Category Archives: Podcasting

No shame: the podcast taking on the Arab world’s sex and gender taboos

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Eib is now in its seventh season, fearlessly tackling subjects from Beirut’s drag queen scene to Jordanian widows’ rights

Rude, fault or blemish; flaw, disgrace or shame. The word has many shades, but nearly every woman who grows up in Arabic-speaking households knows its singular weight. “Anything related to women is eib,” says Tala El-Issa, from her home in Cairo. “If they want to talk about their bodies, it’s eib, their problems – eib. Just being a woman is almost eib.”

When the team at Sowt, an Arabic podcasting network based across the Middle East, wanted to create a show that charged fearlessly into the region’s taboos around sex and gender, the title was obvious. “Eib” is now in its seventh season, the company’s longest-lasting podcast and its most popular.

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Joe Rogan hosts Alex Jones on Spotify podcast despite ban

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Interview with conspiracy theorist leaves streaming service in awkward position

Joe Rogan, Spotify’s biggest podcast star, has left the platform in an awkward position after conducting a lengthy interview with Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist banned by Swedish streaming company for producing “hate content”.

Rogan, the libertarian host of the long-running and wildly popular Joe Rogan Experience podcast, uploaded a three-hour discussion on Tuesday featuring Jones, the founder of the conspiracy site Infowars.

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Alan Partridge on his new podcast: ‘This is the real, raw, be-cardiganed me’

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He’s back – sporting a post-lockdown haircut and hosting a new podcast. Britain’s No 1 raconteur talks about his new hat, driving a Vauxhall, and why Boris Johnson looks like the evil rabbit in Watership Down

Turn right out of Norwich railway station, take the number 12 bus, change at Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital, ride eight stops on the number 4 towards Swanton Morley, walk 1.1 miles, and you can’t help but spot the twin louvred conical towers of the oasthouse that Alan Partridge calls home. It is from this very oasthouse that Partridge – raconteur, national treasure, wit – broadcasts his brand new podcast, From the Oasthouse: The Alan Partridge Podcast, and to which Partridge has invited the Guardian.

Partridge bounds out to greet me in what appears to be an effusive show of hospitality. He offers a handshake before snapping it back into a more pandemic-appropriate wave. “I am so fine with social distancing,” he says. “Remember, I work in television where you’re forever mauled, hugged and leant on by over-pally floor managers or cackling makeup ladies. Now I can say, ‘Get your hands off me!’ without appearing in any way rude.”

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Apple removes two podcast apps from China store after censorship demands

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Pocket Casts says it refuses to restrict its content at request of Chinese authorities

Apple has removed two podcast apps from its Chinese app store, following government pressure to censor content.

Pocket Casts and Castro were both pulled from distribution in China after the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) demanded that the apps stop allowing content that breached the country’s restrictive speech laws.

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Spotify podcast deal could make Joe Rogan world’s highest paid broadcaster

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Streaming service must convince podcast listeners to switch from their favourite app

Joe Rogan, the comedian, MMA commentator and podcaster, may seem an unlikely prospect for becoming the world’s highest paid broadcaster. But after signing an exclusive deal with Spotify, that is what he may have become, marking a new era for podcasting in the process.

To much of the world, Rogan’s name is most associated with the periodic furores that erupt from the marathon interviews around which his podcast is structured.

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It’s boom time for podcasts – but will going mainstream kill the magic?

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Fifteen years ago, when the word podcast was added to the dictionary, only the tech-savvy were listening. Now, as star names pile in, they’re big business. Can the quality survive?

Hello friends! Do you fancy listening to “a new type of time-shifted amateur radio”? No? How about a brilliant podcast? Of course you do.

Fifteen years ago, Macworld, a magazine for fans of Apple products, announced, with limited fanfare, that Apple was about to add podcasts to iTunes, its music download offer. Unfortunately, few readers knew what a podcast was, hence Macworld’s “time-shifted radio” definition. In June 2005, the idea of having thousands of ready-to-hear audio shows, anything from true-crime documentaries to all-chums-together comedy, to up-to-the-minute news to gripping drama to revealing interviews, and being able to listen to these shows whenever you want, wherever you are – well, that wasn’t quite happening. So Apple’s move didn’t seem important. Nor did the fact that the Oxford English Dictionary added “podcast” to its lexicon in the same year, after tech journalist Ben Hammersley came up with the term in 2004 (which was also the year the BBC launched a downloadable version of In Our Time). Podcasts were new. It takes time for the new to become everyday.

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