Less than two years after its debut, NPR is ending its local editions of the Consider This podcast.
The podcast combined national stories from the All Things Considered program with local news stories from 12 stations in 10 markets.
However, an NPR spokesperson said the localization of the podcast “didn’t prove sustainable”.
After launching as the Coronavirus Daily podcast, the outlet developed the podcast with local stories from Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, New York, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Portland, San Francisco, and Washington D.C., in September 2020.
The network’s Vice President of Audio Platform Strategy, Joel Sucherman, said localizing the daily podcast was growing “more and more difficult”.
“The production really hinged on a couple of people doing a lot of manual work on the NPR side using ad technology … to do something that it was not really intended to do to begin with,” he told Current.org.
Consider This was ranked as the 29th most-listened to podcast by weekly average downloads in the latest rankings from Triton Digital. Eight of the top 30 podcasts in the category are produced by NPR.
