Dennis Publishing’s current affairs brand The Week won the Best News and Current Affairs Podcast title at the Publisher Podcast Awards last night in central London.
Celebrating the win, the podcast’s host Olly Mann said: “Our show provides a refuge for intelligent, curious listeners who are bored of Brexit and Trump - or at least have their fill of that elsewhere.”
The Week Unwrapped has been namechecked by media outlets including The Mail on Sunday and Wired as one of the world’s best podcasts.
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Arion McNicoll, editor of TheWeek.co.uk and a regular The Week Unwrapped contributor said:
“Our podcast offers something different for news junkies - a chance to take a step back from the 24-hour news cycle and discover some of the stories that have gone under-reported. Winning the Best News and Current Affairs gong at the Publisher Podcast Award is a great honour for The Week Unwrapped, a podcast that like our brief, sometimes flies under the radar.”
In each episode, members of The Week’s editorial teams delve into the most important stories from the previous seven days – but not the ones that have dominated the headlines.
Following an eventful start to 2020, there has been no shortage of material to talk about. Recent episodes have covered topics including:
· Does the future of fashion lie in clothes we cannot wear?· Why is Dolly Parton having a millennial moment?· Could moveable houses be the answer to coastline erosion?· What is causing men’s testosterone levels to plummet - and should we be worried?
“There’s very little of the partisan posturing you get on other news discussions,” McNicoll says. “What you get instead is an informed, free-ranging conversation between The Week’s writers and editors – and, of course, Olly Mann keeping us all in order.”
Mann welcomes the chance to tackle stories from a less po-faced stance than more conventional news shows.
“I love presenting this podcast because I can dispense with the reverence that’s required when you interview journalists on a radio programme,” he said. “Some of the stories the contributors come up with have genuine significance for our lives, but some are frankly ridiculous, and there’s a reason they’re not much discussed - I get to be the judge and jury and have some fun with that.”
The Week Unwrapped “feels like our listeners’ second-favourite news podcast, which is, counter-intuitively, the best position to occupy”, Mann adds.
“Some listen to The Spectator’s podcasts, some prefer The Guardian’s, but both sets of people will come to us for their secondary set of stories each week. We give a decent briefing, in the grand tradition of The Week brands, but we also have a good chat. That’s the bit you can’t contrive, and I think that’s what keeps people coming back.”
You can subscribe to The Week Unwrapped, and tune in for a new episode every Friday morning, using the following links:
· Apple Podcasts· Google Podcasts· Spotify
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