Podcasting’s Potential, Beyond Two-Fer Thursday
Amid the general anxiety that afflicts both the broadcast radio industry and other old-line media companies, the podcast — an audio program that you pull off the Internet and download onto an iPod or similar device for listening at your leisure — seems as big a threat to radio as the Web poses to print media. But podcasts thus far seem to be more a device for time-shifting — saving radio programs to listen to them when you want to, rather than when a station tells you to — than an audio revolution. Thousands of podcasts are available, and many are indeed homemade shows of a sort you’d never hear on the radio. But many of the most popular podcasts are simply a new way to listen to popular programs from National Public Radio, the BBC and other big radio producers.
Podcasting’s Potential, Beyond Two-Fer Thursday (Washington Post)