The South African Podcast Awards

Awarding the best in South African Podcasting

South Africa’s first national podcasting-specific award show.

Rewarding excellence creates excellence

The South African Podcast Awards is a showcase for the best local podcasts and podcasters. The goal of the show is to set the bar for what “good” is in SA podcasting, and then inspire podcasters to improve on that, year on year. Better audio quality, better show artwork, better content, better everything.

This will do the same job for non-podcasters. Brands, media buyers, and listeners will have a reference point for what a good South African podcast is. The SAPA will also bring great podcasts to their attention.

Details

Entries are now CLOSED.
The SAPA leadership team will make an initial cut to create a finalist list, splitting shows into their relevant genres, and considering all shows for categories like Best Podcast, Best Hosting, and Best Audio Production.
The finalists will be judged by a group of highly experienced podcast professionals. Judging will take place in September and October.
The first annual SAPA will stream live on Saturday the 2nd of November.

Eligibility &Judging Process

Eligibility

Podcast must include a South African citizen on the production team or someone with South African residence.
Podcast must have published an episode in the last 90 days
Content to be judged to be simple repurposing of radio, TV, or other channels, will be disqualified. There must be some adaptation into the podcast format.

Judging

These will vary from category to category, but the judges will be looking for:

Production quality - Recording, editing, post-production, sonic identity.
Hosting - Interview technique, active listening and response, depth of research, insight, chemistry.
Creativity - Interesting angles on stories or interviews. Interesting show concepts and execution.
Value of content or conversation - This is highly subjective, but judges will express their opinion on whether the content of a podcast is important, interesting, challenging, entertaining, insightful, and generally valuable for its intended audience.

Scoring

Judges will evaluate entrants based on a points system, rating each show out of 100 points.

70 points - Bronze
80 points - Silver
90 points - Gold

This means two things:

Firstly, there could be multiple winners in each category.

Secondly, there could be NO winners in a category, if there is no show that gets 70 points or above.

Does audience size count?

Note that listeners stats/downloads will not, in this first year, be considered. We are a community of predominantly independent podcasters, and most of us have zero budget for paid media and other tools and techniques that can help a show grow. We want to reward people who are making great content, whether they’re getting big numbers or not.