Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is issue 178, published September 25, 2018.
In case you missed it, this was the big podcast news that drove casual discussions about the industry over the past week: Last Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported that BuzzFeed has laid off its in-house audio production team — perhaps most famous for people-of-color–driven shows like Another Round, See Something Say Something, and Thirst Aid Kit — in favor of reallocating its resources towards the company’s video operations. As a result, the majority of its podcast portfolio will cease production. In an all-hands meeting Thursday (covered by BuzzFeed’s Steven Perlberg on Twitter), the company’s leadership noted that the decision was driven by difficulty finding a big audience — not a financial calculation.
Don’t miss the second part of the development, however: The company will adopt a production model similar to that of its television projects — “that…
