Compiled by Trent Thomas and Tess Connery
Adam Shand kicks off the year with State Crime Command and War Memorial podcasts
It has already been a busy year for Adam Shand who has released a new episode of Lost At Sea – The Black Bone for the State Crime Command series and also hosted the Up Close – Conversations with Modern Veterans for the Australian War Memorial and LiSTNR.
Podcast Week‘s Trent Thomas caught up with Shand to talk about the two projects.
Shand said that doing Up Close – Conversations with Modern Veterans was an honour that he didn’t have to think twice about accepting when offered the opportunity to host the podcast.
“The conversations with some very different veterans who had common experiences, and who spoke about how they dealt with these issues and how they still feel connected to the call of service was fantastic. As a journalist, sometimes you have to moderate discussions heavily but I just wanted to sit back and listen to them. All four of them had an individual tale which just was engrossing.”
When asked about the different tones of his regular work in Real Crime and working with veterans for this new podcast, Shand said that they are all stories.
“It’s all about listening, it’s all about finding the best way to communicate their stories in the way that they deliver them to you, rather than coming up with preconceived ideas about being a crime writer or military writer or whatever.”
Breaking the case open
Lost At Sea – The Black Bone follows the case involving a human jawbone that was found at a beach on the NSW Central Coast in June 2020. The bone is in excellent condition but almost black. Through DNA analysis, police, and forensic experts, Shand and the NSW police are able to pull more information from the jawbone.
“We found a witness, which helped us understand the context of the bone, where it is, and also the colour of it,” said Shand. “And that gets explained in the second part of this podcast, and explodes a few of my theories and hunches and assumptions from the first episode.”
The new evidence has taken the case in a new direction, and it remains an active police investigation and Shand expects to release another episode on the ongoing story soon.
“I’m expecting to do at least two more episodes. And by mid-year, we’ll have a lot of scientific testing back. And also a programme of contacting dentists around the country would have been complete. And we feel like there’ll be no stone left unturned at that point. ”
Australian True Crime
When asked how the Australian style of true crime compares to the content from coming overseas, Shand said that he is a fan of the local product, especially compared to what is coming from the states.
“I find the American style often a little bit disappointing. There’s a lot of build-up and it is sometimes anticlimactic. I’ve never got S-Town for instance, that was a character piece to me. People loved it. And that’s fine.
“I like people with intent. We have journos who do that, whether it’s Hedley Thomas or Vikki Petraitis. Our style is fantastic.”
Real Crime on the silver screen
When pressed on what’s next for his Real Crime brand, Shand said that they have some exciting work in a new medium in the pipeline.
“We are doing some television across true crime, where we’re also partnering on some podcasts as well. So the idea is to have TV shows that break new ground and the podcast follows up and tries to develop leads that follow the TV broadcasts.”
[Listen to Lost At Sea – The Black Bone here]
[Listen to Up Close – Conversations with Modern Veterans here]
Gillian Bowen’s Making Easy Money returns for a second season
Hosted by 10 senior finance reporter Gillian Bowen, Making Money Easy looks at the current finance and economy news and, with the help of some prominent economists, breaks it down to what the average Aussie needs to know.
Season two has officially launched, and Podcast Week’s Tess Connery spoke to Bowen about what’s changed this time around and what has stayed the same.
This season, 10 has handed Bowen full ownership and control of Making Money Easy, and she says that she’s enjoying being the boss.
“It’s a great opportunity for being in complete control of the creative aspects of it – I love being able to have exciting ideas floating around in my head for different episodes, and then working out how to bring them to life with the experts and economists. I was already doing that anyway in season one, but now I really do get all the freedom. I get to have control over the different ideas and what I want to do. I can just literally ask myself, do I think this is a good idea? And if I do, then I go for it.”
Heading into season two of Making Money Easy, the podcast is still working towards the same goals it always has, but with some shiny new production.
“The concept remains the same, which is to make the idea of talking about money, and business, and finance easily accessible and user friendly. What won’t change is the chinwag style of the podcast, because that to me is the winning formula.
“What’s changed is the production has been given a big overhaul. It’s great that my husband (Chris Bowen) is a production and audio whizz after his long career in radio, and he now is in his own business with his own website where he makes all his own videos and podcasts for himself. He is a genius at making promos and openers and little stings, and all that sort of stuff.
“It sounds more schmick in my mind, but the feel and vibe of what people loved about season one is still very much there in season two.”
Some of the topics covered would be considered quite daunting to a person who doesn’t have a solid grasp of the more detailed economic theories. For Bowen, the key to breaking down a topic is to strip it back as far as she can.
“I always have two experts or economists on so that we can all play off each other. I do a bit of pre-research to see what it is that they’re going to attempt to explain and whether or not I have the right questions to make sure that they explain it easily. Also, I ask all sorts of questions on purpose – because I can tell you there are people listening who are thinking the same question. I have no stress in our questions sounding stupid or silly.”
Overall, Bowen hopes Making Money Easy helps listeners learn about finance without having to try too hard.
“Money can be dry, or people think it’s dry. But I assure you that if you have a listen to what we talk about, you’ll realise that it’s something that’s impacting you each and every day. The more you know about it, the better off you can be brain-wise. It’s always good to expand your brain and this is an easy way to do it.”
[Listen to Making Easy Money here]
Nova’s Kane Reiken on signing the hugely popular So Dramatic!
Earlier in the year, Nova Entertainment announced that Megan Pustetto’s podcast So Dramatic! was the latest independent podcast title to join the Nova Entertainment Podcast Network. The deal involved extending the brand with the launch of a new daily podcast, So Dramatic! Daily.
It’s the latest in a long line of podcast news for Nova, and they’re not slowing down any time soon.
Mediaweek spoke to Kane Reiken, Nova’s digital audio commercial & network director about how the new partnership came about ahead of a feature that will be published tomorrow in full.
“It was a really exciting opportunity for us,” says Reiken. “Overall, a part of the Nova Entertainment Podcast Network for us is about hand-picking and curating the best partners that we can bring on to the network. We’re really looking at partners which add value to our entire network, and also how we can add value to them as well.
“Megan does such a great job in terms of her vertical around entertainment news, she’s got a really strong community of listeners, she’s got a really diverse point of view, and her content is really high quality. For me, it was a no-brainer. It’s about now giving her the opportunity to grow, opening her up to our client partners, and looking at some commercial opportunities to support her production.”
That strong community of listeners that So Dramatic! has attracted played a big role in signing the pod with Nova.
“They’re kind of wild from everything that I’ve seen across the different platforms! They’re so engaged, and I think that just shows the beauty of podcasting. That intimacy that she has with her audiences, the community that’s built around it, that’s why it’s so successful. That’s what really attracted me to bring her closer within the Nova Independent Podcast Network with this agreement.”
Nova launches The Phantom Never Dies podcast
Nova’s latest podcast The Phantom Never Dies is hosted by author, screenwriter, and pop culture expert Maria Lewis, and explores the untold story of the world’s very first superhero.
Over six episodes, Lewis takes the audience on a deep dive into the mysteriously forgotten comic book hero, from his origins as the archetype ‘white saviour’ to a character that came to represent duty, morality and all that was good in humankind.
Lewis said: “From undermining the Nazis during World War II to the character’s connection with Indigenous communities globally, The Phantom’s history off the page is just as fascinating as what’s on it. Whether it’s through my work as a creator or curator, I’ve always believed pop culture has the power to change the world. With The Phantom Never Dies, we’re able to prove exactly that. The geek space can often feel exclusionary for those outside of it and over the course of the series, hopefully we’re able to bring newcomers – and hardcore Phans – into one of the most interesting, baffling and (at times) bat-shit insane stories never told.”
The Phantom Never Dies features interviews with Hollywood directors, comic book historians, Oscar-nominated Australian actors famous for playing superheroes and super villains, family members of original Phantom creators, legendary comic book artists, Hollywood production and costume designers, and more.
[Listen to The Phantom Never Dies here]
Ranieri & Co hits the Motherlode
The team at Ranieri & Co has recently launched its first original series, Motherlode. Co-founder and CEO at Ranieri & Co, Rob Ranieri, told Mediaweek: “Motherlode is the fascinating story about the birth of computer hacking from an unlikely centre – Melbourne, Australia. It was here teenage boys, and they were mostly boys, hacked into some of the biggest organisations in the world.
“It’s also where a young hacker, Julian Assange, cut his teeth on computers and went on to develop Wikileaks, the most disruptive websites the world has seen. But Wikileaks didn’t just spring up out of nowhere. It was 20 years in the making. Motherlode reveals the technological and political motivations behind it.”
The new podcast has quickly found an audience – it has charted as high as #41 on the Apple Podcast chart.
In Australia and New Zealand, Ranieri & Co. exclusively represents Wondery, an Amazon company, with podcasts including including Dr Death, The Shrink Next Door, Even the Rich and Business Wars. Ranieri & Co. also makes custom branded podcasts.
Ranieri & Co. represent local podcasts including The Byron Cooke Show, The Mind Muscle Project, The Fitness and Lifestyle Podcast, Single Minded and The Junkees with Dave O’Neil and Kitty Flanagan.
Audible releases investigative queer true-crime podcast with Patrick Abboud
Audible has released a new investigative queer true-crime podcast, The Greatest Menace, which goes behind the bars of Australia’s one-time “gay prison”, opened in 1957 and operational for a number of decades, exposing the former New South Wales Government’s secretive operation.
Documentary makers Patrick Abboud and Simon Cunich spent three years investigating Australia’s former “gay prison”, exploring the painful history of the institution and the shocking experiments to “treat” homosexuality.
The late New South Wales Police Commissioner Colin Delaney declared homosexuality to be Australia’s “greatest menace” in 1958. The podcast reveals, an undercover police task force was operating in the 1950s through to the 1960s, to entrap, isolate and eradicate the “homosexual threat”.
This queer true crime journey takes listeners from underground nightclubs to hidden sex haunts to remote parts of New Zealand and England. Abboud finds himself entangled in a police cover-up, a case of wrongful conviction and a human experiment that didn’t go to plan.
[Listen to The Greatest Menace here]
Amazon and Spotify mull bids for London-listed podcaster Audioboom
Amazon and Spotify are considering rival takeover approaches for Audioboom, the London-listed podcasting group which has seen revenues and its share price surge during the pandemic, Sky News UK reported earlier this week.
The two digital behemoths have been exploring bids for Audioboom in recent weeks, and could decide whether to make formal offers as soon as this month.
The London-listed company counts Casefile True Crime of the US and the UK’s Cycling Podcast among the partners to which it provides commercial services through its advertising technology platform.
Its Audioboom Studios division produces content such as F1: Beyond the Grid and What Makes a Killer.
The Casefile True Crime podcast is the clear leader as the most popular podcast in Australia. Audioboom also has two other podcasts ranked at #11 and #12 in the latest Podcast Ranker for January 2022. Audioboom is part of the iHeartPodcast Network in Australia.
Audiobook shares hit an all-time high this week after speculation about a sale.
Festival of Dangerous Ideas launches new podcast, FODI: The In-Between
The Festival of Dangerous Ideas (FODI) has launched a new podcast, FODI: The In-Between that pairs 16 leading thinkers from around the world to record and dissect this moment in time.
Featuring a lineup including actor, writer and historian Stephen Fry, social commentator Roxane Gay, broadcaster Waleed Aly, business leader Sam Mostyn, activist Naomi Klein as well as philosophers Peter Singer and Slavoj Žižek, FODI: The In-Between asks things such as what does a passing age look like? What should we celebrate or regret from our past? What do we fear for the future and what gives us hope?
The podcast is hosted by FODI festival director and curator Danielle Harvey, alongside The Ethics Centre’s co-curators Simon Longstaff and Ann Mossop.
In an Australian podcast first, the podcast will debut an artificially intelligent voice clone of Harvey, which features as a co-host at the beginning and end of the episodes. A product of AI voice synthesis, she trained the intelligent technology by recording her own audio samples to replicate her voice, creating a “deepfake,” which matches Harvey’s natural speech when reading a script.
Each episode is also accompanied by short, creative sound responses, reflective of the conversation topic and released weekly with every new instalment. Featured artist responses include a composition by Alexandra Spence made from degraded cassette tape recordings that have been buried in the ocean; a piece by artist and Inuk throat singer Tanya Tagaq; music created by the world’s first neural synthesiser, CellF, by Perth-based artist Guy Ben-Ary; a poem by artist and writer Tasnim Hossain; and an edited conversation between the podcast’s AI host and an artificially intelligent text generator.
[Listen to FODI: The In-Between here]
Piccolo Podcasts partners with Macquarie Uni for new pod
Piccolo Podcasts has announced the launch of, In the CAVE: An Ethics Podcast, from The Macquarie University Research Centre for Agency, Values and Ethics (CAVE).
In the CAVE explores the changing ethical questions that we face in contemporary life, from AI carrying out medical diagnoses, to how robots may change peoples way of life.
In the CAVE is hosted by the Director of CAVE and Leader of the ethics and artificial intelligence team, associate professor Dr Paul Formosa and deputy director of CAVE and leader of the applied ethics team, professor Wendy Rogers. They will be joined by a number of the nation’s leading academic experts to unpack pressing and complex ethical issues.
