Brent Kearney

We have eBooks, audio-books, podcasts and portable ipod-videos — what’s next in the new media explosion?

Podzines. Podzines are the audio version of magazines. Don’t have time to read The New Yorker? Perhaps you could listen to it during your commute to/from work. The journalists themselves could narrate their articles, or the publishers could take care of it. Podzines will open up the enormous volumes of magazine literature to the jet-setting, commuting, on-the-go crowd who programs their computers to download audio to their iPods before they leave the house in the morning.

The idea of Podzines occurred to me recently, after I forked over $6 for a really interesting looking magazine, and wondered to myself when I would find time to read it. I decided that I’d read it when I went camping the following week. I did, and it was thoroughly enjoyable. I don’t go camping very often though, and it would be nice to experience some of the quality content that many magazines have to offer more often, without sacrificing time from my other activities. A Podzine of a good news magazine would become part of my daily dose of audio news, usually soaked in while I’m making & eating breakfast, or catching up on email correspondence.

As it turns out, Googling for Podzine brings up a ton of matches, so the new fad is already well underway! Now all I need is a portable media player :). A brief scan of the search results doesn’t reveal any big names in magazines though, so this new trend has clearly not taken hold in the corporate world yet.

* * Note * *
For some reason, spammers have become fascinated with this article. Akismet stops tens of thousands of blog spam comments on this blog, but every week it a couple of them make it into my moderation queue for this post. I don’t know what it is about this particular post that the spammers like so much, but I’m sick of logging in to mark them as spam, so I disabled comments on this post. Sorry.

I’d be happy to add your comment if you contact me by e-mail.

You can download the C-SPAN video from this link, using a BitTorrent client. Other clips and the full text of Colbert’s monologue can be found here. If you’re interested in American politics at all, Colbert’s performance at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner cannot be missed.

Colbert’s scathing satire left the President and his entourage, along with the Washington press corps, as cold as the post-911 media chill. By the time his monologue finished, even the crickets in the room had stopped chirping. With the exception of a small handful of people. Those people who kept laughing must have either been outside of the Bush administration and the media, had too much wine, or were good-humoured patriots like Colbert himself. The majority, stone-faced, were either part of the 32% who support Bush — and, being the media, the metaphor of White House backwash was just all too apt — or, were just too uncomfortable at the confrontation that they dared not laugh. Thats OK for Colbert, because the rest of the world was laughing.

The monologue segued into the climax of the evening: Colbert’s “audition tape” for the job of White House Press Secretary. The whole ceremony seemed to come crashing to an abrupt end the second that the videotape stopped. The President and First Lady left in a hurry. The media ran away with their tails between their legs and their brown noses bloodied.