Your News Now: how iHeart built Australia's most advanced news podcast

Last week the iHeart Podcast Australia network quietly launched what I think is the country’s most technologically advanced shows – Your News Now.?

But here’s the thing. If you press play on Your News Now, you won’t know how complex or sophisticated it is. You probably wouldn’t guess there had been hundreds of meetings, hours of testing, problems, fixes, and pivots.

That’s the beauty of clever technology - it doesn’t draw attention to itself.

But as someone who’s been working on, and managing, this project for two years, its seamlessness is kind of a pain. I want people to know how innovative we’ve been.

And if Linkedin isn’t the platform for talking about that, I don’t know what is. So here we are.

Before I give you a look under the hood, I need to make clear that when I'm talking about the technology there’s an implied ‘we’ which refers to three people in particular. My audio engineer Ryan Pemberton – vey possibly the smartest person I’ve ever worked with – who stepped wildly out of his job description for this podcast. I’m also referring my former producer Alex Tighe who was involved heavily in the beginning of this project collaborating on the format, testing, and troubleshooting. And of course my boss Corey Layton who had a wild idea for dynamic news content and sent us all on this delightful journey. Corey’s been integral in smoothing the way for us and pushing the product and the team to be better.

Now – let’s start with what you hear when you play Your News Now.

Firstly, everything is nicely mixed. There’s music that sits under the entire bulletin.

A little sting plays.

You hear the current temperature in the capital city of your state read by a voice over artist. There’s a two-person news bulletin, nice and conversational. A short ad plays. You then get sport and then a full weather update for your state read by the VO guy again – it’s relevant to the hour.

How many people would you guess are involved in one episode? Most people would say somewhere around four: two news readers, VO guy and an audio engineer to mix the sound and music.

In reality, it was just two. The news readers. Everything else has been automated.

Here’s how it works, starting with the most complex component: the weather.

The weather isn’t part of the audio file. It’s actually delivered by a dynamic ad, through the third-party platform called AMA , or A Million Ads.

To wildly oversimplify it, AMA is a platform which patches together pre-recorded audio, based on real-time conditions, and then delivers that audio to the listener via dynamic ad. ?

In the case of Your News Now, it takes the listener’s location and looks at the current weather conditions (which it finds on a Google sheet that’s updated via an API) and then patches together a formulaic bulletin.

Sounds easy enough, right?

Yes and no.

In a surreal career moment Alex, Ryan and I had to become weather people and find definitive, binary answers to complex conditions. What’s the difference between fog and mist? Will people care? What’s the lowest temperature we should write for? The highest? At what percentage chance of rain do we mention it?

Every new condition we added meant there were millions of new possible variations on the A Million Ads script. We had to be concise. We had to be correct. ??

The possibilities were infinite, the debate was rigorous and while I’m sure some people would disagree with our choices, I’m fairly certain I could defend them all. We left no stone unturned.

So that's complex enough as is. But all of the above is just planning for perfect listening conditions. If we stopped there, though, the podcast would occasionally fall short. That wouldn’t be good enough.

The content needed all kinds of redundancies built in which created their own little content and technical challenges. Here are a few of the key ones we stumbled on.

What happens if the dynamic ad insertion doesn’t fire for some reason? The news bulletin and music are self-contained and modular enough that the user experience isn’t disrupted.

What if we can’t tell the user’s location? We have a separate script for Australia-wide bulletins which cover all the most populous capital cities.

What if it’s snowing in Darwin? We have every weather eventuality covered including a few degrees above and below all state records.

There’s a whole other side story to this podcast which involves audio caching, RSS platforms and complex coding solutions. It’s long and complicated but suffice to say Ryan Pemberton - who it must be stressed again I hired to edit and mix audio - is the hero.

The abridged version? It worked.

So at this point in the story, we had what I described as a very nice wrapper. What it was missing was the content (or the chocolate bar if I am to continue the metaphor). ?

This was indeed quite a hold up.

We knew ARN had world-class journalists, but like any radio station, they were very busy putting bulletins to air. And we wanted two of them for every update – no small ask.

In order to get this to work, we needed to make it as easy and quick as possible for them to file the bulletin. Getting them to mix the audio and add in the music themselves wasn’t possible, I also wasn’t thrilled with the thought of having to put in a rotating schedule of audio engineers (especially when the first bulletin airs before 6am).

Now, if I was going to rate the best decisions I’ve made since starting the iHeart Podcast department, the first is who I’ve hired. The second is taking the advice of Alex and Ryan to implement Reaper (not ProTools as I was convinced) as our department’s DAW.

This meant that Ryan was able to create an automated template for the news readers that added music, mixed and mastered the audio, and then exported the file with the correct naming conventions.

From a technical standpoint, all the journalists have to do is record their part on Riverside and then drop the files into the template. Genius.

It’s the lowest-touch solution we could possibly make. It still wouldn’t have been enough unless Fiona Ellis-Jones joined ARN. She immediately saw the value of what we were trying to achieve and advocated for the project heavily. ?

It came just at the right time. When Fiona was on board, we had new momentum for Your News Now.

The team moved into another production phase. More testing, training journalists (which again fell to Ryan), decisions on editorial content, testing, more testing, an internal trial week, a soft launch and finally – FINALLY – where we are today. The actual launch.

I’ve learnt a lot from this project. About APIs, dynamic ads, organising meetings in different time zones….

But I think the most valuable lesson has been about hiring clever people and trusting their ability. Being across the detail, but allowing for autonomy.

It was a big project. I’m proud that it’s out in the world as it is now. But has Your News Now reached its final form? Perhaps not. Watch this space.

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