I have been an iPod owner for almost three years, and since I started listening to it in the car, I have largely stopped listening to radio. Since sometime in the late 1980s, though, I had always been a devotee of public radio — not just the news programs, but also many of their other regular weekly shows from “Car Talk” to “Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me”.
Very honestly, I needed a break from “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered”, and so I don’t miss those shows at all. But all those other programs still appeal to me. There’s no reason I *can’t* listen to them on the radio, I just don’t. A lot of them are aired on Saturdays in our area, and I’m not in the car at those times like I used to be in the Time Before Charlotte.
Ditto for streaming radio. Both of the two major public radio stations in Boston offer live streams, but it’s just not meant to be for me.
So enter the podcasts. It’s old news to a lot of people, I’m sure, but NPR makes a ton of their programming available in downloadable form and has a comprehensive listing of them at their website. Their listing includes many programs produced by local public radio stations that are intended mostly for their own listening area, such as Maine Public Radio’s “Maine Things Considered” or KQED’s “The California Report”.
Skimming through the listings the other day, I was tickled to find that several of my favorites offer their entire weekly broadcast in podcast format, such as the news quiz “Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me”, Fresh Air and “This American Life” (you can get the current week’s show as a free podcast, but you have to pay $0.95 per episode to download older shows…or go find them via BitTorrent…shhhh).
Others only give you snippets: While you can listen to “A Prairie Home Companion” as streaming audio on the show’s own site, the podcasts are limited to Keillor’s “Lake Wobegon” monologues from the previous Saturday night’s show. And the Car Talk guys only post their “favorite question” of the week.
My biggest disappointment, though, was to discover that “Says You”, which is a word quiz panel show produced here in Boston, is only available via Audible.com, and they charge four bucks an episode if you’re not an Audible member ($2.95 if you are a member). Sorry, but that’s way too much per episode when other national-caliber programming is available for free.
If you’ve never listened to a podcast, don’t be intimidated by the “pod” part. You don’t have to have an iPod or any other music player to listen to them. You can just download the files to your computer and listen to them that way. If you’re really clever, you can even fiddle around with an RSS feeder to automatically download the latest ones for you, so you don’t even have to be bothered to remember to do it (although you do need to remember to LISTEN to them…).
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