I must be blunt. At this point, I find the idea of podcasting on tv.ku.edu to be kind of silly. Let's be fair. We already post all content that worth posting (and arguably some content that's not) on the Web site. What original content could we possibly post as a podcast that would entice people to go through the tedious process of downloading and transferring those files?
That said, podcasting could work. Lots of people that you don't necessarily need to have good stuff to post a podcast. Look at any radio talk show host if you doubt me. (Al Franken, who periodically posts choppy clips of interviews, is just one example.)
But if we decide to take a nosedive into the great abyss of podcasting, I challenge us to go one further and do it well. Every morning at 7, 8 and 9, KJHK broadcasts morning news updates, highlighting the top national and local news and sports. They literally do it 20 feet away from where we produce the Web site. Why, then, can't we take the audio from one of those newscasts each morning and post it to our site as a podcast each morning? If NPR can do it, so can we.
People could queue up their computer each morning to pull the newscast and it would be ready to listen to when they wake up instead of having to flip on CNN for the national news and then searching all over for anything locally relevant.
Then, at 6 p.m. each evening, we could do the same thing with the evening newscast. It'd just be one more thing for the evening producers to do each night.
Since my experience with podcasting this summer at my internship, which has been well-documented in my blog, I've been pretty jaded towards it. Without anything truly meaningful to post, no one is going to care enough to download and listen. And we have to remember that we're still a student-run TV station and Web site, so our credibility and meaningful-ness (I'm so certain that's not a word) are already in question.
So if we do this, we gotta do it right. And I think starting with the news is a good first step.
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