Innovative podcasts and the future of journalism

Olga Ruiz: Create something unique.

PAMPLONA, Spain -- In August of 2013, Olga Ruiz returned from a refreshing summer vacation ready to start her 16th season on the COPE radio network in Barcelona.

But on her arrival, the managers told her and her team that they were being fired. "The best period in my professional life began the moment they fired me," she told me. "They gave me a second life in journalism."

Two weeks later, she invited her old team and some other journalists to her home for dinner. They decided to launch a new radio organization with long-form stories of up to 30 minutes on topics ignored or treated superficially by mainstream media. They would devote obsessive attention to the quality of the sound.

Versión en español

How to decide whether to offer podcasts on your site

Versión en español aquí.

At the moment I am leading a course for Latin American journalists who have created their own digital news media (blog for the course in Spanish is here).

We just analyzed the multimedia aspects of a number of websites and a question arose about the value of offering podcasts. The simple answer is that it depends on the purpose of the site and the characteristics of the audience. 

There are tools available to offer a bewildering array of different services on your site, but before you deploy any of them, consider these questions:

• How likely is it that this new service (podcast, video, audio, poll, blog, forum etc.) will attract a new segment of the target audience?
• Do our competitors offer this service? If we can’t do it better than they do, maybe we should not consider it.