Duncan Riley, TechCrunch writer, entrepreneur, and host of TPN’s On The Pod, has been nominated in the Performancing Awards 2007. Give him your vote!
The Best Blog Podcast – Performancing Awards 2007 Reader’s Choice Poll | Performancing.com
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Last month I recorded a couple of pilot episodes of a new podcast series where I walk around Melbourne with one of the City of Melbourne’s “greeters”, Jill. This is a project cooked up between myself, Tourism Victoria and the City of Melbourne. We’ve recorded two pilots and I’d really appreciate it if a few of you in Melbourne would grab these and do the walk while you listen to the podcast and then give me feedback on how well it works.
The first tour takes us through Melbourne’s seedy past and is called “Politics, Prostitutes and Poverty”. The second, “Lingering in Laneways” takes us down some of Melbourne’s hidden laneways to discover some of the best kept secret bars, shops and restaurants.
Get both of them at TPN’s Melbourne Confidential site.
There are a couple of stories about podcasting in Australia in The Age today. I chatted with both journalists at length over the last month for the stories but ended up with two lines out of a 2+ page story. Go figure. All of my journo and ex-journo friends (including Mrs R) this morning counseled me to just wear it on the chin. And perhaps they are right. But I’m pissed off about it anyway. And here’s why.
In the main story, by Andrew Bock, the ABC, Austereo (owner of Triple M and Fox FM) and even Salty Dog (congrats Dennis!) get their download figures trumpeted. Where are TPN’s figures? Omitted. Deliberate? I don’t know.
What I do know is that Fairfax, the owners of The Age, have a commercial relationship with Austereo. Fairfax hosts Austereo’s websites. Was that disclosed in the article? No, it was not. Accidental? Perhaps. According to the article, Austereo is doing more than 850,000 podcast downloads a month across all its stations. TPN is doing about the same (we spiked a few months back and hit about 800k, last month it was about 650K, which is where Austereo’s last annual report in July 2007 said they were at). TPN is a one-man, self-funded, three-year-old operation. Austereo is decades-old, publicly-listed company with revenues in excess of $255 million pa which has some of the biggest names in radio working on their shows.
Now if *you* were writing the story about podcasting, don’t you think this would have been an interesting comparison? Apparently someone at Fairfax didn’t think so.
Fairfax also now owns Southern Cross Broadcasting, owners of top radio stations 3AW and 2UE. Was that disclosed in the article? No, it wasn’t. If you take TPN’s listener numbers (450 – 500k per month) and compare those to, say, 3AW, I think we’re about the same size, perhaps even bigger.
Does Fairfax have a conflict of interest when it covers stories about radio and podcasting? What do you think?
By the way, I don’t blame the journo’s involved. They are both swell guys. I’m sure if their stories are being edited after they submit them, and important conflict of interest disclosures aren’t being made, then they would both be concerned. Is the paper interested in reporting news or in promoting a company they have a commercial interest in?
Luckily we now have alternative places we can get our news from, such as NORG. If you aren’t contributing to that already, I encourage you to. We have the tools now to report our own news. Of course, I’ll need to get my backside out of this chair so I know what’s going on the world before I’ll have much to contribute…
From our 2007 survey. I’m rather surprised at how old you all are. I wonder how much of this is a reflection of our content versus the general age of podcast listeners?
It’s that time of the year again when we ask you, our most loyal and lovable audience, to spend ten minutes of your life answering a bunch of questions about what makes you tick. We do this in the hope that this information (all anonymous of course) will encourage advertisers to increase their interest in advertising on our podcasts. We love producing these shows for you and we love the fact that they are freely available. However it takes a lot of work, time and energy and the costs of the infrastructure grow every year. We need to generate some revenue to allow us to keep building and getting better. You can help once a year by filling out our survey.
Stan Relihan had me back on his very popular Connections podcast today to discuss the results of our Digg contest as well as discuss his learnings from his first couple of months podcasting. We talk about LinkedIn, Twitter, and how to use podcasting to build your personal brand.
