Peas In A Podcast
By Neil Dodds
27 February, 2006
Editor's weblog rounds up the experiences of three newspaper podcasting chiefs, including the UK Daily Telegraph's Guy Ruddle.
Their experiences are quite similar. After a little initial resistance, most journalists don't mind reading their work to a podcast audience - though getting a professional voiceover can help too (perhaps if your hacks have sleep-inducing voices?) There appear to be some commercial possibilities, including sponsorship and advertising of podcasts, though podcasting is such a low-budget initiative that there is no great pressure on them to create masses of revenue. It also helps to tackle the subject with a little imagination, making podcasts (in Ruddle's words) "more like a radio programme and less like actors reading out the written word."
Podcasting isn't challenging radio at the moment, despite Apple's announcement last year that the phenomenon represented "The renaissance of radio." It doesn't have radio's immediacy, for a start, as you have to download each podcast onto your PC and then to your iPod every morning.
However, one of the interviewees reckons it might, in future: Apple (again) is said to be planning a wireless iPod, which could, in theory, download selected podcasts automatically when the user enters a wifi hot zone. As it emerged last week that London's "Square Mile" financial district is about to be wired to become one huge wifi hotzone, the era of instant podcasting could be upon us quicker than you think.
UPDATE David Prest of Whistledown Productions argues for professionally-standard podcasts (as opposed to the 'badger's backside' roughness some pundits favour) in the Guardian.
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