The Future of Audio News

I found what I learned in my last blog post to be so intriguing that I decided to do more research into journalism. I used the same source, NiemanLab, and found the opinion of Steve Henn. Henn works as a lead for audio news at Google (cool job). In Henn aricle, “The dawning of audio web”, he describes how one dimensional the podcasts we have today are. By that, he means that we cannot ask the hosts of podcast shows questions. It is not interactive, yet. Henn says, “at Google, we’re at the beginning of an effort to make the audio web as relevant and as useful as the text web has become”. Specifically, Google is indexing and transcribing news from podcasts. Henn adds, “this same technology also allows people to search for podcasts on the web — not just by a show’s title but by searching for whatever they’re curious about. Search for a podcast about CRISPR or the Dirty Kanza gravel bike race and Google will suggest podcasts to answer those questions”. I think the idea of searching the web for audio is awesome. This would definitely make another medium of getting news widely available to the public. [1 image, 1 link, 2 quotes, 200 words]