Three of Tortoise Media’s most popular investigative podcasts will be available on BBC Sounds under a new deal.
Hoaxed, Sweet Bobby and Pig Iron, which were all originally published in 2021 or 2022, will appear in a Tortoise Investigates feed on the BBC‘s podcast platform from 25 August, 25 September and 25 October respectively.
BBC Sounds does deals to host independently-produced podcasts in the UK “non-exclusively and ad-free with payment based on volume of listening” with the aim of broadening its content offering.
The daily news podcast of The Times already appears on the platform. Episodes of The Story, previously known as Stories of our Times before a rebrand in March this year, currently go back to June 2022 on BBC Sounds.
Lauren Bradley, who oversees acquisitions for BBC Sounds, said of the Tortoise deal: “All three podcasts will benefit from prominent curation on our service and find new audiences. The exciting new offering is part of our ongoing commitment to provide a broad range of must-listen podcasts and help grow the sector in the UK.”
Alice Sandelson, commercial strategy director of audio at Tortoise Media, said it meant “more listeners can enjoy our award-winning chart-topping series, which have been captivating audiences globally since their first release.
“At Tortoise, our podcast series investigate untold human stories that offer a deeper, longer-lasting understanding of what’s happening in the world – Hoaxed, Sweet Bobby and Pig Iron are three of the very best examples of this.”
Hoaxed, presented by investigations editor Alexi Mostrous, looked into the “Hampstead hoax”, a conspiracy theory about a paedophile ring in North London, over the course of six episodes from September 2022 and a bonus follow-up episode.
Early Tortoise viral hit Sweet Bobby, also presented by Mostrous, was released in late 2021 and pulled in 11 million downloads in the following 15 months. The six-part show (plus bonus episode) about “one of the world’s most sophisticated catfishers” won Podcast of the Year at Press Gazette’s first Future of Media Awards in 2022.
And Pig Iron, presented by Basia Cummings, an editor and partner at Tortoise, followed the story of the death of 26-year-old journalist Christopher Allen in South Sudan over seven episodes first released in October 2022.
Sandelson revealed in March Tortoise was seeing “about 1.5 to three million” downloads a month, depending on whether it had any limited series like these airing. And about half of listeners to its Tortoise Investigates podcast feed, which collects together its limited series, were in the US.
Other recent arrivals on BBC Sounds, which now has a dedicated team for acquisitions, have included The Bachelor of Buckingham Palace from Vespucci, No Such Thing As A Fish from QI Ltd and Real Dictators from Noiser.
Tortoise co-founder and editor James Harding is a former BBC director of news and current affairs.
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