If you're anything like me, your first waking reflex is to reach across in the dark for your smartphone that is lying, charging, on a bedside table.
Unfortunately, phone in hand, my next gesture is typically to fumble around seeking the "snooze" button, buying an extra 10 minutes of fitful slumber, a cycle I typically then repeat several times.
"Snoozes" eventually completed, my first truly wakeful concern is again phone-focussed: scrolling through my overnight notifications, getting a picture of what I've missed in preparation for the day ahead.
And it is among these notifications, each weekday for the past four years, that the ABC has been working to serve a new and emerging audience, first with The Signal podcast and, as of this week, with its successor: ABC News Daily.
Daily podcasting didn't start at the ABC. It's been a tried-and-tested format for some years now, one offered by hundreds of news organisations worldwide, with nearly a dozen on offer here in Australia.
So what, exactly, is the point of a daily news podcast? And what does it offer its audience that breakfast radio and television, newspapers and news websites don't? And why, day in and day out, do audiences keep returning?
With some experience in this field now, having co-hosted The Signal since 2018, having staffed its audience feedback inbox for much of that time, and now as part of the team that has this week launched ABC News Daily, I think I have at least some of the answers.
When we launched The Signal four years ago, the small team of which I was a part was trying to make something we would all want to listen to.
We wanted a product that didn't assume too much of the audience, that took time to provide context and backstory, and that eschewed some of the hype and drama of traditional broadcast news and social media.
From the start, our method at The Signal was to pick a story each day that we thought had more context than can be easily conveyed in a 1 minute, 30 seconds TV package.
Our mission was to go deeper on that story with an expert, a reporter, or a person with a lived experience of the issue at hand.
Over time, some themes emerged: We discovered our audience loved to be surprised by economic stories, that they found Donald Trump's presidency and the rise of a belligerent China endlessly transfixing, and that they had an almost insatiable appetite for well-explained information about complex issues such as COVID-19, climate change, healthcare, elections and tax.
At the outset, we imagined our audience would be young, smartphone-savvy, perhaps terminally online and interested in the themes and topics of the news cycle without perhaps following the ins and outs closely.
With time, though, we learned these assumptions were not the full picture. Based on our own research, our inbox and the anecdotes we would hear from friends or family of friends or our own families, we realised our audience was older than we'd imagined, more geographically spread out and, while deeply engaged with the news, we would often hear that, without us, they struggled to find daily story-telling with the latitude to lay things out in their full complexity.
We heard from farmers who'd listen to us each day while out on the tractor, single mothers who were home alone and craving adult conversation, expats yearning to hear Australian accents and perspectives, and retirees for whom we were an entry point to the world of podcasts.
We noticed that we also became — in part, presumably, because two of The Signal's four years in the world coincided with a pandemic — an important social outlet for tens of thousands of listeners: a consistent, daily companion in the quest to navigate a perplexing and exasperating time.
And it was this personal connection, I think, that brought them back, day after day.
We also learned, with time, how to ride the news cycle on our audience's behalf: how to pick which stories to pivot to immediately as they broke, and which ones to leave for a day or two to capture them in their full texture.
The workflow we landed on, of generally working on episodes the day before publication, also threw up its own challenges — when Beirut was rocketed by a massive explosion that killed hundreds and injured thousands, the time zone difference meant that we failed to include the fact the entire Lebanese government had resigned in response overnight, Australian time.
But, over time, as we found our groove, we adjusted. When postal votes in three swing states showed Joe Biden starting to pull ahead of Donald Trump, we were in the office, bleary-eyed, at 2am, working on that morning's episode.
This is not to say, of course, that the format of The Signal was for everyone. We learned that some people hated the music breaks, others found the conversational tone too much of an adjustment, and some thought the episodes themselves too short (or too long).
Some listeners wanted more on COVID-19, while some wanted less. Some found the Trump presidency of little interest, while many disagreed.
But, overall, we found our listeners were loyal, curious and, as we became a part of their weekday morning routines, they became our friends too.
Four years is a good run for any product in a rapidly evolving space like daily podcasting and, after nearly 900 episodes of The Signal, late last year we decided to call time.
In 2022, we are offering our subscribers a new product, ABC News Daily, a weekday podcast showcasing the very best of the ABC's journalism that will make fewer assumptions about our audience's age, and have a renewed, laser-like focus on why particular stories matter.
We are aiming to build on the relationships we've built over the past four years, while seeking out new listeners, and we will try even harder to make a product that doesn't ask too much of our audience's time — we're aiming for a more tightly produced product, that runs no longer than 14 minutes.
While we've learned all these lessons already, we have many more ahead of us now. We hope you'll come along with us.
Stephen Smiley is the supervising producer of ABC News Daily. He was previously co-host and supervising producer of The Signal.
