KQED · 2019–2024
The Latest
Local news that’s current when you press play, not when it was recorded.
A radio newsroom runs on a clock. News happens, stories develop, and it goes out to listeners at the top of the hour. As habits changed, listeners found themselves not only listening at different times, but wanting news when they had time for news. During a commute, doing the dishes, right before bed.
News podcasts change the clock from hourly to daily. An episode is finished the moment it’s published, and while it isn’t live, it is on your time. So our idea was to combine the two: as close to live as possible, on your own schedule.
How we got there
We started with what we knew, the flow of news through a digital newsroom, and tried to imagine it as a new kind of show. Bianca Taylor and I worked on this together across the whole five years.
The first work wasn’t a show at all. It was getting audio out of a broadcast newsroom and into the places people already were: NPR One, Google News, Alexa, Spotify. The plumbing isn’t sexy, but it’s what made everything after it easy for a small team to explore.
With delivery methods in place we explored new formats and reimagined old ones. Some of our content already worked in that shape. The rest we had to re-edit, or make new examples to show what it could be.
Microformats came out of that. Short segments sitting between a headline update and a full episode, for people who wanted something with substance but not thirty minutes of it.
In 2019 we started with smart speakers and built KQED NOW, which combined the newscast with stories the newsroom was still developing. That was the first time a listener could get local news that wasn’t finished, and it’s the direct ancestor of what came later.
Then NPR asked us to contribute to Consider This, where they were geo-targeting national episodes to drop local stories in. Our workflow was already flexible enough to feed it, which was the first proof this worked at a scale beyond us.
None of these were failures we learned from. Each one answered its question and raised the next one.
So what is The Latest
It looks like a podcast. You subscribe to it the same way. Behind that it isn’t a show at all: it reassembles through the day as stories break and develop, so what you get is current when you press play rather than when someone finished recording.
The newsroom publishes as news happens. You stay on top of it on your own schedule. Neither side has to bend to the other, which is the thing neither the hourly newscast nor the daily podcast could offer.
Getting there meant the podcast department, not just the newsroom. Katie Sprenger, who runs podcast operations, knew things about how podcast audiences behave that we would have gotten wrong on our own. The dynamic assembly itself we built with Spooler.
It is still running. The episodes below are this week’s.
What happened
The Latest found an audience fast and kept it. In August 2026, more than a year and a half after I left KQED, it sits at 163 in Apple Podcasts’ US News/Daily News category, and it charts in Indonesia and Japan as well. A local show still holding a national category position is the result I’d point to.
What did we learn
Build so the whole newsroom can contribute, including from new directions.
A radio clock has a fixed number of slots, and content gets shaped to fit them. Microformats don’t have that constraint, so a piece can be the length the story actually needs. That opened room for work broadcast wouldn’t have commissioned. Audible Cosmos, a series of sounds from space, started as a microformat, went out on demand first, and then went to broadcast. It won a Regional Murrow for excellence in sound. The digital format wasn’t downstream of radio. It was where the piece could exist.
No format is future proof, so keep the content loose.
Listening habits changed across those five years and will keep changing. What survives isn’t the right format, it’s content held in a fluid enough state that the next one isn’t a rebuild.
Prototypes get you further than arguments.
Each step made the next one easier to say yes to, because the one before it existed and worked.