News podcast consumption examined

The Digital News Report 2025 from the Reuters Institute is being launched as we send today’s update. One part of the data focuses on the changing landscape for news podcasts across countries, looking specifically at the US, UK and Norway to add further context.

The data suggests that YouTube is the main access point for news podcasts in the US - in the country, 15% access a news podcast weekly. One fifth (22%) of their US sample say they saw news or commentary from Joe Rogan in the week after the inauguration (and 14% from Tucker Carlson).
The percentage of weekly news podcast listeners in the UK is half that of the US. Interestingly, in the UK, Goalhanger’s The Rest is Politics is quoted as the #1 news podcast, with Global’s The News Agents at #2 and PoliticsJOE at #3. The BBC only appears at #4 and #5, with Americast beating Newscast.

The winners of the Publisher Podcast Awards 2025 were announced. The podcast of the year went to Political Fix from the Financial Times.

The fiction podcast app Apollo shut down last month, it’s emerged. “We’ve poured our hearts into building a space for fiction podcast lovers”, said the founders in an email, ”and while we’re incredibly proud of what we created, we haven’t been able to grow the listener base enough to sustain the service long-term.”