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Locked-Out Journalists Turn To Podcasting

Posted by Zonk on from the staying-on-the-air-anyway dept.

An anonymous reader writes "An Interesting Canadian Press article is up on the Macleans website discussing locked out union journalists podcasting to stay on the air. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation locked out 5,500 unionized employees Aug. 15 over a contract dispute. Most of those walking the picket line are radio, TV and internet journalists and technicians. In the last few days, they've been cranking out podcasts - locked out folks in Fredericton, New Brunswick; Regina, Saskatchewan; Vancouver, British Columbia and other cities have all participated. Some have 'real news', music and interviews. Others are more propaganda-like. A whole batch of them are at www.cbcunplugged.com."

14 of 146 comments (clear)

  1. Two drink minimum by FatRatBastard · · Score: 5, Funny

    Some have 'real news', music and interviews. Others are more propaganda-like.

    So basically it's no different than your normal CBC broadcast.

    [rim shot]

    Thank you.. I'll be here all week.

  2. Critical Mass? by jarich · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Could this event be the one that shows people how much Podcasting can replace traditional broadcasting? A critical mass moment showing the established media types how effect Podcasting can be? Or creating enough content for force more organization to the content (like a newspaper or a TV newscast)?

    Turning a large group of professionals loose with a medium like this would make me very nervous if I owned a TV station! :)

    --
    Agile Artisans
    1. Re:Critical Mass? by grazzy · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Or.. show the world how useless it is, and realize absolutely nobody is going to give a sh*t.. much like blogs.

  3. Hmm by Dirtside · · Score: 5, Funny
    An Interesting Canadian Press article
    Ah yes, the Interesting Canadian Press. Much preferable to the Staid Tedious Canadian Press.
    --
    "Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
  4. My spoon is too big. by ichigo+2.0 · · Score: 3, Funny

    1. Create a mp3
    2. Put it on a website
    3. ???
    4. Postcast podpod castpost castpod!

  5. Re:CPB? by hungrygrue · · Score: 3, Funny

    Yes, in fact I believe you may be the first person to have ever "mistaked".

  6. Just remember its a lockout not a strike by Noclar7 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    A good friend of mine works with the cbc, and trust me, they want to work! Its especially depressing to see here in nothern New Brunswick since on the same street in Bathurst, there are also hotel workers on strike, nurses and healthcare workers on strike, and a mill that just shut down with a days notice, laying off about 500 people just down the road.

  7. unionized? by Yonatanz · · Score: 5, Funny
    The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation locked out 5,500 unionized employees

    Good thing too, you don't want those un-ionized employees going about stealing everybody's ions.

    I wonder where they were locked though... In a Faraday cage, maybe?

  8. Re:Hate the term "podcasting" by hungrygrue · · Score: 5, Informative

    It is not "streaming audio". Streaming requires enormous bandwidth in order to play in real time. A Podcast is downloaded and saved to the subscriber's disk for playback at a later time. It does not matter, therefore, if limited bandwidth means that a twenty minute episode will take fourty minutes to download

    Streaming audio also has the same limitation that radio does, and which podcasting provides a solution to: the listener must tune in on the day and time of the broadcast in order to hear it. There are a large number of Public Radio programs which I enjoy but my schedule does not allow me to listen to live. Even more programs that I listen to are not offered by stations in my area. Podcasts allow me to subscribe to the feeds that I want and listen to them whenever and wherever I want, including on my mp3 player when I am away from my computer.
  9. Improved ratings by FatRatBastard · · Score: 4, Interesting

    One of the funniest things I've read about the lockout is how the CFL broadcasts have improved their ratings since they've gone play-by-playless.

  10. Inept website by OpenGLFan · · Score: 4, Insightful

    They need to totally redo that website. Right now it's definitely got a "we're mad, and we're podcasting" feel to it. I thought, hey, let's see what the journalists are reporting about! Maybe they're some creative people who've been locked out! Let's listen to them. And the message I got was "We're mad, and we're podcasting."

    They've missed the important point: you have to podcast about something. You can't just podcast. Look at the links on the right -- do you see all the journalists? All listed right there. Hey! They're podcasting! Yes, but what the frack are you podcasting about? It's like looking at a TV guide that says:

    7pm: Richard Dean Anderson, Amanda Tapping
    8pm: Joe Flanigan, David Hewlett
    9pm: Edward James Olmos, Katee Sackhoff

    which, if you're not already fans of Stargate and Battlestar Galactica, gives you no information and doesn't compel you to watch the show.

    1. Re:Inept website by mcc · · Score: 3, Insightful

      They've missed the important point: you have to podcast about something. You can't just podcast.

      See, and that's where you're wrong. It's like "blogs". You'd think they'd have to "blog" about something? Nope, it turns out "I'm blogging!" and "blogs are important!" are both perfectly sufficient messages to sustain a blog.

      Your insistence that you need content to broadcast is outmoded thinking. Blogs and podcasts, and with them the internet, have moved beyond that. "New Journalism" doesn't need content, or quality, or accuracy, or informative value, or entertainment value; it just needs to be there. What we are observing here is a revolution, and its goal is to revolutionize. It's not revolutionizing anything in particular, mind you. It's just revolutionizing.

      --
      Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
  11. Ionized Journalists by Original+Replica · · Score: 3, Funny

    Working in tandem with the un-ionized journalists they will canada the first plasma screen visable from space. But they still won't have anything to say.

    --
    We are all just people.
  12. Re:Hate the term "podcasting" by Jeff+DeMaagd · · Score: 3, Informative

    Point still valid.

    I'm surprised that people on a geek site wave technical ideas away before even bothering to spend any time understand them. It is more than just an audio file on a web site somewhere.

    What makes "podcasts" an improvement over just audio files on a web site somewhere is that you can subscribe to them using a podcast aggregator. An aggregator lets the user subscribe to a bunch of different feeds, when a feed has a new file, it automatically downloads the latest files. It then takes those files and puts them in the user's media library, and also can copy them to the user's portable audio device. Then the user can play the "recently added files" on the media player in the way to work while driving or riding.

    That whole automated chain of events is what makes podcasting a vastly improved delivery system over manually checking every site, downloading every single file and them manually copying them to their portable audio device. I think it is a great improvement over radio. While most of radio, and most podcasts are garbage, with podcasts, I can pick and chose when and where I can play the recordings.