The voices in our podcasts reflect the faces in our newsroom: you’ll hear accents from Hong Kong, Beijing, Sichuan, Shanghai, Tianjin, London, Singapore, Canberra, Ulster, Mumbai and Vancouver, to name just a few.

Back in 2018, we had been publishing to SoundCloud (“the YouTube of audio”) for months before properly launching podcasts. We experimented with formats, styles, content and different presenters and we continue to use it to this day as a test bed for drafts, new ideas, try-outs and experiments.

These were not the first podcasts the Post had published, however. On April 18, 2005, the Post published its first podcast – the same year the New Oxford American Dictionary declared “podcast” the word of year, and just 13 months after journalist Ben Hammersley, writing in The Guardian, coined the portmanteau joining the words “iPod” and “broadcast”, to describe audio delivered to a device via RSS feed.

The history of technological development is littered with footnotes of those who innovated a bit too early, and the SCMP staff who made these first episodes are a worthy addition. As far as I can tell, the Post was one of the first commercial media organisations to begin podcasting (the BBC had been doing it for a while), and this initial attempt lasted a year.

It wouldn’t be until 2012, six years later, that Apple released its podcast app for iPhone and iPad that the global audience was alerted to the concept of listening to audio stories, news and commentary. In 2013, Apple recorded its first billion podcast subscribers and the global audience continues to grow every day.

In the year 2020, a study by Edison Research announced there are now an estimated 850,000 active podcasts and 30 million episodes. Initially it was thought the pandemic would negatively impact podcasts: the assumption was people mostly listened via their commute, and working from home would mean an end to that. Time has shown this not to be the case, with Spotify and other platforms releasing figures showing increases in listening.

We’ve seen another interesting development: if our experience with SCMP podcasts is any guide, more and more people are listening to podcasts via YouTube. We started posting our coronavirus podcasts to the SCMP YouTube channel in February and garnered hundreds of thousands of listens.

SCMP doesn’t have a busload of producers, engineers and interns to put out a daily podcast. It’s a testament to the enthusiasm and contributions of its reporters and editors that we put out two weekly podcasts (Inside China and the US-China Trade War Update) and one monthly (Eat Drink Asia), with a production team that could fit comfortably on a motorcycle seat.

Our Inside China Tech podcast is currently docked, like the starship Enterprise awaiting its new captain to take to the bridge. Meanwhile, our list of new podcasts in development continues to grow.

In late January, we led the global shift to “podcast production from home” when we hurriedly gathered reporters and editors for an Inside China episode detailing what we knew about the virus being reported in Wuhan.

While we recorded discussion of the developing situation in our studio, outside in the newsroom our colleagues were gathering their laptops and notes and wondering how long this situation might last.

Over the following eight months, we developed a hybrid model for podcast production. I turned my living room into “studio A”, made taxi journeys across the city with my trusty road-case packed with microphones and a mixer, experimented with all sorts of headsets and microphones for other presenters, and tried to cope with the ubiquitous sounds of drilling and hammering in neighbouring apartments in Hong Kong bleeding into our recordings.

Seven months later and we have now produced 14 different pandemic podcasts, featuring everything from reporters in Wuhan and Beijing to expert analysis on conspiracy theories, “mask diplomacy”, vaccine development, vaccine nationalism and how the pandemic changed the China-Australia relationship – with interviews recorded via Zoom, Skype, WeChat, Google Meetings and narration recorded in “studio A”.

We’ve also created in-depth podcasts on the China-India border stand-off, Huawei, WeChat, the Hong Kong Autonomy Act, China’s flooding crisis along the Yangtze, the South China Sea dispute and helped our (mostly) American audience understand what the Ballad of Mulan sounds like in Cantonese and Mandarin.

Over a year ago, I started writing a weekly podcast review column in the Saturday print edition of the Post, highlighting new and interesting things to listen to found in my weekly forays into the vast podcast landscape. At the time there were only a handful of locally made contributions, but now that’s changed markedly.

There’s been a huge growth in Hong Kong-made podcasts in the past 12 months and it only augurs for the better to have a strong diversity of voices and wide spectrum of audio content emanating from Asia’s world city.

If you’ve been with us since those first podcasts published in October two years ago, thanks for listening, and thanks for your support; if you’re about to go and find us on your Spotify, iTunes, Google, Overcast, Stitcher or YouTube, don’t forget to subscribe because we’ve got so many more ideas, voices and stories to share.

Jarrod Watt is a specialist digital production editor at the Post. He produces podcasts and video, as well as developing new digital storytelling methods