Podcasts

The pleasures and perils of podcast listening

No phrase is better calculated to tense the neck muscles of a regular podcast listener than ‘We have something special for you now.’ Having your radio shows downloaded to your phone, music player or computer, rather than plucked out of the air the old-fashioned way, immediately grants the listener a great deal of extra freedom: you choose the feeds to which you subscribe, you decide which episodes to hear and in which order. But it also demands from the listener a measure of extra trust, or at least a ruthless readiness to skip, because what a producer puts on a feed can vary much more than in the scheduled-to-the-second world

Why Serial is the future of radio

The fuss may now be over, the last episode of Serial revealed. But if the global success of WBEZ Chicago’s latest weekly podcast is a portent, then the future of radio lies not in static daily programming but in the fleeting pursuit of the latest internet download. No scheduling necessary. Listeners can just choose what they want to hear (based on what’s trending online), sign up for the podcast, and listen to the episodes any time they want, once they have been released for download. Just imagine how much easier and cheaper this could be for production companies. Non-stop, live, on-air programming would become redundant. The listener would no longer