Archive for the ‘Podcasting’ Category

There’s been a lot of talk like this lately about the President bypassing the media through web sites, his Jay Leno appearance and other says. I don’t know what the big deal is. At the rate print media are disappearing, there are fewer and fewer reporters covering almost anything, except maybe the octuplets.

The media simply are not gatekeepers any more. One part of their transition will be to make the information out there meaningful by prioritizing and “connecting the dots.” This isn’t some evil new scheme. Pure objectivity has never existed, and when attempted it leads to silly attempts to dig up non-credible sources to “balance” a story.

I spent most of Super Tuesday flipping between CNN and MSNBC to see which network would give me the best feel for the incredibly complex picture. As usual, MSNBC seemed to have better analysis (CNN spends too much time patting itself on the back), but the real surprise came when I started sneaking upstairs to visit the washingtonpostpolitics.com web site.

Graphically, CNN’s presentation of the raw numbers was far easier to follow, providing more information faster than MSNBC. But as is increasingly my gripe with CNN, they provided too little in the way of perspective. Even on Super Tuesday, we viewed the news not from the eye of an eagle, but rather from that of an earthworm.

But when I sneaked off to the computer and visited washingtonpostpolitics.com, I was blown away by the efficiency with which the editors provided up-to-date information in a way that made sense. There was a map on left (appropriately) showing the Democratic results, and one on the right showing the Republican returns. As each state was projected, it was color coded for the winning candidate. But best of all, you could simply hover your mouse over a state and immediately get the current results and the percentage of boxes counted. In seconds, I was able to get a better read on the elections than I could gain from a half hour of the news networks combined.

The key, of course, was the interactive nature of the web. By and large, you still can’t hover over a map to get information on TV. But it goes deeper than that. The stories written through the night also did a much better job of summarizing the returns and making sense of them.

I shouldn’t have been surprised, I guess. For a while, I’ve been addicted to the Washington Post’s daily podcasts by Ed O’Keefe, who had taken a break from those to manage the Super Tuesday reporting on the web site. His podcasts are the best daily political fix anywhere — print or broadcast. Better than Hardball. Better than NPR Morning Edition or All Things Considered. Heck, even better than Jon Stewart’s Daily Show! So I shouldn’t be surprised that washingtonpostpolitics.com did the best job on Super Tuesday.

This also serves as a reminder that increasingly, podcasting is playing a major role in how we get our information. We download it with our daily sync and listen to it at our leisure, at the health club or in the car. Indeed, I’d say there are three or four podcasts that are more useful than anything on cable these days. I’ll make a point to give it more attention here going forward.