1,000 episodes of #TalkingTech podcast
MANHATTAN BEACH, Calif. — We just passed the 1,000th episode of the USA TODAY #TalkingTech podcast. Time flies when you’re having a blast.
Thanks again listeners, for tuning it into USA TODAY’s No. 1 most-listened podcast, with more than 43 million downloads — 25 million in 2016 — in three years.
Our average daily audience is 68,500 listeners, or just under 500,000 weekly and 2 million-plus a month.
Our most popular podcast was the interview with young kids who created the Workflow app for Apple, which drew some 120,000 listens. Our top five countries are the US, Canada, UK, Australia and Japan. In the U.S., we're most popular in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston and Seattle, in that order.
We started down the podcast road in 2013, initially as a way to run extended interviews. We then switched gears in June 2015, when we met Vanessa and Todd from the podcast app Stitcher.
Vanessa mentioned that short worked best for the app's front page, where people went every morning and afternoon for quick hits.
We started shifting the show to a daily news/commentary/review piece (running two to five minutes), while still doing the extended version of #TalkingTech, as a tech roundtable every Thursday.
We still do the Roundtable. Our most listened to podcast of the month, with 113,000 downloads, was a conversation with USA TODAY staff photographer Robert Hanashiro about our favorite photo app, Google's Snapseed. It was an edited portion of of a larger conversation about drone photography as an art form.
Since June 2015, we've podcast daily. We've recorded on-the-spot reports from tech events staged by Apple, Facebook and Google, the Consumer Electronics Show, South by Southwest and NAMM. We’ve podcasted from vacation, with tech updates from Hawaii; Puerto Vallarta, Mexico; Portland, Ore.; and Savannah, Ga. We’ve recorded at our desk, in the #TalkingTech garage, at convention centers, restaurants and the family living room.
We've had hundreds of guests to the USA TODAY Los Angeles bureau, where we do the roundtable, a mix of young tech start-ups, execs and occasionally, comedians or actors. (Thank you, Nemr, Angela Conwell and Lori Jonas.)
Most days begin by scanning the tech news every morning looking for something to talk about and record commentary, reviews and tech updates. Interviews are usually done in person, although recently we began testing a new website, Zencastr.com, which offers the ability to record conversations in high-quality audio. We chatted with Chad Richard from Yelp in San Francisco and consultant/author Peter Csathy in San Diego recently this way. We look forward to bring in more voices this way.
Subject-wise, we lean towards consumer tech: how to live with this stuff, get the most out of a new gadget, talk about whether it's actually worth it to spend your hard-earned money on the latest from Apple, Google and the rest, and occasionally try to go deep and remind folks about tech basics like why they should change their passwords now.
My first love, as listeners know, is photography. This year I'm drooling over 360-degree virtual-reality cameras, drones and the latest smartphone cameras.
Listeners, what areas would you like to see covered? We’re in this together folks, and I take your input very seriously. Thanks again for listening.
Now it's onto end-of-the-year shows and kicking off January with a bang, at the Consumer Electronics Show.
Please leave reviews and subscribe on iTunes and Stitcher--tweet your comments to @jeffersongraham on Twitter and I’ll read the best ones on the next episode.