The Yale Daily News Podcast
The Yale Daily News is the nation’s oldest college daily newspaper, founded on January 28, 1878. The News is editorially and financially independent, serving Yale University students, alumni, staff and the wider community of New Haven and Yale. It publishes five days a week during the academic year and produces several special issues each year celebrating Yale’s Indigenous, Black, Latinx, Asian American and Pacific Islander communities in partnership with campus cultural centers and student groups.
It covers national and local news, politics and sports as well as New York City exclusives. Its award-winning writers and columnists also offer commentary on current events. Known for its intense city news coverage, celebrity gossip and cartoons it was the first tabloid newspaper in the United States. Its newspaper circulation peaked in 1947 at 2.4 million copies daily.
In this episode, the News examines the future of affirmative action at selective universities in light of a recent SCOTUS decision overturning racial preferences for legacy and donor-related applicants. It is the latest installment in the News’ “Affirmative Action” series, which explores how the country’s most elite colleges and universities have adapted to the Supreme Court ruling, what impact it may have on students of color and other underrepresented groups, and what steps institutions can take to protect these students.
The daily news podcast sector is growing fast. There were only 102 active daily shows in our database at the start of last year. Since then the number has almost doubled – mostly due to more publishers launching shows but partly because of an upsurge in demand following COVID-19.
While daily news makes up a smaller share of the overall podcast market in the UK and Denmark than in other countries such as Australia, it is gaining ground. In both countries publishers are able to focus on developing high quality, long-form shows that can compete with established players.
In the UK, former BBC journalist Manveen Rana is behind the new daily Times podcast. She says the podcast allows them to tell a complete story each day. ‘There isn’t a daily news podcast in the world that offers the level of storytelling you get with The Times,’ she says. ‘We have journalists who are experts in their fields and we have an incredible editorial network to draw upon.’ The show is produced by Wireless, which operates Talk Radio in the UK and is part of the News UK group.
In the US, four of the top five most popular daily news podcasts are news shows – NPR News Now, NPR Up First, FT News Briefing and USA Today – according to subscriber data from Podtrac. Publishers don’t always reveal download figures but some, like NPR, have said their flagship shows reach hundreds of thousands of listeners a month. These numbers are lower in Denmark and Sweden where daily news makes up a much smaller proportion of the podcast market. That may be because other genres have a greater audience in those markets but it could also be that consumers in those nations are less interested in daily news as a whole.