Freespoke <3s New Media

Announcing Our Latest Feature: Podcast Results

Freespoke’s motto is “showing you what Google won’t.” In our ongoing effort to fulfill that promise, we have identified the rise of “new media” as an important source of news, commentary, analysis, and expert information which is currently underserved in the general search market, and we’re going to serve the gap.

New Media

On Oct 14, 2024, Gallup released an update to its long-running survey poll of trust in news media. The key trend is a rapid and accelerating decrease in trust for “newspapers, TV, and radio”. This chart is so essential that I’ve reproduced it here:

When users lose trust in institutional news media, where are they going?

Our answer: they’re going to new media.

What is “new media”? One might be tempted to start listing media formats: Podcasts, Twitter, Substack, YouTube, Twitch, etc. While it is true that new media is associated with newer media formats, we don’t believe that this is the essential difference. The essential dichotomy between old media and new media is “institutions vs persons.” With new media, there is single person, with a face, a name, and a professional reputation, who has primary billing. The traditional “byline” in a newspaper is promoted to top billing, and there is no institutional letterhead above it and no unnamed editor lurking in the shadows.

Issues With Institutions

1. Accountability.
   
   When a journalist writes a bogus story in a newspaper, the feedback loop that punishes the credibility of the institution that backed that journalist is winding, and diffuse. The corrective signal is weak. By and large, these institutions can just keep chugging along without changing how they do business, and that is what they do.
   
   With new media, the loop is tighter. New media is defined by radical disintermediation between creators and their customers. We know the names, faces, and oevre of the influencers we trust. The relationship is bidirectional: if an influencer breaks trust with his followers, his influence and livelihood are directly impacted.
   

2. Expertise.
   
   Institutional media is primarily produced by professional journalists who, by and large, do not have subject matter expertise in the stories they’re reporting (with certain beat reporters excepted). In contrast, for any given topic, in the new media infosphere, there are deep subject-matter experts producing fresh content on that topic (if only they can be found - more below!).

   Consider the difference in the quality of the reporting on the tragic Blackhawk - CRJ midair collision which occurred on Jan 29, 2025 at Washington Dulles. On the one hand, you have 15 news organizations reporting the same low-information AP wire reports. On the other, you have “Captain Steeeve” - a one man shop on Youtube - who posted a detailed analysis of the issue, with documentary evidence, less than 24 hours after the disaster. If you had listened to Steeeve on Jan 30th, you’d be better informed about what happened on Jan 29 than if you read a newspaper today, Feb 4. In this case, at least, the consumer of new media was better informed, and sooner, than the consumer of any newspaper.
   

3. Competition.
   
   There are a handful of national newspapers, a handful of national wire services, and a handful of national TV networks. In contrast, there are thousands of new media content creators. The barrier to entry for new media content creation is far lower, and the competition between creators is much fiercer. The consumer choice is greater.

New Media Needs a Search Engine

If new media can better inform the public than newsmedia, why hasn’t it completely taken over?

One answer was foreshadowed in the last bullet point above: there are just so many entries in this market that it becomes difficult to sift through it all.

That’s what search engines are for.

Hey, we’ve got one of those! At Freespoke, we’re committing to keeping our users informed with the best available information. We believe that this commitment requires us to surface new media, and we are focused on doing that. Freespoke intends to become the best entrypoint into the new media infosphere.

Our first foray into this topic a new, from-scratch audio search engine. For now, we are only pointing it at podcasts. An upcoming post will be a technical deep dive into exactly how our audio search engine works. Right now, we just want you try it out for yourself!

If you do take the time, we’d love your feedback. Every survey entry will be carefully digested by the entire team as we continue to actively develop this feature.

Audio Search Is In Beta

Our new audio search feature is already available at https://beta.freespoke.com. There are just a few caveats to call out before you jump over there.

1. We have only indexed 4,800 hours of podcasts right now, which is 5251 individual podcast episodes.

2. We have only indexed podcast episodes from 14 different popular podcasts.

3. Our corpus is frozen as of January 27, 2025. We haven’t indexed, and are not currently indexing, anything released more recently than that.

So, we don’t have podcast results for every query, and if you are looking for hits in your favorite podcast, you probably won’t find it yet. Yet on many queries, the podcast results are already some of our best. Below, we’ve included some sample searches. We would love for you to try this feature and give us your feedback about it.

If you do take the time to play with it, we’d love your feedback. If you fill out this survey, it will be carefully read and digested by everyone at Freespoke who’s working on this feature. We are still actively working on it, and your suggestions could very well make it into the product!

Sample Queries

Where was Napoleon born?

Fluoride

How to Organize Time and Efficiency

Will AI Take Our Jobs?