Today, podcasts are one of the most simple ways to brand engaging content and garner loyal followers. But there are mistakes even the pros make that could be the difference between being downloaded or ditched.
In mediabistro.com’s How to Make a Podcast People Want to Subscribe To, producers and hosts count down the nine things that could be preventing you from getting more listeners.
Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews. 
Social Times’ content expert @AmandaCosco tells all about three popular content aggregation tools
Slate launched an update to its iPad app that addresses what it said were its users’ two most common requests: the ability to save articles, and support for Instapaper.
The update to the magazine’s original iPad app, which launched in August, also solved some other bugs.
Slate has a handy tool for Gawker readers who are concerned about whether their email addresses were compromised in the hacker attack on the latter this past weekend: Just go to this page and enter email addresses into the widget.
Slate V launched a new video blog, Trending News Channel, which features two to three short videos per day detailing “the more shrug-worthy news items trending each day.”
Trending News Channel is being run by Slate V executive producers Bill Smee and Andy Bowers, and the Chevy Volt is the launch sponsor and the blog’s exclusive sponsor for the month.
Slate V said it will not tie content on Trending News Channel to any one source, mining searches from Google, Twitter, Yahoo!, Bing, and other sources.
Comedian Iliza Vie Shlesinger is channeling her very best Maria Bartiromo for Slate V, hosting Up in Your Business, a weekly series that Slate said “aims to do the world of business and business news what Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert do to politics and the mainstream media.”
The debut episode (below) examines how fictional character Gordon Gekko of Wall Street and Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps rates against Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, as well as poking fun at Netflix.
Slate editor David Plotz spoke with Betsy Rothstein for a mediabistro.com So What Do You Do Q&A, during which he touched upon how he keeps his writers motivated, where his publication falls ideologically and politically, and why he spent months feeling as if he was being haunted by a 50-foot-high Michelle Obama.
The interview was part of mediabistro.com’s Profit from Your Passion series, with activists representing this week’s focus. Here, Plotz discusses politics and ideology at Slate:
Slate doesn’t have a party line, an ideological platform, or positions on anything. We never feel any obligation to cover an issue a particular way, or to stake out a position, or to serve some higher public good. Our view is the public good is served when we are honest and journalistically ambitious. If that means we are savaging something the right loves, fantastic. There is no intentional political activism at Slate. One thing we’ve done during the past few elections is everyone on staff says how they’ve voted. We publish it. It’s cool. It speaks well for our transparency so people can look and say that our work stands and falls based on its truth and integrity and consistency.
There is no effort to do political activism. We want to be engaged, but if we decide we write about health care, it is not to get it passed, but because Americans need to know about it. As long as the stories are smart and new and fresh, it doesn’t matter where they fall.
James Ledbetter landed the job of running Reuters.com just two months after business/economy site The Big Money was shuttered by Slate, paidContent:UK reports.
Ledbetter, who had still been writing for Slate, was deputy managing editor of CNNMoney.com and Fortune.com prior to the launch of The Big Money.
paidContent:UK also reported that Arlene Getz, former editorial director of worldwide special editions at Newsweek, will join Reuters to help tailor its news offerings for media clients, reporting to top news editor Eddie Evans.
Ledbetter told paidContent:UK:
Reuters has done a great job of redesigning its Web site for a general business audience, but to date, they haven’t had a lot of resources at their disposal in terms of organizing its news in a compelling way. Aside from getting a quick understanding of the logistics of a very large place, I want to focus on answering the question of how can you bring more voices, more excitement to the site, without stepping on the integrity of Reuters. And how you can work with the amazing group of journalists to create a more compelling Web experience.
