fast forward a couple of months and in March 2019, journalist Will Oremus was reading through a report on Facebook’s latest publishing trends and spotted the story from Texas.
Immediately intrigued, Oremus dug a little deeper and found that the success of the story seemed to contradict major adjustments made by Facebook to their algorithms a year earlier. Changes that, according to Mark Zuckerberg, would de-prioritize content shared by media and businesses in favour of “meaningful social interactions”.
So, did this story defy the news feed algorithm? Did the algorithm fail? Or did the post do exactly what it was supposed to? Check out this week’s episode of Chips with Everything to find out. Max Sanderson
