The Experiment

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"You should think about doing broadcasting. I think you'd be really good at it."

That was by far the most-unexpected comment I received at Blog Indiana, from an attendee at my talk named Charlie (I think his name was Charlie. Anyone who knows me for any length of time in real life knows I'm godawful with names). I honestly hadn't thought about broadcasting since high school work with the student television station.

But as I sat through sessions on the conference's second day I thought more about it. I thought about burgeoning internet broadcasting empires like Leo Laporte's Twit Network and Dan Benjamin's 5by5 Studios and I thought about what a) I'd like to hear in an internet broadcast and b) what I could be capable of doing.

I also thought a bit about something from Bill Browning's talk a day earlier. His talk, about political issue blogging, didn't really apply to me, but the thought that, essentially, you have to be the change you want to see made me realize I needed to do something. I spent a lot of my talk concerned the the idea that a single individual could support themselves on something journalism-related.

I don't have the time (or the ability to quit my day job) to do hardcore reporting right now, but I figured I had time to take all the interesting bits FollowIndy finds, condense them to the good stuff and then broadcast them out in a daily, less-than-five-minute podcast that folks could start their day off with.

I also thought about future revenue models and ways to make it pay, but that's all things that I can worry about in time.

I recorded the first of this daily experiment a bit Saturday night after getting back from the conference and polished it up this morning.

I wrote the show notes and posted it to FollowIndy's tumblr blog.

Some quick notes on this very first try at podcasting:

• First off: damn that took way more time than expected to produce. I thought, "Hey, it's just five minutes. Shouldn't take more than a half-hour to do." I think all in all, I plugged four hours in that 4 minutes. A lot of that was fighting with and figuring out unfamiliar tools such as Garage Band and Levelator and even more of it was simply research and writing. If I want to keep this up on a daily basis, I have to find ways to either get that amount of time down or find a way to spread it throughout my day so I can record in close to realtime in the predawn hours.

• I'm not very natural with it yet, and it shows in that first effort. Things that sound funny the first time through while writing sound, flat lifeless and forced when read off a document. I'm hoping the cadence and just act-of-doing-it gets more natural in time, but damn it sounds pretty stiff in spots right now.

• The Plantronics headset that Benjamin suggests for entry-level podcasters is seriously nice. The only downside is that its USB dongle is so large it will monopolize both USB ports on a MacBook Pro.

• Commas and short sentences are your friend. if you listen to that broadcast, I start off the Brisard item with this bit of text:

  In the aftermath of a technical mistake that resulted in the dropping of four drunk driving-related charges against Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department officer David Bisard, IMPD officials demoted three high-ranking officers associated with the case on Saturday.

  That whole chunk has one comma and is a damn mouthful. You can hear me a) start to run out breath right before the comma and b) do a rapid air intake right after the comma to catch up.

  I could have edited and rerecorded, but I left a lot of warts in there so it can stand as a representative first try (and as someone once said, if you're aren't embarrassed by your first release, you waited too long).

• I'm also likely to drop the short weather bit. I'm just reading off weather.com and really, there are others that do it better.

So that's the experiment: local internet broadcasting. For now, it's a news digest, but down the road I'd also like to look at a weekly interview show and already have some idea of people I'd like to talk with. I just need to figure out if there's interest in that sort of thing (or even this sort of thing) and how to rig everything up to record a live interview.