Podcasting is an opprotunity for newspapers to find a broader audience

Jason Rosenbaum
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I’ve been “with it” with computer for a long time. The only problem is I’m usually behind the curve.

When I was barely 10, my dad brought home a 286 computer, which had no mouse, about 16 or 17 colors and hundred or so Atari-like games. Years later after my Bar Mitzvah, I received a new computer – a shiny IBM with an Intel Pentium 166 MHZ processor. I bought for one reason and one reason only – it was black.

Right now, I am typing this essay on a fairly decent computer – a Sony VIO desktop. When I receive the computer as a gift a few years ago, I thought I had finally found my device that wouldn’t go obsolete within a year. I was half-right: my computer is still functional and fairly up-to-date. Unfortunately, it’s only useful when I’m at my house, rather than everywhere like those folks who actually bought Macs that were “required by the J-School” (I didn’t buy one and I guess I’m still graduating.)

The story remains the same for the iPod. Even though I had earned enough money to buy it through a part-time job, I waited for a couple years. After all, it’s not necessarily something that you need to do a job or live a life. But when I went to Best Buy and bought a Mini, I was in love. But little did I know that the device that brought joy by playing hours upon hours music was the pretext for a revolutionary feature that could change the way the public receives and disseminates relevant information -- Podcasting.

To me, Podcasting is next best thing to streaming, “on the clock” radio. If anything, it is the closest audio version of a newspaper available. Instead of essentially being force to listen to commercials and uninteresting news stories, a news hound can pick and choose the information where the want to invest their time. There is also an opportunity for a person to subscribe to a Podcast that they want to listen to week after week, along with the option of creating and submitting a Podcast.

It all makes for a rather communal and interactive experience. Information gets passed to people who want to listen to it, while the provider of the message has an easy and low-cost way of disseminating information to as many people as possible. As a result, we’ve seen explosion of entities – such as television news and radio stations – offer Podcasting as a hook to draw more people into their broader pool of knowledge. There are also opportunities for politicians, entertainment companies and ninjas to find niches of people who want to listen.

The biggest problem I see with this advance in information dissemination is the same problem we’ve discussed with blogging – some Podcasts are going to less credibility than others. And with so many Podcasts available on a multitude of subject matter, is difficult for an editing/watchdog role to be effective. But also like the Blogosphere, it is very likely the marketplace will sort out the good from the bad, and people will flock to information that suits their needs and is accurate.

While my penchant for finding technology after it’s become obsolete has left me a few bucks shorter, the impact on newspaper that fail to use this trend effectively could be more serious. It would behoove newspaper to use this medium to expand their coverage of daily events. This would be a way for the newspaper to transmit their coverage to a broader audience who might not have time to read the newspaper, but will certainly have the time to listen to it while they are riding the train or walking to work.

Podcasting is one example of technology that would greatly benefit the newspaper industry, even though it seems that it would only impact radio and broadcast companies. And if newspaper companies don’t use the technology, they might end up losing a chance to gather more readers by spreading out their news coverage to a broader audience.