PodCraft | How to Podcast & Craft a Fantastic Show

Making Podnews: How James Cridland Publishes a Daily Podcast & Newsletter

17 snips

Jun 12, 2025

James Cridland, the mastermind behind Podnews, shares his journey of creating a daily podcast and newsletter devoted to podcasting news. He discusses the importance of a centralized source in a growing industry, balancing personal life with consistent content creation, and managing audience feedback. Cridland reveals his tools of choice, like the Lewitt RAY mic and Hindenburg PRO, while emphasizing the need for journalistic integrity and smart marketing strategies. Tune in for insights on growing an engaged audience and the evolving podcast landscape!

Ask episode

AI Snips

Chapters

Transcript

Episode notes

ANECDOTE

Origin of Podnews

James Cridland started Podnews in May 2017 after realizing there was no dedicated podcast news source.
It began as a side project he could manage in about an hour a day alongside his job search.

ADVICE

Grow Audience At Events

To grow your audience early, meet your community face-to-face at industry events.
Wear branded gear and network actively to become recognizable in your niche.

ADVICE

Use Podcast To Complement Newsletter

Use a companion podcast to complement your newsletter but not replace it.
The podcast version can signpost listeners to more detailed content in the newsletter or website.

Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode

Get the app

Since 2017, Podnews has been an essential daily briefing for podcasters and industry folks who want to keep their finger on the medium’s pulse.

But this newsletter and its companion podcast aren’t just brilliant sources of news, data, and analysis – they also make for a fantastic case study of creating content consistently over a long period of time.

In this episode of Podcraft, I caught up with James Cridland, the one-man operation behind Podnews, to pull back the curtain on how he's built what might be the most consistent content machine in podcasting.

We covered a lot of ground, from why James started Podnews in the first place, to why he chose to publish a daily briefing in both newsletter AND podcast form.

We also talked about tools and workflows. You'll find everything James uses in this Podnews piece, but some notable picks for me are:

The Lewitt RAY mic and Scarlett 2i2 interface - I'm a big fan of both
Hindenburg PRO v2 as his software of choice
FreshRSS - an RSS reader to keep up with new articles and blog posts

We got into some of the more "human" aspects of putting Podnews together, too. How does James manage to take holidays while still publishing every day without fail? How does he handle negative feedback when writing about something not everyone will respond well to? And how does he maintain journalistic freedom when sponsors help pay the bills?

Then there was the growth and reach stuff. How did he market Podnews in the early days? How did it grow, and was that growth slow and steady or 'spikey'?

James also chooses to run Podnews largely by himself, where others in his position might look to build a team of employees. I asked him about his thought process there, and that led to a conversation about how he's thinking about eventual semi-retirement.

All in all, this was a deeply enjoyable case study and a look under the hood of one of the industry's most prominent and prolific voices. So much so that I even manually wrote the shownotes(!!), and who even does that in 2025?

Also mentioned: If you want free podcast coaching on a future episode of Podcraft, fill out this application form as soon as you can!