Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is issue 218, dated July 16, 2019.
California dreamin’. This morning, Southern California Public Radio of supposedly sleepy Pasadena — one of the two major public radio stations serving Los Angeles (excluding KUSC), the other being Santa Monica’s KCRW — announced the launch of a new podcast division called LAist Studios, which the organization bills as “a new podcast development and production studio dedicated to expanding upon the storytelling capabilities of SCPR.” I suppose you could describe the division as, roughly speaking, the West Coast equivalent of WNYC Studios…or more precisely, an evolution of whatever WNYC Studios is supposed to be at this point in time.
The association between those two public radio podcast businesses isn’t only superficial; there’s connective tissue between the two institutions. LAist Studios is the first major initiative rolled out by Herb Scannell, who became SCPR’s new…
