Audio Ink

It’s a chilling story but one worth telling. In the Dark, an investigative podcast by APM Reports, has received a George Foster Peabody Award for its groundbreaking reporting on the 27-year investigation of the Jacob Wetterling kidnapping. 

The NPR Story Lab is a three-day audio storytelling training for member-station teams and independent producers from across the nation at NPR HQ. The workshop has selected two audio projects that will receive editorial support and $10,000 in funding to launch pilot episodes of their podcasts and create broadcast segments for NPR newsmagazines.

NPR and iHeartRadio have begun a new partnership. More than 30 of NPR’s most popular podcasts are now available through iHeartRadio. The addition of NPR further grows iHeartRadio’s podcast library, which currently features more than 9,000 shows across 19 different categories.

Take that Apple. The team at TagStation announced Wednesday that the NextRadio app is now available in South Korea, allowing listeners to tune to local FM stations via the FM radio chip in their smartphones. TagStation has previously focused expansion of the NextRadio app in North America and Latin America, making South Korea its first country outside of the Americas.

The new weekly podcast from ESPN Audio is called Sports? with Katie Nolan. Nolan joined ESPN last October and appears across multiple ESPN platforms. She is a regular host of SportsCenter on Snapchat, and recently co-hosted a live Twitter show prior to the Titans vs. Chiefs NFL Wild Card game. She also contributed to the MegaCast for the College Football Playoff National Championship.

Programmatic is something both iHeartRadio and Spotify already offer advertisers, however, Pandora says it brings more to the table with its 73 million monthly active listeners. A pilot program will be launched with Volkswagen. Pandora will make its audio inventory available through deals with The Trade Desk, AdsWizz’s AudioMatic and MediaMath.

TagStation, owner of the NextRadio app, announced on Monday that the hybrid radio app is now available on new JVC and Kenwood head units.

Cadence13 and newsletter MarketSnacks have announced a new podcast series called MarketSnacks Daily. It will provide a daily take on key business stories happening from Wall Street to Silicon Valley, and in between, in a quick, digestible, entertaining format.

Inside JAWS is a tale of a modest thriller that became an ordeal and then a disaster and then a phenomenon and then a classic. Steven Spielberg, a fresh-faced, inexperienced director nearly wrecked his promising career, but became the most important filmmaker of our era. On Tuesday, day one of the series’ release, Inside JAWS hit the Apple Podcast chart at #2.

New podcasting app Anchor has introduced a new product called Listener Support which gives podcasters an opportunity to generate revenue. The question is: Will listeners pay for a show they love to listen to?