adrian monck

In praise of podcasts

Podcasts get a shot across the bows from ‘viewspaper‘ editor and accomplished controversialist Simon Kelner:

Kelner is endearingly contemptuous of multi- platform journalism, especially when it comes to pod and vodcasts. “I’ve never met anyone who ever listens to pod- casts,” he explodes. “When I saw in the Telegraph ‘Get your podcast of Simon Heffer discussing David Cameron‘s latest policy announcement’, I thought you’ve got to be joking! I’m not convinced that they’re the future.” [Guardian]

Kelner’s right about Heffer’s chances of making it onto an ipod. But he’s wrong about podcasts.

My daily commute into London Cannon Street brims with City types with their headphones full of Wake up To Money, BBC Five Live‘s 5.30am take on the financial markets. In January it got over 100,000 monthly downloads. Kelner may not have the resources to fill a daily half hour for Britain’s beleaguered and undervalued financial community. But over at the Beeb…

Update: After some searching I can’t find a Simon Heffer discussing David Cameron‘s latest policy announcement podcast. Shane Richmond might know if such a podcast ever existed or if it was merely SK’s flight of rhetorical fancy?

Adrian Monck

,

4 responses to “In praise of podcasts”

  1. Bit different though, isn’t it – Wake up to Money is a radio programme, from the BBC, which makes radio programmes – things you listen to – and has been doing so rather well since the 1920s. There’s a natural audience there, which I still don’t believe there is for newspaper hacks reading out the pieces they’ve crafted equally skilfully for the page. Radio on demand – yes, definitely the future. Newspaper podcasts? Meh. I bet most of those commuters were reading newspapers too…

  2. But Adam – look at the hacks who can hop the divide – like the Sunday Telegraph‘s Liam Halligan, who can work in any medium…reading out stuff online is certainly no way to make radio, but there are definitely audiences for it.

  3. I can recall many examples of Simon Heffer podcasting for us over the last twelve months or so but I’m struggling to think of an example of Mr Cameron announcing a policy.

    But seriously…

    SK is almost certainly talking about a real podcast. There have been a few instances of Heffer discussing Cameron.

    Unfortunately, our audio is only archived on the site for two weeks, which is why you couldn’t find it. We hope to have a permanent audio/video archive soon.