Better Political Podcasts

I listen to a lot of political podcasts because, frankly, I'm a politics junky. And I have come up with a few ideas as to how to improve them. Before that, however, I have to give a little bit of background on the current state of political podcasts. The format of these shows fall into one of two camps. One format is the complete show, like Meet The Press. And the second is to break a show into it's individual stories, and example of that is the News Hour with Jim Lehrer podcast.

Some shows provide a podcast extras segment that gives you some additional material. An example of that is the Washington Week podcast which uses the extra segment to ask the interview subjects on the show some more questions from the listener.

None of the current crop of politiical podcasts that I listen to use the AAC format to embed links or images into the stream. And I haven't seen any video politics podcasts.

So, while I appreciate that I can get these shows in my iPod just like a TiVo I think they could be doing more. Let me get on my soapbox for a minute or two and present some ideas:

First, break the shows up into individual stories. Why? Because it allows me to pick and choose what I wish to listen to and ignore the rest. And because we will be able to write software that can use the keywords associated with each story. Then I could create podcast playlists that would take politics stories from a variety of sources and combine them into a single feed.

Another reason to break the show into segments is to allow people to link to a particular story without having to say, "Download this show and go to 7 minutes 30 seconds..."

Second, use the enhanced AAC format to embed links into the shows. In a single five minute interview there can be a lot of references to different policies and events and links to details on those would be great. In addition a link to the transcript would also be appreciated.

Third, to create a five minute interview for a pre-recorded show they will do a one hour interview, and edit it down to what they put on the air. I'd like to be able to hear the one hour interview in it's entirety. Not only would it be more informative, but it will help create a better audio archive of newsmaker interviews for the ages.

There is a lot more that could be done with podcasts, and these are just a few starting points. What is clear to me is that providing more depth of content in podcasts will increase the listener base and thus increase the potential market for podcasts. And that creates a tide that will lift all of our boats.

What are your ideas for making better political podcasts?