The best links in podcasting.
Every Thursday.
One dispatch. Five hundred hours of listening distilled to what actually matters.
Four hours. Every week. That's how long I was spending hunting for the same links my peers were hunting for — and we were all finding them three days too late.
I was a solo podcaster running a weekly show on media criticism. Every Monday I'd open seventeen tabs — newsletter digests, Twitter threads, Reddit threads, LinkedIn posts — triangulating what had actually moved in podcasting that week. Tools that launched. Format experiments worth stealing. Acquisitions nobody had contextualized yet.
One Tuesday in October 2022, instead of closing the tabs, I typed them into an email. Eleven friends. A subject line: "links I found this week, in case useful." No design. No CMS. Just eleven links with one sentence each, sent from Gmail.
"Don't ever stop sending this. I found three tools in last week's issue that I've already billed to a client."
Three replies came back within the hour. One of them said: "don't ever stop sending this." I screenshot it and saved it to my desktop. It's still there.
From: Sam R.
Subject: Re: links I found this week, in case useful
"Don't ever stop sending this."
Eleven became forty by December. Forty became four hundred when a producer at Spotify forwarded it to her team. By the time I set up a proper subscription page in March 2023, there were 1,200 people waiting for it. Today, Airwave goes out every Thursday morning to over 14,000 audio creators across 68 countries.
"I pitched a format to my network that came directly from a link Airwave surfaced. It got greenlit. That's the ROI."
Nothing has changed about how it's made. I still read everything. I still write every annotation by hand. The only difference is the number of people who read it on Thursday morning with their first coffee, and the number of tools built, pitches greenlit, and episodes shipped because of it.
"Reading Airwave is the closest thing I have to a water cooler conversation with other serious podcasters."
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One email. Every Thursday morning. The links, tools, and moves that matter in podcasting this week — annotated by hand, never by algorithm.
Issue No. 153 · Feb 20, 2026
Last week's five links.
Tested it on a 40-minute interview. The cloned fill-in is indistinguishable at normal listening speed. The real story is the pricing tier shift buried in the changelog.
Read the full pieceThe official post uses the word "streamlining" six times. What it means: if you had fewer than 500 paid subscribers, your monetization layer is gone as of March 1.
Read the full pieceThe technique is simpler than the headline suggests — a single Google Doc written before every recording, not after. The discipline is the point.
Read the full pieceThe crossover point happened sometime in Q3 2025. If you're not treating your clips as the primary discovery surface, you're marketing backwards.
Read the full pieceThe median Upwork editor earned 34% more per project hour. The catch is in the replies: it took an average of 14 months to reach that rate. Worth reading all 200 comments.
Read the full pieceThis is what lands in your inbox every Thursday morning.
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