C&RL News January 2015 56 Gary Pattillo is reference librarian at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, e-mail: pattillo@email. unc.edu G a r y P a t t i l l o Podcasts “An estimated 39 million Americans have listened to a podcast in the past month.” This number represents about 15 percent of the population over 12 years old. Regular podcast consumers listen to an average of 6 podcasts per week. In 2013, most listeners (64 percent) used a desktop or laptop computer to listen. In 2014 smartphones, tablets, and portable audio players became the preferred device to consume podcasts. The percentage of Americans who have ever listened to a podcast is at an all-time high, but is still represented by only 30 percent of the population over 12 years old. Tom Webster, “The Infinite Dial 2014,” March 5, 2014, Edison Research and Triton Digital, http://medium.com /@MattHartman/gimlet-media-the-future-of-podcasting-467298cb9b8e (retrieved December 2, 2014). AcademyScope “A team at the National Academies Press has developed a unique interface for exploring its library of more than 5,400 research reports from the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council.” AcademyScope “offers an initial display of a swarm of report covers, indicating the number of times each has been downloaded, a figure that is updated in real time. When users click on a title, the cover appears in a panel on the right-hand side, along with a descrip- tion of the report. Related titles are displayed at the bottom of the panel, and links are available for downloading the report or viewing it online. Among the swarm of covers are lines linking many of the reports. Each line represents a judgment that the two reports are linked by having similar content.” Patrick Marshall, “Picture this: AcademyScope visualizes research library,” December 2, 2014, GCN, http://gcn.com/blogs /emerging-tech/2014/12/academyscope.aspx (retrieved December 2, 2014). Women in media During the last quarter of 2013, “64 percent of bylines and on-camera appear- ances went to men at the nation’s top 20 TV networks, newspapers, online news sites and news wire services. . . . At the nation’s 10 most widely circulated newspapers, researchers found that on average men garnered 63 percent and women 37 percent of bylines. . . . The Chicago Sun-Times led the other nine newspapers in the female byline count with women writing 46 percent of its stories. The New York Times came in 10th place with 31 percent of its bylines crafted by women.” Women’s Media Center, “The Status of Women in the U. S. Media 2014,” www.womensmediacenter.com/page/ -/statusreport/WMC-2014-status-women-with-research.pdf (retrieved December 2, 2014). Self-publishing The largest self-publishing company in the United States in 2013 was Amazon and its CreateSpace program with 186,926 new titles. Smashwords came in second with 85,500 self-published titles. Third place went to Lulu with nearly 75,000 titles. More than 391,000 titles are self-published each year. Bowker, “Largest self-publishing companies in the United States in 2013, by number of titles published,” October 2014, www.statista.com/statistics/249043/largest-self-publishing-companies-in-the-us-by-number-of-titles-published (retrieved December 02, 2014).