The Next Big Things for Newspapers: Podcast, Vodcast

By: Steve Outing Podcasting and vodcasting may not yet be entirely mainstream, but with the popularity of Apple's iPod portable music player (and competing brands) and its podcast-ready iTunes music software, that's not far away. Ergo, these new media formats should become part of any newspaper's content strategy. Indeed, for a small but growing number of newspapers, they already are.

Why podcast? The reason is simple enough. Young people, especially, are spending more of their time on the Internet and listening to iPods, and less time on the printed word. For newspapers, it's imperative to reach news consumers via digital channels. They can deliver the news directly via podcasting or vodcasting as an alternative to people reading the print edition, or add value to the printed-newspaper experience by offering audio and video content that supplements what's in the newspaper's paper edition and Web site. (And all the while, adding a new revenue stream to the company mix.)

Let's take a look at a few newspaper podcasting and vodcasting initiatives, and you'll see why they're so important.

The Telegraph's podcast show

Late last year, U.K.'s The Telegraph hired its first podcast editor. Long-time radio journalist Guy Ruddle left the BBC, where most recently he presented the "Wake Up to Monday" show on BBC Radio 5, to develop The Telegraph's podcast strategy. What he's developed as stage 1 of the podcasting initiative is a daily podcast news show that features Ruddle as the show's moderator and chief interviewer, and regular participation by the newspaper's journalists. It sounds not unlike a radio interview show.

The Telegraph Podcast usually runs somewhere around 30 minutes in length, and features Ruddle interviewing Telegraph reporters, columnists and editors. On Saturday's podcast, for instance, one of Ruddle's interviewees was columnist Simon Heffer; the two chatted about Heffer's Saturday column, which bemoaned the U.K. government's proclivity to banning things -- like fox hunts, smoking in public places, etc.

Part of the idea of this podcast, Ruddle explains, is to give readers/listeners "another way to access Telegraph journalism." But while some newspapers have developed their first podcasts as simple readings of the day's top headlines, The Telegraph has chosen to create something a bit more interesting and that supplements -- not just repeats -- Telegraph print and online content. The conversations Ruddle conducts, while often about a Telegraph journalist's specific published column or article, touch on topics that aren't always in the text version.

Certainly, Ruddle's podcast show could be listened to on a drive into work; it's partly about "allowing people to 'read' The Telegraph while they are driving," he says. "But we also think we can add value to the paper. You can read about someone in the paper and then, hopefully, hear them in their own words on the podcast, for example."

I think this is a smart first step into podcasting for a newspaper. Many other first podcasts from newspapers feature an announcer reading the top headlines -- the idea being that people may choose to get their news first thing in the morning from the paper's podcast rather than the print edition or Web site. While that's a fine and useful service, there are plenty of other ways for a news consumer to get the same thing elsewhere online. For instance, rather than a reading of top stories from my local newspaper's podcast, I'd prefer to get my top national and international headlines from a credible national source like National Public Radio or the New York Times. A podcast of top stories from my local paper would interest me only if the focus was on local news.

Most newspapers could easily copy The Telegraph's approach of producing a daily podcast that's more radio show than headlines read out loud. All it really takes is a competent host who's good at interviewing, and staff journalists willing to take a few minutes out of their schedules to be interviewed periodically.

Further out, Ruddle plans to expand the podcasting program: "There are any number of different podcasts we could and probably will do -- some utilizing existing Telegraph journalism and some original stuff using our journalists or, at the very least, our brand values."

Naples Daily News podcasts first, vodcasts next

At Florida's Naples Daily News, a Scripps-owned newspaper, podcasting is well under way, and vodcasting is set to debut in April. For both of those initiatives, the goal is to produce broadcast-quality, professional audio and video work -- and to get away from the amateur sounds and sights of some of the newspaper industry's early experiments with podcasting and vodcasting.

Heading up the charge is Rob Curley, director of new media, who joined the newspaper last August after heading up the award-winning online operation at the Lawrence Journal-World in Kansas. Early on in Naples, Curley initiated podcasts.

He and Ruddle apparently are operating on similar playbooks. The main news podcast is simply called the "Southwest Florida News," and features a variety of content. Each edition starts out with local weather, then moves into a half dozen or so news stories. One or more of those stories typically features an online editor interviewing reporters about their coverage; for example, last Friday's podcast featured interviews with two reporters who covered a series of car accidents where people drove into canals on dead-end streets where local governments hadn't erected proper barriers.

After the news, there's sports; the best letter to the editor is picked out for the day and read aloud; and an online editor talks about the most interesting upcoming events from the local calendar. The program ends up being a little bit of everything from the paper. The typical podcast runs between 15 and 25 minutes; there's not a set time limit.

It's worth noting, however, that the news podcast isn't the Daily News' most popular. That, Curley points out, is a podcast by the paper's minor-league hockey beat writer; his podcast gets five times the downloads as does the news podcast.

With podcasts, Curley and his team made a decision to make them sound as professional as possible, but without spending much money and mostly using existing staff. While the podcasts are recorded by staff online journalists who are not professional broadcasters (and use $25 microphones purchased at Radio Shack), they sound professional thanks to low-cost tricks like using royalty-free music and professional announcers for lead-ins, lead-outs, and intro announcements for regular sections of the podcasts. The newspaper used a voice agency in New York to record a bunch of boilerplate lead-ins and announcements, rather than rely on untrained staff members. Using a non-local voice agency was important, so that the Daily News podcast didn't have the same voices as used by local broadcasters or advertisers. The price for that work: all of $150 for 15 minutes of a pro announcer's time.

Curley says that for a typical news podcast, at least five different voices can be heard in addition to the boilerplate professional voice work -- an indication of the buy-in from the newsroom. The podcasts also aim to drive listeners to the paper's Web site and to the print edition.

The Daily News vodcast

While the Naples Daily News is one of the pioneers in newspaper podcasting, what's more important about that operation is what it's doing next: a daily news vodcast (or video podcast). Starting in April, the paper's new-media staff will produce a Monday-Friday vodcast that's designed for viewing on portable devices like the iPod and on the computer screen.

Naples is an obvious market to try this out. The community of 22,000 does not have a TV station and thus no local newscast; residents are served by TV stations in Fort Myers, about a 45-minute drive to the north. But Naples "deserves" a video news service, says Curley, and now the newspaper is in a position to provide it.

The paper has set up a studio and added several employees to produce the daily vodcast: an anchor/producer (who has a broadcast background) and three videographers (one of them an intern). There are also two commercial videographers/3D animators on the paper's staff who do commercial work and are capable of producing professional-grade TV graphics. Those two positions are not counted in the video newscast budget; they have their own budget related to commercial video development work. (Their work is demonstrated on this promo for the video newscasts.)

If that sounds like a lot, Curley points out that six weeks prior to the debut of the daily news vodcast, "we have pre-sold enough ad contracts to cover all of our new labor costs and much of the capital expenses/start-up costs we had to begin the project."

In terms of what the news vodcast will look like, Curley says it's more an "anti-TV newscast." The idea is to craft a program that's not a clone of local TV news. Just as with the podcasts, this vodcast news program will have an anchor reading news and interviewing Daily News reporters and columnists. He says that many newspaper staff members are excited to take part and are providing scripts based on their reporting, while others want nothing to do with it.

The staff has been practicing the show, producing the daily vodcast but not releasing it publicly 'till the April debut date. By the time that day rolls around, vodcast viewers "will be seeing episode No. 25," says Curley. If the concept doesn't turn out as well as expected, he says the team will try new approaches and be nimble, inventing as they go.

Is this news vodcasting the future for newspapers? For cities and towns like Naples where there's no TV news except from neighboring communities, perhaps. The low cost of vodcasting makes it possible. Even for markets where TV news is present, newspapers well may decide that this is a new revenue opportunity worth pursuing.

D.C., Palm Beach & Knoxville experiments

Also doing vodcasting is WashingtonPost.com, one of the first newspaper companies to have tried video podcasts. It publishes a regular vodcast featuring the website's best documentary and breaking-news video (see it here), which had an advertiser back in December but is currently without one. There's also a five-day-a-week audio podcast that selects a papers from the newspaper and an announcer reads the entire story; no luck finding an advertiser for that yet.

Deputy multimedia editor Chet Rhodes says the plan is to launch several more podcasts and vodcasts over the next few months as part of a partnership with WTOP radio, and as the website staff figures out how to work more with staff at the newspaper.

Partnerships with local radio stations clearly are something worth exploring. At PalmBeachPost.com, the online staff produces a feature called Top Story Rewind, which takes the top radio stories of the week and compiles them into the podcast. Interactive projects editor Will Sullivan describes it as an "eclectic mix of the top stories, features and sometimes commentary from columnists or other personalities."

"It's a pretty easy system that most other papers with radio -- or possibly TV -- partnerships could easily replicate," he says. Reporters from the newspaper record stories for the radio, and Sullivan says that they seem to get more "jazzed" about hearing their own voices on the radio than just on the Web.

Another video-podcast innovation comes from the Knoxville News-Sentinel in Tennessee. It distributes a video column called RandomThis, which debuted early this year, and now includes video ads (but not in the iTunes vodcast version). Managing editor for multimedia Jack Lail says the videos also are posted to Google Video to boost audience size. The hope is that people might stumble on one of the newspaper's videos via Google, then click through to the Web site and watch others, or subscribe to the paper's vodcasts.

The temporary podcast

One other technique for podcasting that's worth mentioning is the "temporary" podcast. Generally, a podcast is a regular, long-running program; the user subscribes to a podcast and continues to receive it over the long haul. But it's also worth publishing short-run or temporary podcasts. An example might be for a reporter covering a big murder trial to produce a daily trial-summary podcast each day of the trial until a verdict is reached, or for reporters covering a hurricane to produce a daily podcast through the storm period and immediate aftermath.

A couple real-world examples demonstrate the model:

At the Greensboro (North Carolina) News & Record, religion writer Nancy McLaughlin did a story about a young woman who gave a kidney to an ill woman who she didn't know -- because she felt that God had told her to do it. The paper's Web site produced a series of podcasts featuring the two women reading from their journals about their experiences leading up to and after the transplant surgery.

At DenverPost.com, fashion reporter Suzanne Brown recorded a series of podcasts from the New York fashion shows while reporting there. (You can find links to those podcasts on the main podcast page.)

The staffing decision

Moving into podcasting and vodcasting can be a difficult thing for some newspaper staffs. The results of text-oriented journalists producing broadcast content can be sketchy, as demonstrated by some of the earliest newspaper podcasting experiments. A trend made obvious in some of the descriptions above is bringing in the talents of broadcast professionals to serve as anchors and hosts, or using the services of professionals to provide boilerplate content and letting the non-broadcast journalists loose on the rest.

At DenverPost.com, the earliest podcasts produced were read by college students. That wasn't a bad decision in the beginning, as the online staff had to work with a small budget. But recently, the site hired Mark Roberts, who has worked for NPR and Colorado Public Radio as a freelance and staff reporter, to be the daily news podcaster.

"Broadcasters have the great advantage of being experienced with the microphone," says Gil Asakawa, executive producer of DenverPost.com. "I don't think that's a necessity, for instance, if we have a columnist or reporter do a podcast. ... But for the top headline news, having a presentation that's authoritative and still be loose and engaging is important. ... I think podcasts by definition can maintain the 'do-it-yourself' and people can accept that."

The danger in getting "too professional" in newspaper podcasting is that it becomes just a clone of traditional TV newscasting -- something most newspaper podcast pioneers say they're trying to avoid. "I think there's room for something that's different, and perhaps quirkier, than broadcast news," says Asakawa. "Podcasting is still at a stage where that DIY ethic informs the sound more than the need for strict structure and a bunch of rules."