I’ll start by saying I’m new to Apple Shortcuts, so there may be an easy way to do this.
I would like to automate the process of sending a record of a podcast (e.g., name of podcast, name of episode) to a Day One daily journal after I start listening to it (i.e., it doesn’t need to be when I finish it, just that I have listened to it). So, the trigger would be starting to listen to a podcast, and the action would be to write the entry in a Day One journal.
Is this possible to do automatically?
There are no automation triggers for starting to listen to a podcast available to Shortcuts.
Shortcuts does have some support for the Apple Podcasts app and Day One adds its own Shortcuts support, but I don’t see anything for the current playing episode in Shortcuts.
If you happen to use a third party podcast app, then they usually will provide this and you could grab the information to put into Day One.
As for triggering, consider a lock screen shortcut trigger or a back tap trigger.
I use Overcast and created a shortcut to add notes about the currently playing podcast to Drafts. You can download the shortcut here, and I spoke about it on Mac Power Users a few years back if you want more detail. It does utilise Toolbox Pro to check if audio is playing and pause/play my podcast, but your use case shouldn’t need that as you are not taking any additional notes - just auto logging that you listened.
Hope that helps.