NPR funding under threat

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• Funding for NPR is under threat in 2025, after Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have written they intend to “take aim” at funding for NPR and PBS. NPR is one of the largest podcast publishers in the US (and has trained many producers who work elsewhere).
  • NPR itself earns less than 1% of its funding from the US government; though its member stations earn 14% of their income that way. In 2023, NPR’s total revenue was $318mn, but earned just $32mn directly from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which is funded by the federal government. By way of comparison, in the UK, the BBC’s revenue from government-mandated licence-fees in 2023 was US $4.6bn (£3,660mn); five times fewer people live in the UK than the US.
  • Eric Nuzum, a former NPR executive, suggests that those at NPR should lead with a concrete vision for the future, rather than take a defensive position.
• The BBC published its top podcasts of 2024, based on plays within BBC Sounds, the Corporation’s proprietary audio app. The BBC’s daily news podcast Newscast was most popular, in a year with a UK and US election.
• More podcasts are being updated this year: and more often. Livewire’s visualised podcast index stats has data today saying that 243,773 podcasts were updated in the last 14 days, up 2.5% from 237,693 this time last year. Additionally, 852,027 episodes were published in the last 14 days, up 7.6% from 787,243 in 2023.

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The Tech Stuff

• Tenacity is a fork of the Audacity audio editor, without the Russian analytics data or licence dramas. A number of forks were produced after Audacity was acquired by Muse in 2021; most have now merged into this project.
• If you’re running transcripts as part of your production process, whisper-cpp has been updated in Homebrew, and now lets you use the large-turbo model. More accuracy, and far faster.

Tips and tricks

• Want to get live captions for everything you listen to, on whatever device? Chances are your computer or phone will do that for you.

Podcast News

• Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States, has died. He was 100 years old. In The Guardian's Politics Weekly America, Jonathan Freedland talks to Jimmy Carter’s biographer, Jonathan Alter, about why history should look favourably on the peanut farmer turned politician.
• In the Podnews Weekly Review this week, the podcast's PWR Supporters give their views about how 2024 was for them - and what to look forward to in 2025.

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