Dead Man Talking: How NPO cloned a star reporter’s voice to reassess the JFK case

Audio’s answer to the blog — easy to do, hard to do well — podcasts have leapt from niche medium to undisputed audio king.

Demand is high, and so is supply; search your podcast platform for ‘true crime’, and you’re swamped by choices of varying quality.

It’s a densely populated, competitive space, so if you want your true crime podcast to fly, you’d better get it right.

At the very least, that means a strong theme, moreish content, and captivating presentation.

Dutch broadcaster NPO has ticked every box and more with ‘JFK – The Missing Link’, an ambitious reopening of the mother of all conspiracy theories, released in November 2023.

It’s a muscular theme, with investigative journalists Babs Assink and Lammert de Bruin panning old facts from the 1963 assassination and unearthing new nuggets of evidence. But the real clincher is that, thanks to the magic of AI, the presenter is the mercurial, controversial, and long-dead Dutch journalist, Willem Oltmans.