Podcasting should be a natural adjunct to any media and business communications

Steve Rubel has some salient points in Reinventing the Media Interview about new realities for journalists and their sources quarry. But this needs to be taken a few steps further.

Any significant interview with any expert or notable quipster as part of any media story -- and the more technical, the better -- should be captured and published as a podcast. As a footnote or addendum to the main story, as an additional deep resource, as a curio -- the captured telephone call MP3 is a staple of newsgathering, and it's also the foundation of any good podcast.

Newshounds, go forth and capture, with permission, of course, as many meaningful phone calls as you can and turn them into podcasts. This makes so much sense with reportage, but it also makes value for help desk FAQs, for technical how-to-fix-it dialogues, for industry analyst briefings, anything that smacks of an interview.

Everything is in place now to do this now -- quickly, easily, and cheaply. I'd be happy to show you. Indeed, these verbatim audio sidebars and their transcripts should be the norm from now on for any significant interview of just about any nature.

If it was a good call for the participants, it will be a good listen to a larger audience. Transcripts allow for the search granularity to make the whole content accessible, and transcripts allow for the quick plucking of highlights and excerpts, even outside the context of the 400-word news story.

Podcasts are the drippings in the pan from a leg-of-lamb of news products production. Sometimes the gravy is better than the main course, for those with the stomach for it.

So podcasts as natural adjuncts to news stories, allow the reader/listener to dive as deeply as they wish. Links in the transcript give them more trails of bread-crumbs to follow. The interview-generated podcast gives the person interviewed the exposure they deserve for their expertise and time, and it exposes the entire interview process as a building block to the end news product -- supplying the reporter/editor(s) further impetus to do the right thing through-out: high-quality, transparent, and trusted journalism.

Oh, and let's not forget all those extra page-views and MP3 downloads as ancillary profit centers.