Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is issue 246, dated February 18, 2020.
The Podcast Academy. Last Friday, a group of podcast publishers and related operatives announced the formation of something called The Podcast Academy — not to be mistaken with what appears to be a semi-amateur Australian resource for podcasters of the same name — which they described as a nonprofit organization dedicated to “elevating awareness and excitement for podcasts as a major media category and advancing knowledge and relationships in and around the business.”
Its activities will involve things like holding webinars, organizing networking events, and publishing white papers, but its flagship endeavor seems to be an awards program called called the Golden Mics. (Between “Golden Mic” and the use of the word “academy,” the whole nomenclature strikes me as a little derivative and cringe-worthy, which perhaps doesn’t bode well for the endgame effort of “elevating…
