Friday, June 29, 2007

reviews.cnet.com Want to keep your news podcast audience hooked? Give them good show notes.

Recently, I've been pleased that the Denver Post finally got the feed for its weekday All News podcast working right. As I mentioned earlier, for a long time that feed only worked sporadically. But now the day's headlines, skillfully and wryly presented by Steve Alexander, show up reliably in my podcatcher.

Why does this matter? Like many people, audio news is a key part of my daily routine. In the morning, while I make breakfast, I listen to Colorado public radio. Then I load up my MP3 player with the latest news podcasts to listen to while I exercise or run errands by bike. I only get a newspaper Thursday-Sunday, and even then I usually only glance at the front page. Sitting down, unfolding, and reading a dead-tree newspaper just isn't my style most days.

I love headline-style podcasts, and I like to get an audio overview of news headlines from all kinds of news media -- not just radio. So I listen regularly to headline podcasts from MSNBC, BBC News, and (now) the Denver Post.

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Why should a news org bother with a headlines podcast? It drives site traffic and keeps you connected to your community. Almost every day, I end up visiting news sites to look up stories I first heard about on the headlines podcast.

If you do a headlines podcast, please publish show notes! That's just a blog posting for each episode listing titles with direct links to the stories mentioned that day. From the listener's perspective, this is crucial. The Denver Post's podcast doesn't offer show notes, so each time I go to look up a story I heard about on the podcast I have to wrestle with the site's not-always-reliable search engine.

In fact, show notes is where most mainstream news org headline podcasts fall flat. For instance, the BBC Radio headlines podcast Newspod offers show notes -- sort of. They do provide text listings of the topics covered in each episode, but no links. MSNBC's News Headlines podcast offers no show notes. And neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post offer show notes for any of their podcasts.

Here's a good tutorial on writing podcast show notes. Much of this process can be automated through a content management system. For a good example of clean, simple, link-focused podcast show notes, check out the Geek News Central podcast or CNet's Buzz Out Loud.

Podcast listeners are almost always Web-savvy. Expect that they'll often want to jump from their headphones to their computer. If you hope to keep them engaged, it's a mistake to make them hunt for further information.

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