The ECG Newsletter is expanding its coverage to include Podcasts, a media technology that has become a hugely popular source of news, information, music, and conversation. The approximate number of Podcasts is about 850,000 and growing. Of the almost million Podcasters only about 1% make any money; the remaining 99% say they do it to “build their brand.” Podcasts can be interviews, monologues, panel discussions, balanced or biased, rants and/or raves, lectures, and music, a wonderful resource and a bit of the Wild West. There are even Podcasts on how to create your own Podcast.
Podcasts originated from radio stations. In fact, it is thought that the first Podcast was the 2004 “Open Source” with Christopher Lydon here in Boston and since then this media has grown rapidly. Newspapers and TV stations are now creating podcasts to get the news out and to broaden their subscriber base. WBUR is now, as Victor Hernandez, the Chief Content Officer, notes “in the middle of a podcast push… to evolve into a multiplatform institution… we rarely describe ourselves as a radio station anymore.”
For those of you who are already Podcast listeners, we’d love to hear from you with your suggestions, recommendations, and cautions. What do you listen to? What’s your favorite? Do you prefer your news in the written word or streaming? Have you thought of making your own Podcast?
For those of you who are not familiar with Podcasts, it’s easy to get started. And, also, since Podcasts are portable, it’s a good way to avoid the “driveway moment”--- a radio segment so compelling that people will leave their cars running in the driveway to finish listening to it. There are many ways to search for a Podcast; just use your search engine (Google, Firefox, Safari, etc.) to find a person, subject, or specific Podcast you’re interested in (“how to,” sports, cooking, travel, black holes, films, etc.) and click on. If you already have Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube, you can look through them. An example of a Podcaster search engine is https://www.listennotes.com The most popular music (and now a source for many podcasts) source is Spotify https://open.spotify.com/ It is a subscription service (there’s a charge). Pandora https://www.pandora.com/ offers music with no fee but you’re subjected to interruptions; Pandora does offer a paid subscription if you can’t stand the ads.
I’ve chosen a few Podcast samples from various sources:
From radio:
“Fresh Air” is one of the more popular interview programs, “Fresh Air,” hosted by Terry Gross who has for years delivered “the Peabody Award-winning weekday magazine of contemporary arts and issues… with conversations about a variety of topics and a variety of significant people.” https://www.npr.org/programs/fresh-air/ She’s a wonderful interviewer and with her probing and connecting style, she is able to get her guests to open up in real-time conversations. Here is a podcast in which Terry Gross is being interviewed by comedian and podcaster Marc Maron; it’s funny and reveals little known facts about Terry. https://www.npr.org/2015/05/20/407981536/terry-gross-to-marc-maron-life-is-harder-than-radio
“Open Source,”with Christopher Lydon, who notes that “we like to call ‘Open Source’ an American conversation with global attitude. It was the first podcast and drawing on our roots here in Boston, we’ll remind you why the city has been the capital of ideas in America since the heyday of Emerson and Thoreau in the 1840s.” https://radioopensource.org/
And, one of my favorites, “The Moth,” that “celebrates the commonality and diversity of human experience through the art and craft of true, personal storytelling.” The stories are sometimes funny, sometimes sad, sometimes both, and, most of all, captivating. https://themoth.org/
From Newspapers and Journals:
“The Daily” --for an in-depth look at current events described as “Twenty minutes a day, five days a week, hosted by Michael Barbaro and Sabrina Tavernise and powered by New York Times journalism.” https://www.nytimes.com/column/the-daily
“New Yorker Radio Hour” with regularly updated stories from the New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/podcast
From the UK: Trouble falling asleep? Try the “British Shipping News.” Many Brits use the “British Shipping News” podcast for insomnia. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z89bFO9yQSY It's got a rhythm of its own, it's quirky, it's English, it's slightly mysterious because nobody really knows where these places are unless you're one of these people bobbing up and down in the Channel.
So—here’s just a few samples. Search for your own favorites and let us know what you recommend! We’d love to hear from you.
--Jane Hilburt-Davis