I am doing a report on Newspapers using podcasting in their news rooms and wondered what you all thought about that?

If a local paper would hire me to prodce their podcasts, I WOULD LOVE IT!!!

I'm a public relations/media relations professional for a living, which means I have a lot of contact with newspaper folks. I'm also a former radio reporter and now, obviously, a podcaster. Shoot me an email if you want to chat. I might be able to help you out. My email is steve-@-endgamepr.com (remove the dashes).

Steve, which one were you talking to? Me or GAH? If it is me, I will drop you a line tonight when I get home, if it was GAH, he should drop you a line IMMEDIATELY!!!

Sorry ... should have quoted. I was talking to GAH. He and I chatted via email last night. I'm not sure if I helped him or not, to be honest.

I wish I could say I knew someone that was looking for a podcaster to work for a newspaper. But, then again, if I did ... I'd keep it for myself

I recently did a proposal to my local newspaper to start using podcasting on their site. The two people I met with loved the demo, and were very excited about it.

As I followed up the next week on the phone (left voice message) with the guys who were very excited about the prospect of having a seasoned "podcasting" pro do their podcasts, I received an e-mail response from them saying, quote, "At this time, the overall feeling is we are not ready to make the jump into podcasting as of right now. We still have a long way to go to get more comfortable using what we have readily available to us. I will be honest, is that I don’t think I can send my staff down another avenue right now until they are more comfortable with what they currently have in front of them."

Behind the scenes I found out that while the newsroom and management was excited about the prospect of podcasting, it was the web guys and the IT department that shot the idea down.

A case of old dogs, new tricks I guess.

More and more newspapers are including video and audio on their websites, but (and I don't think I mentioned this to GAH via email last night) I'm not sure I've seen too many that are doing actual full-blown podcasts. I really should talk to my local newspaper, though. In the past they actually ran a radio network that provided news to local radio stations. They might be open to this sort of thing.

I think you'll find this a lot. I'm doing some work for a company that was initially intended to be a podcast, and may yet still be, but the underlying vibe I get from the web folks is that they don't see a lot of value to it. At least from their perspectives of storage space, bandwidth, and set up. I think sometimes when the owners or marketers of a company talk to their web developers about this stuff, they forget that the devs are coming at this from an old-school technical angle and not from some inherent knowledge of what works on the net. For the "Idea People" whose job it is to find ways to reach more people all the technical jargon of podcasting must be quite intimidating; it's probably easier for them to skip the research and translations, and just defer to the IT guys who must know what they're talking about. That's too bad, because there are probably a lot of companies that could really use this technology but aren't.

Eric