It was perhaps inevitable that a medium defined by its invisibility would eventually demand to be seen.
The Wall Street Journal, which has operated podcast operations in the traditional manner — which is to say, as audio productions consumed by people doing other things — is reorganizing those operations to accommodate the increasingly unavoidable reality that podcasts now frequently involve cameras, ring lights, and the expectation that hosts will be presentable from the waist up.
The publisher recently hired Samantha Henig to a newly created position overseeing both video and audio teams, a role that Taneth Evans, head of digital at The Journal, described during a session at the Digiday Publishing Summit in Key Biscayne, Fla., last week as an acknowledgment that "we need a conductor atop all of these formats because they need to be able to intermingle."
More tellingly, The Journal had initially planned to hire a head of audio. It ended up retitling the position to senior director of shows.
"To set up a team that was only audio felt like we were making life a little bit hard for ourselves," Ms. Evans said. (One imagines a certain wistfulness in conceding that the ear alone is no longer sufficient.)
The position is held by Leital Molad, whose purview is primarily audio but not exclusively so — a formulation that would have seemed redundant five years ago and now passes without comment.
The Journal is also adopting what Ms. Evans called a "show-centric strategy," with satellite teams organized around individual programs rather than production disciplines. Those teams might include audio producers, video producers, social media specialists, newsletter writers, and live events staff, depending on the show's ambitions and audience.
This approach echoes the embed model The Journal already uses for content strategists, who report to Ms. Evans but are assigned to specific coverage areas. "They are the advocate for the reader," she said. "I have no skin in the game."
Whether listeners — or, increasingly, viewers — will notice the organizational chart behind their morning briefings remains to be seen. But for a newspaper that has spent more than a century printing words on paper, the adjustment to formats that move, speak, and occasionally require makeup is, one supposes, just the latest in a long series of accommodations to the preferences of the audience.
Original story published in Digiday: "Future of TV Briefing: Inside The Wall Street Journal’s new shows strategy - Digiday", by Tim Peterson