Ashley Milne-Tyte

Podcasting versus audio on demand

March 18, 2013

Last week I wrote a post asking if podcasting is still relevant. I've since had a chance to listen to this webinar featuring former NPR reporter and editor and current Slate podcast executive producer Andy Bowers. I'd had a link to the webinar in my inbox for a while but its length - an hour - meant I kept postponing listening. I'm glad I did. Here are a few takeaways from the interview.

• Bowers can't stand the word 'podcast' himself. He thinks it's outdated and reeks of the iPod, which he, along with others, claims is now a gadget of the past. (I still don't have an iPhone and use an iPod Nano quite cheerfully every day, demonstrating a) my dinosaur tendencies and b) my dedication to the medium. He thinks of the Slate podcasts more in terms of audio on demand.
• Bowers thinks audio is lagging far behind other areas when it comes to the way the Internet has (or rather hasn't) disrupted it. He believes there's a new audio world looming in the not-too-distant future, but we're not there yet.
• Podcasting, he says, "is intimate...it's an opt-in club. You've joined that club and you feel invested in it in a particular way."
• "Much of podcasting is about personality and it’s about opinion," he says. "As news people that can be a little uncomfortable." How true.
• Podcasting is about experimenting, Bowers says. Slate has tried a few things and dropped them, and continued with shows it never expected to last.
• The ad rates Slate gets for its podcasts are the highest rates they get for anything on the site. They have more advertisers than they can fit on their shows.

Today I came across this piece by Radio Survivor's Paul Riismandel called 'Will the success of podcasting mean the end of the medium?' It's more about how we access podcasts - and whether podcasts will continue to exist in their current form - than the content of podcasts. It came out of the writer's time at South by Southwest, where podcasting was under discussion. If you're a podcaster yourself or just interested in the medium, both the webinar and the piece are well worth listening to and reading. 

Is podcasting still relevant?

March 15, 2013

(Photo: M Keefe, Creative Commons license)

Earlier today I was going back and forth on email with a professional contact and friend about the radio entries in a journalism competition we were both connected to. The topic started out being about the dearth of entries in the radio category, which was disappointing, but then the discussion moved on to podcasting and whether podcasts were permitted to be entrants in this particular competition (they were). I know the question of podcasting's popularity, or lack thereof, has come up in other forums, but I wanted to raise it here because I was struck by this journalist's perspective. She was discussing 'online audio' as a term to use instead of 'podcast', referring to 'the brief podcast craze', and saying use of the term 'podcast' had been thought not to be a good idea as it was 'a trendy term' that 'could quickly become dated'. She said 'online audio' described what was meant 'without using the jargon of the moment'. (Am I speaking from my ivory audio tower, or is the moment still with us?)

She also mentioned she felt podcasts were less popular today than they were a few years ago because everyone is flocking to video thanks to higher connection speeds, 'and the big media companies are investing in online video.' The video entrants for this competition just keep coming. 

I want to pose some questions in the hope others will weigh in with their opinions below.

• How do you feel about the term 'online audio' rather than 'podcast'? To me, a radio reporter and audiophile, 'podcast' never went out of fashion and is the accepted way to talk about an audio show that is produced for consumption away from the actual airwaves. At one point I experimented with using the words 'online audio show' on The Broad Experience website, but the term seemed awkward and just never sat well with me so I took those words out and re-wrote 'podcast'. I know from Edison Research's latest report on podcasting that only about 45 percent of Americans are familiar with the term. Still, that's a lot of people.
• I realize online video appeals to a mass audience, whereas audio does not. As my former Marketplace colleage and host of the wonderful podcast The Memory Palace, Nate DiMeo, once said, 'audio never goes viral'. OK, occasionally. But not often. Video goes viral all the time. I am aware that within 'elite' audiences, such as public radio listeners and Slate readers, podcasting is popular and becoming more so. But what do you make of the fact that a chunk of the news-aware public, including journalists, apparently feel it's basically had its day?

Perhaps that's all I have. This conversation really made me think about podcast awareness and relevance, and I'd be very glad to hear others' opinions on this topic. 

Grasp magazine feature

March 8, 2013

It's been a good week for The Broad Experience. I launched with Mule Radio Syndicate, have been featured on Skillcrush and have also been featured in this piece in Danish magazine Grasp, talking about how the show came into being and where I want to take it. Also earlier this week I appeared on Whitney Johnson's blog with a piece entitled, appropriately, The Accidental Risk Taker. More on that in the post below.

The Accidental Risk Taker

March 4, 2013

Read here. Appears on Whitney Johnson's blog. If you don't know Whitney, she's a former Wall Street analyst as well as a co-founder of Rose Park Advisors, the investment firm of Harvard Business School management guru Clayten Christensen. She writes for the Harvard Business Review blog and speaks all over the place about topics from investing to innovation to women. I met her at a conference last summer and subsequently read her book 'Dare, Dream, Do', which is about encouraging women not to shelve their dreams about life and work, even as life gets complicated. This piece is about my very unexpected launch into the world of entrepreneurship. There's an audio component too.