Yet the true crime story it tells is both more concise and more conclusive than its podcast predecessor. Episode one of Dirty John begins with an official from Orange County, California, describing the multiple stab wounds inflicted on the victim of a homicide in summer 2016. The podcast then rewinds two years to 2014, when wealthy interior designer Debra Newell, a single mother in her 50s from southern California, meets the perfect man online. Her grown-up children smell a rat, but Newell is smitten. Within two months the couple move in together and marry. So why has Dirty John struck a nerve? Perhaps its listeners are peculiarly sensitive to the dangers of meeting people online. Perhaps it hit during the right news cycle, when predatory men such as Harvey Weinstein were in the headlines. Untold : The Daniel Morgan Murder Peter Jukes, Alastair Morgan A single murder committed in a south London car park 30 years ago has now generated two series of , a podcast created by writer Peter Jukes with Alastair Morgan, the brother of Daniel Morgan. Morgan was a private investigator whose killing in 1987 has never been satisfactorily solved, yet prompted several inquiries that reached into the dark heart of the Met Police and the Murdoch media empire. Co-host Earlonne Woods is serving a 31-year sentence for attempted robbery; sound designer Antwan Williams, 15 years for armed robbery. Each is told in bite-sized 15- to 20-minute episodes, slickly produced, deeply sourced and hosted by award-winning reporter Phoebe Judge. Most are torn from the headlines, but , giving its tales a context and detail that makes them both unique and yet scarily familiar. Crimetown Marc Smerling, Z-S Pontier Marc Smerling and Zac-Stuart Pontier covered true crime in their documentary film Catfish and the hit HBO series The Jinx. Their podcast, , spends each series examining the history and influence of organised crime in a different American city. The first, which concluded earlier this year, trained its panoramic lens on Providence, Rhode Island, taking in a novelistic sweep of interrelated stories and characters from the late 20th century. At its core was the relationship between mob boss Raymond Patriarca, left, and mayor Buddy Cianci, who made his name as a prosecutor fighting corruption, but was ultimately convicted of corruption himself. The death of one of the main characters brought it to light, plus a sharp-eyed colleague and a helpful prosecutor. The reporting is the same as it always is: talking to as many people as you can find and getting as many documents as you can find. These stories are everywhere, but a lot has to go right for them to work. Why produce as a podcast? You can hear depths of emotion in their voices, nuances of emotion, hard to convey in prose. Why do you think Dirty John has resonated so widely with listeners? I hope Dirty John is a cautionary tale. I hope it gives people some insight into exactly how a predator works. Have you been surprised by its success? What sort of responses have you received? One woman told me that, after she got a 500ft restraining order against him, she looked out her window to see him in the street just beyond the boundary line, watching her. Why do you think true crime is such a popular podcast genre? Same with Dirty John. Larry David Photograph: John P. What is the medium, if not oral history writ large? Notable by his absence is Jeff Garlin, who explained in another interview that this kind of thing is far too much like introspection for his liking. Eight years on, the punchline is still enough to make you snort. As with his books, Miller is happy for his cast of characters to do most of the talking. The result is so entertaining that even Larry laughs. Their sister podcast, , is a gloriously obsessive audio film club — host Bill Simmons and others from The Ringer crew dive back into beloved films from Heat, to Clueless and Scream and work out exactly what makes the kind of movie you can watch over and over again. He died from a self-inflicted gunshot in 2012 and , over six episodes. A critical cultural companion. Marc Maron Photograph: Travis Shinn Five more pop culture podcasts Comedian Marc Maron is the standard bearer for the podcast interview genre, doing long conversations this year with the likes of Bruce Spring-steen, Lee Daniels and Sofia Coppola. Millennial London trio Alex Reads, Reckless Rai and Derek W tackle life, books, black pop culture and wellness. John Schaefer sifts through the far reaches of music taking in contemporary classical, jazz, gamelan, electronic experiments and more. Conversations with writers of non-fiction, each week telling the story that lies behind their reporting. Every episode, recorded in front of a live audience, is based around a theme, like discussing democracy with MP Jess Phillips, judgment with Phoebe Waller-Bridge, or sexism in the film industry with Gemma Arterton her episode when she revealed a Hollywood producer bullied her about her weight and filmed her at the gym to make sure she was exercising. The presenters set themselves a weekly challenge: Frances-White posed for a life drawing class to get more comfortable with nudity; for another episode, inveterate apologist Hagen challenged herself not to say sorry to anyone for a week. Hagen left in January this year to focus on other projects, but in her place is an impressive succession of guest presenters including Susan Wokoma, Sara Pascoe and Aisling Bea. It includes practical advice on how to negotiate pay rises and be more assertive in the workplace, and regularly raises money for refugees and FGM survivors. Rather than beating ourselves up over our imperfect feminism, the show offers a more inclusive, forgiving approach. Each episode has a theme, such as sickness, work, solitude or aging. Stance Independent Following in the footsteps of the more established Melanin Millennials, to the world of podcasts covers sexuality, race and current affairs in a fresh, approachable way. Rookie MTV Rookie, the online magazine aimed at teenage girls, came into existence about a decade too late for me, but had it been around when I was at school it could have saved a lot of loneliness, shame and general confusion. Like a benevolent older sister, the site — — gives advice on a range of important topics such as friendship, relationships, self-worth, body dysmorphia, contraception and so on. The infuriatingly talented and well-adjusted Tavi Gevinson, now 21, presents; the guest list is a starry, yet brainy, affair, from Lorde to St. Vincent, Roxane Gay to George Saunders. The digital strategist and journalist, respectively in New York and Los Angeles, used to have weekly phone calls to discuss politics, pop culture and feminism; eventually they started recording them and. Opinionated, likeable and well-informed, the two women are equally at ease talking about the latest fashions or discussing the Nazi threat in the United States and giving sensitive, non-condescending advice to young listeners writing in with questions about sex and relationships. He told him the girls in his class were much better than he was and that was a bigoted view. It was really joyful and good-natured. Has the podcast affected the way you approach male-dominated situations? The world needs that right now. What are the challenges women still need to overcome? More than half the women murdered in America are killed by their male partners; worldwide stats are similar. This stuff is life-and-death important. What effect do you think the Weinstein scandal will have on women? The MeToo Campaign has been amazing. A chorus of voices makes it feel safer to many of us. A realisation that women are a large army raring to go. Plus, being ex-pros, they boast a contact book that would be the envy of most podcasters: Warren Gatland and Will Carling are among those the show has interviewed. Understandably the focus is largely on US sports stories — the significance of baseball cards, a heated college football rivalry between the universities of Texas and Oklahoma — but they are told in a way that is never impenetrable to outsiders, and a couple of tales here have a truly global reach: most notably the time a certain Donald Trump tried to conquer the NFL with his own rival United States Football League, a move that is seen by some as a dry run for his assault on the presidency 30 years later. The Offside Rule We Get It! ESPN The testosterone-drenched world of sport podcasting has, much like the testosterone-drenched world of sport itself, largely excluded female voices to date, which makes this podcast from broadcasters Lynsey Hooper, Kait Borsay and Hayley McQueen all the more of an appealing outlier. Hello to Jason Isaacs. Short Cuts Short comprised of stories on a theme — and inevitably dubbed a kind of This British Life — presented by comedian Josie Long. Blue planet II: The Podcast New and launching after every new episode , featuring behind-the-scenes interviews with the PhD-heavy team who make the programme. Money Talks: The Economics of Podcast Commercials By Simon Usborne When a gang of researchers on the BBC series QI started a podcast in 2014, none expected it to succeed. But people started to listen — a lot of people. And, in podcast world, that meant embracing what has become an artform in itself, miles away from the cringey, breakneck patter of modern commercial radio ads. According to , one of the biggest players in podcasting, and the distributor of No Such Thing as a Fish, around 80% of podcast ads are read by the presenters. The approach recalls the early days of live radio, when the only way to deliver scripted ads was for a presenter to read them. In a recent episode of Fish, which now gets more than 1. And those listeners are increasingly valuable, having largely built ads out of their lives. They pay a premium for ad-free music and TV streaming. They run finished spots past the advertiser before stitching them into the podcast this also allows globally popular podcasts to carry different ads in different markets. Brands generally buy 60 seconds at £10-£30 per 1,000 downloads. So a slot in the biggest podcast might cost around £30,000. Brands can track sales by including a podcast-specific promotion in the ad. The smartest advertisers also understand that, even if presenters make fun of their product, that can be good advertising, too. They all put their hands up, but when we ask how many have bought a podcast for a client, not one does. Murray and his co-presenters are already starting to notice interest from bigger players. Now the bosses are happy, the team is free to wonder at their success without guilt.
