digesting podcasting

"The ongoing regulatory and commercial conflicts over the issue of net neutrality will increasingly affect public service broadcasters", said the editor of Vox Publica on 23 May 2007. "As the broadcasters distribute more of their audiovisual offerings online, the question of quality of service and the future of the Internet as a whole becomes a crucial issue for broadcasters, according to Associate Professor Tanja Storsul at the Department of Media and Communication, the University of Oslo."
Podcast: ‘Interview’ with Sen. Ted Stevens example of podcast taken from FreePress.net.

Yahoo is getting in the scene too. Michael Bazeley, journalist at San Jose Mercury News wrote "A year ago, few Internet users had ever heard the word “podcast,” let alone listened to one. Now Yahoo is making a bet the podcasting phenomenon has a mainstream future. The Sunnyvale company Monday unveiled a slick service that lets people easily find, review and automatically download any of the tens of thousands of radio-like audio shows that are fueling a wave of personal digital publishing."With Yahoo’s stature as the most-visited Web site, the new service will undoubtedly drive thousands of people to discover podcasts — the audio files intended to be played on portable digital music players such as iPods.

The move also makes business sense for Yahoo since it makes the Web site a more attractive platform for personal publishing. And it might push users to Yahoo Music Engine, the company’s new subscription music service.



“It certainly marks a major milestone in the adoption curve,” said Michael Geoghegan, who produces a movie-review podcast called Reel Reviews.
Yahoo’s service is free and still in testing mode. It provides a directory and search engine for tens of thousands of shows and more than 100,000 individual podcasts. Yahoo compiled the directory by crawling the Web and searching for special types of files. Publishers can also submit their podcasts to be included in the directory."

Jhon Thompson wrote on Journalismcouk about the Sun Online making history today by hosting the first ever podcast by a British Prime Minister. "The Prime Minister entered the digital age yesterday with an interview about his plans to end anti-social behaviour on Britain's streets.", he writes.
Will multimedia be abused in journalism? Will journalism exist only on a digital version? Mark Bowden, columnist of Philadelphia Inquirer, worte in 'journalim's future' article: "I think the print edition will probably endure to some extent, but, without any doubt, the future of daily journalism is digital, not because it is the latest thing, but because it is, quite simply, a far better medium than paper and ink."

HOW MULTIMEDIA IS CHANGING ONLINE JOURNALISM

A look at the use and abuse of podcasts in online journalism




Throughout its history, journalism has undergone several changes. These changes can be seen in terms of content, features, ownership etc in all print productions around the world.


All these changes happen as a result of society's evolution i.e capitalism and the introduction of new technologies. The most important factor must be the phenomenal growth of the Internet. Guardian web pages few years ago

The idea that the New York Times will only be available as an online version in five years time seems rather weird. Baudrillard would say that we are in a historical moment in which the virtual world is taking over the physical. Baudrillard's interpretation might be right or not but what is sure is that screens of computers are – at least in the western civilization - the most used battlefield for black words and white surfaces.
I believe journalism can be seen as a human body that is slowly but radically changing, becoming a less terrestrial being. When a newspaper or a broadcasting corporation (such as the Guardian or BBC) goes online today, it does not just become electronic, or virtual, but it becomes a multimedia creature that exists thanks to the co-existence of different media forms.
The most famous form of multimedia is a podcast. Guardian video home


Wikipedia explanation of a podcast is the following: “A podcast is a digital media file, or a series of such files, that is distributed over the Internet using syndication feeds for playback on portable media players and personal computers.” The mechanics of it is “an automatic mechanism whereby multimedia computer files are transferred from a server to a client, which pulls down XML files containing the Internet addresses of the media files. In general, these files contain audio or video, but also could be images, text, PDF, or any file type.”
Podcasts can also be videocasts, audiocasts, imagecasts or even a mixture of audio and video-images. I interviewed Angelo Miotto, subeditor and newseditor of the online newspaper PeaceReporter, in order to understand the new changes and challenges that new media has created in the world of journalism.
“The range of contents that is available today for any online publication has been made possible thanks to the development of new technologies that has been able to speed up web traffic and software. The traditional printed medias, thus, picked up the occasion to briefly re-elaborate their own image in order to gain new readers. This new audience, in the contemporary logic of capitalism, it is identify with contacts to ‘sell’ to earn advertisings. The Italian experience demonstrates how in few years there was a real proper boom of the phenomenon. However editorial quality did not stick to quantity production.
Too often audio-videos to download are of very poor quality, edited in a rush or not precise in details. Moreover new hybrid experiences were introduced, such as a tv news realized into a radio studio inside a newspaper editorial unit. This is the case of ‘la Repubblica’, one of the most read daily Italian newspapers. la Repubblica multimedia The website is full of news and fast contents but it is fashion or gossip news that are predominant on multimedia sections. In order to get a quick idea of this you just need to compare the multimedia contents of
‘la Repubblica’ and the ones of the New York Times. Online version of newspapers developed in a dynamic way; often readers are called to vote on dolls or called to participate through forums and blogs. However, the most innovative proposal is the one launched by the Spanish newspaper El Pais. Elpais.com, the most visited online newspaper in Spain, build up a section called Yo periodista (I journalist). In this section readers are able to produce the final product that will be published online.” Multimedia [podcast] improved Internet possibility of creation, therefore journalism ones too. What Mr. Miotto made clear, though, is the fact that editors and journalists should not forget that quality of production must come before quantity. A correct use of technologies can lead to interesting results; an abuse of multimedia would just create chaos.

Example of PeaceReporter audiocast

Example of PeaceReporter photogallery

PeaceReporter multimedia gallery