Jamie East from Smart 7: On reaching 1000 episodes – “the juggernaut never stops!”

The daily news podcast The Smart 7 have reached their 1000th episode! To mark this milestone, they created a short survey made up of seven multiple choice questions to find out what people in the UK care about most. The 1000th episode out today is exploring and expanding on the results of the survey, but we wanted to check in with the host to see how he’s celebrating this immense achievement.

Congratulations on your 1000th episode! How are you celebrating?

Ha – the curse of the daily podcast means our celebrations involve recording, publishing and planning – the juggernaut never stops! We may allow ourselves a reflective hour or so – unless there’s breaking news – in which case, back to the grindstone!

More than 3 years of daily episodes – have you ever missed a day?

Aside from Bank Holidays no – and we make up for those by doing some special bonus episodes. That’s the thing with news annoyingly, it’s never ending!

What are you most proud of?

I think to be a small independent publisher in news is extremely tough – so I’m really proud we’ve taken on the giants and often beaten them! Our size means we are far more nimble and can make decisions a lot faster than our peers – which really helps. They have the budget and the teams, we have agility and personality.

Does the 7 minute limit make it easier or harder to do a daily show?

At first it made it incredibly difficult. How could we possibly fit all the news in (Especially as we launched on the day Boris came out of hospital after Covid). But as we found our feet, it’s become a real feat of engineering – we are probably the most efficient sub-editors on earth! Not an ounce of flab is allowed in our episodes – there’s no time!

Tell us about the survey -where did that idea come from?

I live on social media and therefore constantly feel I’m trapped in a bubble of my own making. Hopefully this survey will give us at the Smart 7 a real sense of where our listener’s heads are at, what they’re concerned about and what their hopes are for the future of the nation. Not only will this help us make the podcast better – the results will definitely be of interest to everyone.

Listen and subscribe to The Smart 7 on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and other popular podcast apps >>