Podcasting in Burli Newsroom

To say podcast use in North America is on the rise would be something of an understatement.  In 2016, America’s podcast listening audience had grown an estimated 23% since 2015, and 75% since 2013 (Edison Research).  Since their rise in 2007, smartphones have turned into the perfect portal for carrying on-demand audio around with us at all times, and our culture is certainly interested in the smartphone!

Podcasting, at its heart, is a produce-and-consume model of distributing audio.  Content generators publish audio (and sometimes video) to the web, and subscribers use podcast receiving software (iTunes, Overcast, and similar) to download and play the content.  The actual downloading process on the part of the listener is usually automated, and playback is at their convenience.

To keep up in a challenging environment, many traditional radio stations have taken to podcasting as a way of staying in touch with their audiences.  Why not?  Radio has been in the business of creating high quality, captivating audio for decades, why not take advantage of that existing and constantly refreshed source of media?  There’s surely a place for professional audio engineers to capture some podcast listeners among a field of competition that has largely been developed by amateur enthusiasts.

Burli helps its customers get onto the podcast train by helping you easily convert your audio into podcasts.  From planning your show, to recording and editing, and all the way through posting it online, Burli Newsroom has it all.  Let’s take a look.

Get It Together

To be perfectly honest, there’s nothing special or different in how you prepare your audio for use in podcasting.  In fact, what we’re seeing with our customers is a tendency to take the content that was already destined to go on-air live and simply reuse it for their podcast.  When we recently spoke with Bell Media, they told us that they do exactly that – especially in their sports talk format.

With the exception of some editing around specific length and/or content, getting your audio together for use in a podcast should be relatively simple.  In fact, you can even use the automatically-generated content coming from your Burli audio logger!

Put It Online

Once the podcasting features have been enabled in Newsroom by your System Administrator, there’s not a lot of work to do to get it online for public consumption.  To start, right-click your finished audio project, and select Podcast this audio…

You’ll be taken to the Podcast Uploader screen.  All you need to do is populate some fields to describe which show you’re podcasting, and click Upload now.  Your file is uploaded, and you’re done!

Just for information, here is how the fields translate from Burli Newsroom into Apple iTunes:

Again, this all assumes your System Administrator has set up your credentials to establish a podcast channel with a provider, and given those credentials to Burli.  Once this step is complete, Burli can access the channel (or channels, if you’re creating more than one show.  The channels are available from the pull-down menu shown above).

Ingesting Podcasts

Of course, podcasts themselves are just another alternate form of audio input as far as Burli is concerned.  Newsroom allows for ingest of podcasts just as easily as any newswire.

If you have a podcast you’d like to add to your In-Queue, please speak to your System Administrator.  Then you can use that incoming audio any way you’d like.

New Fields in Audio

As the industry grows and changes, one thing is certain – we all need to change with it!  Making the leap to podcasting is just one way in which radio is quickly adapting to become a stronger and more competitive medium, and it’s also one more way Burli Software is helping our customers.

To learn more, come visit us at the all-new www.burli.com for more info, or email us to get in touch.