Break it up, you clique: this week on Fresh Powder

Break it up, you clique.

Big Podcasting, a reference to the old money being infused into the industry, is relatively new but has developed so quickly that you might not know who owns your favorite podcast anymore. Spotify? iHeartMedia? SiriusXM? What about Amazon? With big media companies buying up so many once-independent podcasts productions, is the free-for-all open market at risk of becoming privatized in the future? Nicholas Quah, with an interesting perspective on this and other questions about the future of the industry in 2021 (Vulture): “Apple is still thought to be the structural incumbent in terms of podcast distribution, and more importantly, it remains the focal point of the open podcast ecosystem. As currently composed, a healthy Apple Podcasts app, then, broadly equates to a healthy open podcast ecosystem, and it follows from this that the competition between Apple Podcasts and Spotify can be read as a proxy tension between open podcasting and something relatively more closed. What Apple does to keep pace with Spotify and its other Big Podcasting peers, then, should be a significant matter of concern for those who have a stake in open podcasting.”

. . . Right on queue: Apple is, in fact, considering a podcast subscription service — a tier to its existing services — to compete with Spotify.

In other journalism

–  “News audiences aren’t necessarily used to seeing violence and disruption at citizen demonstrations in support of a president — and certainly not on the scale we witnessed on Wednesday at the Capitol. It proved a novel test of how the news media would frame the unrest and the aims of those involved.” Nieman Lab on how the media challenged the norms of covering protests during the violence at the Capitol.

–  What details can we extract about Leonardo DiCaprio’s next movie role, Netflix’s “Don’t Look Up,” from analyzing only his movie beards? Esquire tried looking backward to look forward: a Twitter thread investigation. (Who will take over and go deeper on this?)

–  Journalists did not dodge paperwork during the Trump administration. Axios: More FOIA requests were filed in the last four years than the previous 16 combined.