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OPINION: Smartphones usher in golden age for podcasting [Chicago Tribune]
[October 01, 2014]

OPINION: Smartphones usher in golden age for podcasting [Chicago Tribune]


(Chicago Tribune (IL) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Oct. 01--I believe in podcasts.

I subscribe to 33 of them, some of which come out daily. And while I don't get to them all, I probably spend three hours a day with my earbuds in while engaged in activities ripe for multitasking, such as commuting, walking the dog, cleaning the kitchen, shopping, exercising and puttering in the basement or the yard.



I believe that this medium -- which celebrated its unofficial 10th birthday on the first National Podcast Day on Tuesday -- is ideal for our busy, mobile, on-demand lives.

I believe that we'll soon look back on 2014 as podcasting's infancy, the days when it still accounted for less than 2 percent of audio consumption, when only 30 percent of Americans reported having ever listened to a podcast, and when newspaper columnists had to spend a paragraph defining podcasts for the roughly half of the population who tell pollsters they're not familiar with them.


A podcast is a program that you download to your computer or phone and listen to at your convenience. Sometimes it's a repurposed broadcast radio program -- for example, "Wait Wait . . . Don't Tell Me!", an NPR show produced locally and aired on WBEZ-FM 91.5, is currently the fourth most popular podcast in iTunes' U.S. charts. More often, though, it lives only online, is free and supported by advertisers.

But while I simply believe in podcasts, Alex Blumberg is committed to them.

Blumberg, 47, a former Chicagoan with two children under age 5, has just quit high-profile production jobs at public radio's "This American Life" and "Planet Money" programs (respectively No. 1 and No. 18 in the iTunes ranking) to try to launch a for-profit network he initially called The American Podcasting Corp.

Though he's since dropped the name, the concept remains the same: a company that produces long-form narrative programs with the same high journalistic and production values of the shows from which he recently resigned.

Blumberg, who lived in Chicago from 1990 to 2002 and worked for "This American Life" when it was based here, told me in a phone interview from his home in New York City last week that he sees what tech analysts and data crunchers see in podcasting: a medium poised for exponential growth.

In the early days -- it was 2004 when a journalist coined the term "podcast" after the iPod, then the most common device on which they were played -- listening to online audio was a chore. You had to find it, download it and, if you wanted to listen on the go, plug your mobile player into your computer and upload the file.

Smartphones have changed all that. Now, if you're one of the 54 percent of the U.S. population that carries these devices (it's 78 percent of those age 12-34), you can subscribe with a few finger taps to shows that then automatically appear in your podcast app, as easy to listen to as a song in your music library.

And if your car has Bluetooth technology, now virtually standard in new vehicles, flipping on a podcast is nearly as simple as flipping on the radio.

Apple announced last year that iTunes had reached 1 billion subscriptions for more than a quarter million podcast programs worldwide. Other networks of affiliated podcasts have begun forming to offer brand assurance to listeners and advertisers. In September, Edison Research reported a 25 percent increase over last year in the number of people who said they'd listened to a podcast in the previous month.

These are the kinds of facts that Blumberg and his business partner are sharing with potential investors. You can hear them make their awkward pitches and listen to them discuss their hopes and fears with their wives on "StartUp," a podcast chronicling their still fledgling effort to make a living as podcast entrepreneurs (podtrepreneurs?). It debuted last month and is now No. 9 on the iTunes chart.

"I'm really bullish on this," said Blumberg, who said he expects to launch his network with three shows by early winter. "It's the perfect medium for our connected age." Whether he makes it or goes bust, I'm all ears.

Thirty-three podcast subscriptions? More, actually, if you count the multiple shows that come with Slate's feed. I've listed them all at chicagotribune.com/zorn, where I invite you to recommend your favorites as well.

___ (c)2014 the Chicago Tribune Visit the Chicago Tribune at www.chicagotribune.com Distributed by MCT Information Services

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