podcast this, my freshprince
Every morning, I wake up to our local NPR affiliate, North Country Public Radio. I’m generally not a huge fan of NCPR’s local coverage, mostly because I find it mind-numbingly dull. Having grown up in Philadelphia, no news seems complete to me without a discussion of the previous night’s murders; however, NCPR does a fine job pushing through the rest of NPR’s content from the satellite feed, and frankly, for a wake-up option, NCPR beats the local alternatives, which tend to be a craptacular bonanza of Top-40 cheese, Country twang, religious ranting, or French talk radio.
In my often half-awake moments listening to NCPR in bed in the morning, I hear one of the local morning hosts, Todd Moe, often mention that listeners can “podcast” their local news stories from NCPR’s website. I also heard the same thing today on the Ed Schultz show, where an announcer described how listeners could “podcast” their content. What each of these conventional broadcasters mean is the following: that one can go to the appropriate website, find the RSS feed for the podcast, and add it to a feed reader or podcatcher like iTunes. To me, this is not what the verb “to podcast” means; instead, what Moe and Schultz’s announcer mean to describe is the process of subscribing to a podcast. Thus, Todd Moe and Ed Schultz and the rest would be perfectly correct to say that one could visit their sites and subscribe to their podcasts; however, to say that one can “podcast the news items” implies — given the contemporary use of “podcast” by most people who know what they’re talking about — that the listener is actually doing the recording and distribution of the news items. Considering these points, when I record my podcast, I am podcasting; when I download Satisfy the Mind or The Angry Hippie or any of the other dozen or so shows I like, I am definitively not podcasting, I am subscribed to podcasts whose content I am receiving.
While this isn’t a huge issue, the repeated misuse of “podcast” does have a nails-on-chalkboard quality about it, almost like when you catch older folks trying to sound modern by using slang that was au currant in like 1989. Todd Moe might as well be saying “Wow, those are some fresh kicks!” to which you could answer “Thanks DJ Jazzy Jeff, now where’s the Fresh Prince?” Much like older folks trying to understand a generation they are almost chronically incapable of comprehending, the misuse of “podcast” points to a broadcast establishment that’s almost chronically incapable of understanding anything outside of their own distribution model.
