The Podcast Ecosystem, Radical Fonts, and a History of Paris in 2.5mins

👋🏼 Hi everyone!

🔔 I’m off to Prague next week to help our client ADP with their annual ReThink event. Along with all the podcasts and webinars we produce with them, we also help find and develop stories for client case studies and other sessions at their live events. It’s going to be a great week, but a bit chilly!

If you’d like help developing stories for your live B2B events, or taking the stories from the events into other digital formats to get more value from them, we’d love to help! Hit reply or drop me a line and we can have a chat.

💻 DATA POINT: Baseball is, of course, the best American sport, but the eggball enthusiasts have their big event this Sunday. The Superbowl is now the only show that generates regular huge broadcast TV audiences, and as a result, the cost of ads has sharply risen to a remarkable $8m for a 30sec slot. You can read the graph below less as a story about the rising value of the Superbowl, and more as the concentration of money on to the last island of mass attention in a broadcast landscape that is now mostly underwater.

📕 The Short Story

An Internet of Checkpoints (5-min read)

JUST SCREAM (lots of short audio files)

The Genius of Margaret Calvert (6-min read)

Times New Resistance (free font)

Seu Jorge’s Tribute to David Bowie (60 min watch/listen)

Resist and Unsubscribe (Campaign)

A History of Paris in 2.5mins (2.5-min watch)

Why You Should Be Deliberately Unpredictable (8-min read)

Mapping the Podcast Ecosystem (15-min academic paper)

📣 How We Got Here - a Podcast About Change (Podcast Series) 📣

📚 The Long Story

An Internet of Checkpoints (5-min read)
We are a social animal, and sometimes we can build community in the strangest places. This beautiful post from Bijan Stephens traces the unlikely story of a youtube gamer video that became a place for people to tell their life stories.

JUST SCREAM (lots of short audio files)
Talking of which, I came to this site because screaming feels like a very appropriate response to everything right now. But then I found the playlist called ‘hope’ on the site, and was reminded again, that the cracks are where the light gets in.

The Genius of Margaret Calvert (6-min read)
Margaret Calvert is probably the most visible designer in the UK. If you’ve ever driven, rode or walked on a UK highway, you’ll have seen her font and designs in the road signs and navigation. The social impact of her design work is almost impossible to measure. I also loved finding out that the little girl with the bob hair on the school sign is based on her, and of course she’s leading her little brother as they cross the street.

Times New Resistance (free font)
Thank you to our Minneapolis friend and colleague Deborah Carver for sharing this brilliant font. It’s Times New Roman, but it replaces some, er, key words with their real meaning. So ‘ICE’ becomes ‘The Goon Squad’ and ‘Illegal alien’ becomes ‘Human Being’. Another example that fonts=power.

Seu Jorge’s Tribute to David Bowie (60 min watch/listen)
If you need the digital equivalent of a walk in the park to clear your head, here you go. I love Seu Jorge’s covers of Bowie tracks for the soundtrack of the Wes Anderson movie The Life Aquatic. Here he plays the songs as a tribute to Bowie, in a beautiful location on the coast of Sao Paolo.

Resist and Unsubscribe (Campaign)
I can find Scott Galloway a bit annoying, but can’t argue with his call for an ‘economic strike’, giving you the info you need to unsubscribe from the platforms and services that are supporting or enabling US Government oppression.

A History of Paris in 2.5mins (2.5-min watch)
Another breather - this is a beautiful video that shows how the city of Paris has grown over the last 2000 or so years. I love seeing new building materials changing the colour of the buildings.

Why You Should Be Deliberately Unpredictable (8-min read)
Hugh dropped this in the Storythings’ Slack just as I was finishing the newsletter, so I had to bump another link to make room for it. This is SO in line with what we tell our clients about how to survive in an age of AI - Do the opposite of what your peers are doing, be yourself, be human, and commit to a ‘flagship format’. Amen to all that!

Mapping the Podcast Ecosystem (15-min academic paper)
This is a great paper detailing how the researchers analysed over 273 thousand English language podcasts posted on RSS in May and June 2020. The description of how they did it is incredible, and so are the visualisation. I was fascinated by the size of the religion cluster, but also by how un-connected that cluster was.

📣 How We Got Here - a Podcast About Change 📣
I’ve shared a lot of posts about change today, so I dug into the archive to find a short Storythings podcast series from 2022 that we made for the UK Parliament. Each episode takes you through the story of how ordinary people made real changes to policy and laws through protest, from the secret ballot to animal rights.

💌 Humans of LinkedIn

This week, we really like Rob Estreitinho’s call to ‘Make B2B less Bleh.’ It uses a lot of the same stats and resources as our recent STAY HUMAN Campaign, so we agree with him 100%!

READ THE POST HERE →

Drop us a line if you have anything you’d like us to share in a future edition of this newsletter, or of course if you have any comments or suggestions for us!

Have a great weekend!

Matt, Anjali, Hugh, and the team