One podcast per section, each configurable, on Apple Podcasts and Spotify

A reader who only follows sport has little use for a show where sport turns up between business and culture. A single general show, all articles mixed together, is the lowest common denominator: it exists, it works, but it asks everyone to listen to everything to find the little they care about. WeDispatch's "My shows" screen opens the other route: one general show, and if you want, one show per section. Sport with sport, business with business.

Where the sections come from

You do not invent sections in a form: they come from your site. It is the first category of an article (the first WordPress category, for example) that files that article into a show. As long as your articles have no section, only one show is offered to you, and that is right: opening shows on made-up names would serve nobody. As soon as your articles carry categories, each one can become its own show, fed automatically by the new articles in that section. This mechanism extends the principle described in our piece on how to turn your site into an automatic podcast: the site publishes, the feed fills up, you copy nothing across.

What you set, show by show

Each show has its own settings, and everything you put there is public: listening apps display it. A field left empty keeps the suggested default, so you only set what you actually want to distinguish.

The show name, its description (two or three sentences: what people hear, and for whom), the author shown beneath it, the main Apple Podcasts category (which other apps reuse), and an "explicit content" box to tick if your articles cover adult topics. The cover art is set here too: square, at least 1,400 by 1,400 pixels, in JPEG, PNG or WebP; we crop it to a square if needed. Without an uploaded image, we draw one with the show name, so no show goes out without artwork. Finally, the podcast email address: Apple Podcasts and Spotify use it to check the podcast is yours (Spotify sends a code to it), and since it appears in the feed, which is public, a contact address is better than a personal one. Setting all this up uses the same plugin as everything else, the one described on the WordPress page.

The status on Apple, tracked without asking you

Publishing a show on Apple goes through Apple Podcasts Connect: you add the feed address, Apple reviews it (usually one to a few days), then puts it live. Tracking that review by hand is tedious, so WeDispatch does it for you. When Apple's crawler reads a feed, we note it, at most once an hour, and the screen moves from "Not on Apple Podcasts yet" to "Apple has read the feed: the show is a draft or under review", then to "Live". You know where you stand without reopening Apple's console every morning.

What Apple rewrites at each feed read

One point is worth grasping so you do not waste time: a show fed by an RSS feed does not keep its settings "inside Apple". Apple re-reads the feed regularly and takes the name, description, author, category and cover from it at each read. The feed is therefore the single source of truth. In practice, if you change the title or the cover directly in Apple's console, your change is overwritten at the next feed read; you have to make it here, in "My shows". Conversely, what you save here, the apps pick up at their next read, usually within a few hours. Spotify and Deezer work the same way, from the same feed address.

Grouping your shows under your brand

Once you have several shows, Apple lets you file them in a channel: your brand at the top, and your section shows beneath it. The listener hears everything, or a single section, depending on what they follow. It is free, no subscription, and you need at least two shows for a channel to make sense. It is the finished form of the starting idea: not forcing a reader to take your whole site to hear the part that concerns them. Once the shows are in place, the listen link you drop into a newsletter and the podcast feed tell the same story to two different audiences, with no double work on your side.

Read next

• Reading a PDF aloud: what grates on the ear, and what we do with it
• Flagging uncertain names before the reading, not after
• Listen to your articles and PDFs on your phone, like a radio