From Jabiru in Kakadu National Park in Australia, the latest from podnews.net with Podscribe. The podcast industry in France has called for official government recognition for podcasting. If we want podcasting to remain a diverse, creator-driven medium, it must be recognised as a cultural industry in its own right, the organisation said in a statement following its AGM. It follows AudioUK asking for the same in the UK and podcasters asking for similar recognition in Canada.
Mission Media AI has been launched, a new content distribution and media sales company founded by David Krulwich. Steve Smith, formerly of SiriusXM, will work on publisher relationships. George Mani will be head of business development. CoHost has added new features to its tracking links tool, making it faster to deploy tracking links for new shows promoted on multiple platforms.
Qling is a new iOS podcast app that, quote, aims to find novel, inspiring and also new content tailored for each user. We link to that today. The Sonic Dash, a competition from Silver Sound, is a competition with a difference. Podcast creators are given just 48 hours to make a two-minute sound story from scratch. The winner from last week was UK-based Skadis Symphony, run by Oliver Morris and Jude Hodgson-Hannah.
Inspired by 1970s Italian horror cinema, Oliver and Jude turned Britain's most beloved beverage, tea, into a twisted and darkly funny faux trailer. You can hear it in the Sonic Dash podcast feed.
And thank you, we think, to Ryan Pownall, a Canadian social media influencer, who, after launching a podcast on Buzzsprout and getting his adult-themed podcast listed on all the platforms, promptly hired an AI-powered anti-piracy service called Ceartas DMCA, which sent a takedown notice about us to Google because we had automatically listed his grubby podcast. We've appealed the copyright strike with Google since this is literally how open podcasts are supposed to work.
And thank you properly to Stephanie Fuccio for becoming our latest personal supporter. Personal supporters like Stephanie, who owns podcast optimisation company Coffeelike Media, help us lower our reliance on advertising and pays for pod news for everyone. Never in the same place twice, Steph appears to be in Copenhagen, in Denmark, as we write this. In People News, Neil Carruth has been made General Manager of Silver Tribe Media, the digital media management and production company.
Carruth moves from Freakonomics Radio and NPR. It's a Monday, so time for some tech stuff. And a working prototype has been put live by the Podcast Standards Project for a demo of a podcast hosted with HLS Video and discovered that it already works in Fountain and Truefans. The benefits with HLS streaming are that it might be significantly cheaper for podcast hosting companies and better for users.
It's included in the same RSS feed as the audio feed, so is backwards compatible with existing players. In the Podcasting 2.0 podcast this week, Adam and Dave are joined by Rockie Thomas of Soundstack to talk lit, chat and working wood. And there's a new version of transcription tool, Whisper CPP, available. It adds something called VAD, that's Voice Activity Detection, and that can significantly speed up the process of transcription.
And in podcast news, Jurassic World Rebirth is coming to theatres soon, which means there's no better time to explore the real science behind dinosaurs. I Know Dino, the big dinosaur podcast, is for everyone who's ever wondered what dinosaurs were really like. The latest episode is all about Allosaurus, an iconic Jurassic predator known for living fast and dying young, millions of years before T-Rex.
And hey there, history lovers, history for hot girls, deep dives into the history of people, events, items and ideas traditionally considered feminine. And on today's episode, Natalie and Michelle explore the rise in popularity of the romanticity genre. From stories of swords to, well, stories of other swords, they unpack what is so captivating about this genre as well as its critiques. And this podcast is sponsored by Podscribe. Newly launched is their June 2025 industry rankings.
You can see the top podcasters, publishers and advertisers in the industry's ultimate ranker. Explore the full rankings to spot the leaders and the biggest movers. There's a link in the show notes. And thank you to Podscribe for your support this month. And that's the latest from our newsletter. To read all the stories and subscribe for free, we're at podnews.net.