Even before COVID-19 hit, the Toronto Star had planned to launch a podcast. The team had recorded episodes for the first few weeks and were developing more when the pandemic forced a quick pivot. The name of the podcast, This Matters, summed up what the daily podcast was about and suddenly, the only thing that mattered was COVID-19.

“It was not meant to be a COVID podcast but, of course, for the first couple of months, it amounted to such,” said Irene Gentle, editor at Toronto Star. The timing happened to be both fortuitous and frustrating. While the podcast gave them a vehicle to provide daily updates on COVID-19, the team faces a steep learning curve. They had only worked in the studio and didn’t have experience with the challenges of remote recordings.

“We’re a small team, launching [a podcast] for the first time,” Gentle said. “About a week before the launch, they set up mobile, home studios to practice in, because an isolation mandate was inevitable at some point.”

Just days before the podcast launch, that edict happened, and the entire staff shifted to a work-from-home environment.

“We figured, well, this is it. This is life, let’s not hide it,” Gentle said. “We made our debut episode in part about launching our first daily podcast in a pandemic, draped under blankets for sound quality and shooing away pets.”

The perfect pandemic platform?

It’s impossible to know how the podcast launch would have gone in a “normal” environment, but This Matters turned out to be exactly what the Toronto Star’s audience needed. Listener numbers exceeded expectations from the beginning, and initially, the daily episodes helped guide them through an uncertain and often frightening time.

“By its nature, podcasting is an intimate medium — literally a voice in your ear when you’re feeling alone and isolated. Its strength is its depth, so you hear experts help you through a time when you feel scared,” Gentle said.

As people looked for things to do in a time when leaving home was no longer an option and tried to understand what was happening both locally and globally, This Matters filled both those needs. Using a rotation of three journalists as hosts, as well as the occasional guest host, the podcast has become a daily staple for many.

Just as with coverage on other platforms, Gentle said they had to remotely and carefully read the room to determine when they could stop focusing solely on COVID-19.

“We definitely tip-toed out of pandemic coverage gently and slowly,” she said, adding that now it’s at least 60% non-COVID-19 topics. “But the pandemic has impacted so much, it’s hard not to touch on it, no matter the topic.”

However, even without a global pandemic, Gentle said the team had plenty of fodder for episodes: “It’s not like it was an uneventful year, even without COVID-19. Polarisation that led to an insurrection. A global and anti-racism reckoning. A lot happened.”

Moving forward, This Matters will touch on COVID-19 as needed but Toronto Star has expanded its strategy and will experiment with a variety of topics as well as bonus episodes and special series.

“We’re pretty bullish on the opportunities, for dailies like This Matters but also other formats,” Gentle said. “There’s a lot to talk about.”

This case study originally appeared in the INMA report, The Engagement and Economic Promise of News Podcasts.

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