Uses of Podcasting for Informative Purposes
News is important to the world, from figuring out what the latest cold virus is to learning about breaking stories. This type of media outlet is helpful to the community and is considered by most to be a public service. This gives potential listeners the opportunity to hear footballs games or direct new casts, broadcasted by the personality of their choice. News media has grown quite rapidly during the last ten years; the need for information has never been stronger, and the desire to have information available from multiple sources is something completely new to the media arena.
Through the use of relay news feeds the majority of all current news stations, radio or television, have available podcast recordings. But there are also an astounding number of broadcast personalities who choose to perform the news through private podcasts, with no real network affiliation.
The first news outlet to begin to use podcasting was newspaper; they supplied a podcasting of everything included in their daily edition. The sole purpose of this program was, initially, to provide for those who could not read on their own due to illiteracy or visual impairment.
What came next was a great surprise: Their Web sites were flooded with traffic. Thousands of people began to subscribe to the newspaper just to have the podcast available. Something intended to act as a public service to the non-reading community turned out to be a big part of their business. Through the further development of podcasting programs many newspaper companies built entirely new audiences.
Podcasting added something new to the print news industry. While it was not necessarily print media, it gave newspaper companies the opportunity to capitalize on a portion of the market that was interested in knowing what is in the newspaper but for one reason or another did not take the time to read it.