The Oberserver reported this week that 'podcasting' is the hottest thing going on in radio at the moment.
The BBC have made 20 programmes available as podcasts on its website as part of a real life trial (always better than focus groups) More than 300,000 people have downloaded coontent in the past two months. Radio 4's In Out Time has been downloaded 20,000 times a week.
The only other participant is Virgin Radio who is the first and only commercial station to enter the market of podcasting. Their Pete & Geoff show gets 1500 downloads a day.
Whilst in the next col. of the paper is a brief article on Rupert Murdoch investing £600 million in new pressses for News International - whilst preoccupied with I am sure the migration of his newspaper empire into the 21st century.
Compare this with another piece which analyses the success of the Johnston Press and the challenges it faces going forward.
Richard Wachman writing the piece says
Bowdler must, however, take the threat from the internet seriously, as personal advertising is migrating to the web. He has set up an online CV agency where prospective recruits send their details to a central database, available for a small fee to employers. But further investment is necessary.
And so, if I were Johnston I would be running lots of real life tests to see if mobile internet services for customers and advertisers alike will build the growth for the future. I would be looking at metrics, and commissioning companies to deliver metrics that can show as best one can ROI for advertisers.
I would look at successful mobile and internet sites and services from around the world which might inspire new innovative thinking around how to grow over the next 5 to 10 years. Incremental innovation is always a good route to go. Meaning you can gradually innovate, test refine, adapt and move forward. And enough evidence is out there that one can move newspapers successfully forward. And the evidence indicates that the growth is in the regions not in the nationals.
Print journalists often use tape recorders - why not look at the BBC's success with podcasting. It is from old auntie that the regional newspapers face their biggest threat
As as Rupert himself said
We need to realize that the next generation of people accessing news and information, whether from newspapers or any other source, have a different set of expectations about the kind of news they will get, including when and how they will get it, where they will get it from, and who they will get it from.What is happening right before us is, in short, a revolution in the way young people are accessing news. They don’t want to rely on the morning paper for their up-to-date information. They don’t want to rely on a God-like figure from above to tell them what’s important. And to carry the religion analogy a bit further, they certainly don’t want news presented as gospel.
From the SMLXL archives Connectivity, Culture, Community and Commerce. why it's all happening on the web
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