The Australian’s Teacher’s Pet podcast hits million downloads

The Teacher’s Pet, The Australian’s podcast investigation, has soared past one million downloads since launching six weeks ago.

The Teacher’s Pet, The Australian’s podcast investigation, has soared past one million downloads since launching six weeks ago.

There is global interest in the podcast, with overseas listeners representing about 25 per cent of the audience for the true-crime investigation about the disappearance of a young mother on Sydney’s northern beaches.

“There wouldn’t be another podcast that has achieved a million downloads in the first five or six weeks of going live,” said Rob Loewenthal, chief executive of podcast hosting platform Whooshkaa. “It is certainly the most successful launch of a podcast that we have seen in the three years we have been hosting content. There are other podcasts that do big numbers, but they have been building up over years and not weeks.”

The Australian’s national chief correspondent Hedley Thomas and co-producer Slade Gibson created the podcast, which investigates the 1982 disappearance and suspected murder of Lyn Dawson. The series has been at the top of the Australian Apple podcast charts for much of the time since its launch. Episode seven will be available on Friday.

Paul Whittaker, The Australian’s editor-in-chief, said the podcast built on The Australian’s 2016 Bowraville investigation into the deaths of three Aboriginal children.

“Podcasts allow newspapers to amplify big and complex stories by giving a voice to victims and their families in a way that our journalism has never previously been able to,” Mr Whittaker said.

“This is giving us a new platform, a new audience and a reach beyond the written word, putting the listener at the scene of the crime and looking through the eyes of those who were there as they tell the story in their own words with their own voices.

“The Teacher’s Pet podcast ­series has required all the journalistic expertise and skill of one of Australia’s most accomplished investigative journalists, in Hedley, to firstly reinvestigate a case that had long ago been abandoned by police and the media. Then, he had to convince people to trust him.”

Thomas and the paper’s ­national crime correspondent, David Murray, are speaking at an event for The Australian’s subscribers tonight in Sydney, after a similar event yesterday.

International podcasting sites were leading global listeners to the podcast, Mr Loewenthal said. “The US continues to grow as a proportion of total downloads to 10 per cent and the UK now makes up 7 per cent total downloads,” he said. “The longer the ­series goes on, the more the international audience is discovering this content.”

The Australian had opened the stories to non-subscribers because feedback could aid the investigation. “We have got a lot of leads as a result,” Mr Whittaker said. “What has been unique about this investigative podcast series is that it is a story that is literally unfolding day to day as more and more people come out of the woodwork — sometimes within hours of the deadline for the next episode.”