Podcast Responses

Slate’s The Gist: Puppies Don’t Win Pulitzer’s

            Mike Pesca was the main speaker of this podcasts; however, he had several guest speakers talking about various topics and included some funny voice recordings of celebrities at The Emmys. From the trail of Bob McDonnell all the way to a new app that Pesca describes as “the next twitter,” popular topics of today were discussed.

            I enjoyed listening to Pesca because he kept things interesting. Overall, the podcast seemed upbeat, and he used a few seconds of techno music to represent a shift in topic each time he changed the subject. When he was explaining each topic, he used sarcastic remarks to emphasize his opinion. One example of when he did this was while he was discussing the Bob McDonnell trial. He mocked the defenses’ main argument with ridiculous alternatives to support McDonnell’s innocence.

            Not only was Pesca able to keep the podcast upbeat with his humor and music, but also his guest speakers talked about some innovative topics. He had the CEO of a new app called Yo join in on the podcast, and he told listeners a little about where the app originated and how it is useful for communication in Israel. Pesca explained this app as the next twitter because its ability to send the message “yo” with a simple click of a button.

            Although I enjoyed listening to the majority of the podcast, I felt the remainder of it was mostly to advertise. I don’t listen to a lot of podcasts, so I don’t really know if that is a normal thing to do, but I noticed a lot of Pesca’s airtime was used to encourage his audience to download the Yo app or subscribe to Harry’s razors, so he really lost my interest there.

BBC World Service: Global News

            After listening to Pesca’s entertaining podcast, this one was a bit hard to bear. It was a typical newscast, and the podcast had a lot of great, useful information; however, it lacked the ability to hold my attention. The assortment of topics the podcast discussed ranged from militant activity, Ebola, James Foley’s death and some pop culture news.

            The speakers that went into more depth with each topic ended up being recordings of reporters for the story. Although the recordings were very helpful in learning more about the topics, they were very poorly replayed during this podcast. While a female reporter was giving a recap on the emotional events of the James Foley memorial, there were some technical mistakes made and the recording and podcast speaker were talking at the same time. It was very distracting, and I wasn’t able to focus on what the reporter was trying to say.

            Other recordings that were replayed during the podcast also seemed a bit fuzzy or bad quality, and the information being given during those recordings were crucial to learning more. During the Ebola report, the woman trying to explain the amount of possibly infected victims seemed to have a bad connection because there was a lot of background noise in her report.

            The podcast was also boring, and the long gaps of silence between topics didn’t really help my attention span. The pauses also were a little confusing. At first, I actually thought I’d accidentally paused the podcast because the gap of silence lasted so long.

            I don’t’ mean to really criticize the podcast because it really went into depth with some very important topics that interested me; however, I believe they could’ve ensured that the podcast quality was a little better before posting it to the pubic.

Overall, I’d have to say that if these two podcasts were able to combine, they’d make better news. Mike Pesca’s upbeat attitude was easy to listen and pay attention to, but I wish he’d brought in a few more serious topics, like the Global News did, rather than spend time telling us about Harry’s razors and other advertisements.