PotterCast

» see pottercast.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

PotterCast started on 22 August 2005, between the fourth film and the sixth book, which was the exact moment when being a Harry Potter fan meant waiting. The Leaky Cauldron was already the largest English-language Potter news site, and the podcast was its weekly hour: what Warner Brothers had announced, what Rowling had hinted at, what the forums were arguing about. Melissa Anelli ran it with John Noe and Frankie Franco III, and Sue Upton read the news segment until she left in late 2009.

The format was a book club that never finished its book. There was a segment called Bit by Bit that worked through Deathly Hallows a few pages at a time, and a slot for voicemails from listeners arguing about canon. Later episodes were recorded live at LeakyCon, the convention the same people built, and by then the podcast had become one output of a company. Mischief Media ran that convention plus BroadwayCon, and published a dozen other fan shows alongside this one.

Harry Potter arrived in Turkey through translated paperbacks and cinema tickets, which is a different distribution system from an American fansite publishing an hour of audio every week. The books were everywhere in the bookshops when I was a student. The commentary layer around them, the one that produced conventions and podcasts and listeners who could cite an episode number, never got a Turkish edition.

~ the dossier ~

~ the rowling episode ~

Episode 130 is the one the Wikipedia article leads with. PotterCast got J.K. Rowling on the line, which made it the first podcast to interview her, at a point where podcasting was two years old and most authors did not know the word. It is a strange artifact of timing: the biggest author alive gave an interview to a fan show that had no studio.

She then recorded the show's introduction, and that recording stayed in place for the rest of the podcast's life. Before her it had been Rupert Grint, who read the intro for episodes 112 through 129, and Matthew Lewis for a short run before Deathly Hallows came out. For eighteen years, a show about the books opened with the voice of the person who wrote them.

~ the last two episodes ~

The feed thins out in the last stretch. Season 17 episode 2 is dated 15 April 2022 and is called "Prejudging Fantastic Beasts." Episode 17.3 is the LeakyCon Orlando live show from 15 September 2022. Then, on 6 March 2023, an episode titled "The Last of Us on HBO, Part 1" opens with the hosts saying they are going to start talking about the things other than Potter currently occupying their minds. Part 2 followed on 14 March 2023. The feed has published nothing since.

Nothing announced it. The Wikipedia article still describes the show in the present tense and lists its status as Infrequent, which has now been true for three years. The site at pottercast.mischiefmedia.com kept serving the full episode archive until the summer of 2026, then started returning a redirect in August of that year, and the hostname no longer resolves at all. pottercast.com survives only as a redirect pointing at that dead address.

I came to the last two episodes through a shutdown date that turned out to be wrong by four days, and found a Harry Potter podcast whose final act was a few people admitting they wanted to talk about something else. Most dead feeds just stop mid-season with no warning at all. This one said out loud that its attention had moved first.

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