Podcast: SciPod
Feed URL: http://www.newscientist.com/podcastfeed.ns
Website: http://www.newscientist.com/home.ns
Rating: 5 stars out of 5
Appropriate for science enthusiasts, environmentalists, news junkies, Anglophiles, skeptics, students, and teachers
All good things must come to and end. And so it was with SciPod, the New Scientist's podcast. For a year and a half, the New Scientist, a British popular science magazine, brought high-quality science reporting weekly to podcast listeners around the world. SciPod was simply the best popular science podcast out there. The show was a multinational production, professionally hosted from London by Caroline Williams and from Boston by Ivan Semeniuk. Music by the Damn Neighbors and others filled the gaps and helped the show assume an informal air. Still, the content was sometimes challenging for amateurs. The show never shied away from tackling complicated concepts.
It is a shame that SciPod has gone off the air. The exchange between Semeniuk and Last Word column editor Mick O'Hare was one of the better aspects of the podcast. In the segment, O'Hare would answer questions from New Scientist readers dealing with mundane mysteries, such as why bananas turn brown in the refrigerator or, in a particularly British conundrum, why sheep refuse to simply move to one side when confronted by a car attempting to pass. Banter between Semeniuk and O'Hare was always friendly, entertaining, and full of bad jokes.
Valerie Jameson charmingly narrated a weekly science news roundup in her Scottish accent, never heard in news programs in America.
The reasons for SciPod's demise, however, are easy to understand. A podcast of such quality must have cost a good deal of money to make. Semeniuk intimated as much in the last weekly podcast on May 11. It was a marketing device conceived in the best spirit of the Internet: build something and offer it for free, and people will listen.
And yet SciPod was most certainly a marketing device. Listeners were reminded that these articles and more are covered in greater depth in this week's issue of the New Scientist. Such podcasts abound on the Web, but most have more marketing than content, and so are pointless to listen to.
SciPod was an exception. In the end, producers of the podcast must have asked themselves why they bothered offering so much original content free to nonsubscribers. The number of subscriptions may not have increased due to the podcast, or what must have been the high cost of production did not exceed the return on investment. Why buy the cow? as the saying goes.
If you missed SciPod, you can still get archived shows at the Podcast Directory. The publisher promises “occasional in-depth reports,” the first, a timely and useful survey of climate change, its myths, and the debate about the topic in the United States, appeared on July 2. This was a promising start. Perhaps some good things don't have to end after all.
