The Latest Dynamic Podcast · Spooler · KQED Newsroom

A news podcast that updates itself throughout the day. Listeners subscribe once and get current local news in the same episode — refreshed as stories emerge and develop.

The Latest looks like a regular podcast, but behind the scenes it’s a dynamic audio system that evolves in real time. Built in partnership with Spooler, it’s one of the first news podcasts to use dynamic content delivery to keep episodes current rather than static. It draws from one of California’s largest newsrooms, weaving together breaking stories, segments from The California Report and Political Breakdown, and KQED’s afternoon newscast News Fix into a single listening experience that stays relevant from morning through evening.

The project was the result of five years of infrastructure work. Starting in 2019, producer Bianca Taylor and I built flexible systems for transforming broadcast content into new digital formats — microformats for short-burst listening, voice skills for smart speakers, geo-targeted integrations with NPR’s Consider This podcast. Each experiment taught us something about how people actually want to consume local news. The Latest was the culmination: a format that blends the immediacy of live radio with the convenience of on-demand, adapting to listeners’ lives rather than the other way around.

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