Emily Maitlis tries too hard not to be teachery on her new podcast

The competition between news-led podcasts is nearing boiling point. If you tuned in to The Media Show on Radio 4 last Wednesday, you’d have felt the tension between the podcasters leading the guard: Alastair Campbell of The Rest Is Politics, Jon Sopel of The News Agents, plus his executive producer, Dino Sofos, Nosheen Iqbal of the Guardian’s Today in Focus, and Adam Boulton, who has just launched a politics show with Kate McCann on Times Radio.

Kiran Moodley and Minnie Stephenson might reasonably have joined this line-up as they launch a new series of their news pod with Channel 4 this week. The Fourcast, like The News Agents (where Sopel is joined by Emily Maitlis and Lewis Goodall), will cover a mixture of geopolitics and home stories, but on a weekly basis; The News Agents is daily. Both will be accompanied by video and, in the case of The News Agents, TikTok content. And let’s not forget there’s Newscast on BBC Sounds.

The feeling among these zealous newscasters is not that radio is dead, exactly, nor that TV has had its day. It’s more that the culture of headlines and soundbites now associated with them, compounded by social media, has altered the way we digest hard news. The thing about a podcast is you can’t half-listen to it. The intimacy of the format makes it the perfect conduit for in-depth analysis you will actually take in.

The News Agents stretches this idea by layering interviews and commentary in a sophisticated, almost book-like manner, which rewards close listening. The first episode, on the FBI raid on Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago, moved between conversations with Anthony Scaramucci, the president’s former director of communications, Mick Mulvaney, his former chief of staff, a law professor, and reflections from the podcast hosts themselves.