Techmeme is an influential site that provides concise, headline-length summaries of the day’s tech news. What would that sound like as a podcast?
Techmeme, the influential tech news aggregator, is launching its own podcast
Because everyone has a podcast. (That’s a good thing!)
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Peter Kafka covered media and technology, and their intersection, at Vox. Many of his stories can be found in his Kafka on Media newsletter, and he also hosts the Recode Media podcast.
We are going to find out. Techmeme is launching The Techmeme Ride Home, a daily show that will drop every afternoon. When you’re riding home. It’s a rare product extension for Techmeme proprietor Gabe Rivera.
You know what a podcast is and how to listen to one, so I’ll let you do that yourself. I’ve heard a couple demos of it, and it sounds like a slightly NPR-ified version of Techmeme — a straight-ahead summary of whatever dominates Techmeme that day, though a little more fleshed out than Techmeme’s trademark headline-and-tweet aggregation.
It runs around 20 minutes, and it’s produced and hosted by Brian McCullough, the creator and host of the Internet History Podcast.
If this was a couple of years ago, I would be reasonably confident that a daily Techmeme podcast wouldn’t work. Because everyone knows that podcasts aren’t radio broadcasts — they’re their own thing, and they work because they’re asynchronous and on-demand, and so the idea of a daily news show makes no sense at all.
Plus! Techmeme works because you can quickly scan it to learn what’s going on. That utility goes away if you’re listening to a summary of things that happened earlier that day.
And, of course, all of that is wrong.
The New York Times’ Daily launched a year ago and became a huge hit for the paper. NPR’s Up First is a success story. Now Vox Media is trying its own daily drive-home podcast — Today Explained, via Recode’s corporate cousin Vox.com.
Rivera’s take, via email: “Given we’re seeing both morning podcasts and evening podcasts ... dayparting might be spreading to podcasting, at least for specific use cases like explainers, summary shows and here’s-what-you-missed topics. Techmeme Ride Home will be a little bit of all three.”
More important: None of the rules or theories that I have, or anyone else has, about podcasts mean a whole lot right now, because podcasting is just getting going. (Yes, it’s been around for a decade. It’s still just getting going.)
If you’re reading this you’re probably very familiar with podcasts, but most of the world isn’t. So the people who make, fund and consume podcasts are all figuring out what the medium is going to be. That’s a fun thing to be a part of.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
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