Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is issue 202, published April 2, 2019.
Public radio podcasts as direct donation vehicle: A case study. Last October, New Hampshire Public Radio released Bear Brook, a six-part investigative podcast that amounted to a big swing for the station. The project had local flavor; the case looked into a series of unidentified bodies found years earlier in the eponymous state park, But the podcast had broad potential appeal: Bear Brook, after all, had all the trappings of the true crime genre, a.k.a. the Bloody, Beating Heart of Podcasting.
(As an aside, a true crime podcast narrated by Dan Carlin features heavily on the second episode of the Twilight Zone reboot, as well as in an upcoming Awkwafina project. Bloody, beating heart indeed.)
And appeal Bear Brook did. By the end of March, the podcast has garnered over 4.5 million downloads across six episodes (plus two mini-updates) since its October launch, suggesting a roughly half…
