Whilst skimming the jobs section of a newspaper, I came across this:

“Make your voice heard: podcast reporter, £25k, 6 month contract, The Daily Telegraph”

Gosh, newspapers are hiring specialist “podcast reporters” now? Who’d a thunk it? Obviously the best bit of the ad is you will [have] .. an engaging speaking style. Well, can you imagine what kind of people and voices you might get? Whoever gets the job has to appeal to the core audience y’know.

Anyway, this got me interested, and it turns out that the Telegraph already has several podcasts available, so this job looks like it’s to put someone dedicated to the task (although with it being a six month contract I suspect it’s just exploratory and then they’ll cut them loose – there can’t be any money in it for the paper can there?)

I had a quick look around some other big newspapers: of course The Guardian are doing the Ricky Gervais podcasts and political podcasts (including PMQs) but haven’t yet podcasted up their existing audio reports; The Times don’t seem to be doing anything at all in this area (although they do have an incredibly frustrating habit of having every single link open in a new window!) but they do have a beta version of a desktop search tool powered by Blinkx which is really quite unexpected and makes you wonder about what else these supposedly old-school media enterprises are up to with the new-fangled hyperinterweb.