I don't really understand why "innocence" is used here; I know that it can be used to denote novelty rather than naivete, but I'm not really sure that podcasts were ever so innocent. After all, podcasting draws heavily on over a century of public radio broadcasting for its media encoding and tropes.

It's nigh-impossible to take this sort of posture seriously when podcasts like "Behind the Bastards" spend their time either talking about horrible people, or talking about the evil of iHeartRadio and how terrible their sponsors are. This isn't the "end of podcasting's innocence;" this is mass media moguls realizing that they missed out on squeezing money from Joe Rogan.