Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is issue 254, dated April 14, 2020.
Pandemic watch. So, here’s my sense of where we are at the moment: it’s April 14, 2020, which means that, as of this week, we’re about one full month into widespread implementation of social distancing measures in most places across the United States. In other words, we’re now firmly in the “new normal,” I think. Now that we’re here, my inclination is to view whatever audience trends we see from here out as less about the effects of a disruptive transition and more about the new shape of podcast consumption behavior under these conditions.
(Then again, there’s the possibility that some parts of the country will opt to pull back on social distancing as part of an effort to open the economy back up, perhaps sooner than later — so there’s a chance we’ll end up seeing more bursts of disruptive transition in the weeks to come. In which case, we’ll probably see further…
