The New Radio Revolution, Heather Green, Tom Lowry, and Catherine Yang, Business Week, March 3, 2005:

For all the hullabaloo it’s generating, podcasting is not even close to being a business yet… Maybe a few will come up with a way to make a living doing it. Maybe not. Regardless, a trend is afoot that could transform the $21 billion radio industry. Consider the basics: With no licenses, no frequencies, and no towers, ordinary people are busy creating audio programming for thousands of others. They’re bypassing an entire industry.

Radio Days for Everyman, Heather Green, BusinessWeek Online, March 3, 2005:

That enthusiasm goes a long way to explain why podcasting has created so much excitement. It allows people to thumb through an exploding treasure trove of shows and find exactly the right one for them, no matter how off the wall it might be. That makes podcasting very different from mass radio, which needs to play the most broadly popular songs to attract the widest audience. With podcasting, niche audiences can dip in and out shows, compiling their own lineup.

Podcasting gives voice to amateurs
Benny Evangelista, San Francisco Chronicle, February 28, 2005:

When my editor asked me to try my hand at podcasting, the assignment stirred up an old fantasy I had as a kid growing up in San Francisco — to be a radio news and sports announcer. After all, podcasting, the latest phenomenon to sweep the Internet, lets you create your own radio show. But instead of broadcasting your voice over the air, podcasters record their shows digitally and transmit them in the form of an MP3 file that can be beamed around the world to — as the name implies — iPods or similar digital audio players.

Podcasting faces growing pains
Scott Kirsner, The Boston Globe, February 28, 2005:

Remember the Web in 1994? Lots of pictures of pet cats and long lists of people’s favorite junk foods. Podcasting is in the same place today as the Web was in 1994. These personal radio broadcasts, designed to be downloaded to an iPod or similar MP3 player, are homespun, rough-edged, and — let’s be honest — not all that riveting. Some of the best podcasts so far are recordings of speeches and roundtables from high-priced technology conferences; some of the worst are like eavesdropping on your next-door neighbors while they’re making dinner and talking about their day.

For a Start-Up, Visions of Profit in Podcasting, John Markoff, New York Times, February 25, 2005:

The primarily amateur Internet audio medium known as podcasting will take a small, hopeful step on Friday toward becoming the commercial Web’s next big thing. That step is planned by Odeo, a five-person start-up that is based in a walk-up apartment in this city’s Mission District and was co-founded by a Google alumnus. The company plans to introduce a Web-based system that is aimed at making a business of podcasting - the process of creating, finding, organizing and listening to digital audio files that range from living-room ramblings to BBC newscasts.

Adam Curry Wants to Make You an iPod Radio Star, Annalee Newitz, Wired, March 2005:

He’s gone from MTV to MP3, and now he’s leading a grassroots rebellion called podcasting. Why amateurs may soon rule the airwaves (begin download now)… Welcome to podcasting, the medium that promises a future where anyone can make radio, instead of just listen to it. The biggest podcast audiences now number in the mere tens of thousands. Yet real radio, the kind with bona fide mass audiences, is starting to use the technology to make its shows available for download.

‘Podcasters’ deliver radio-on-demand, Celeste Biever, New Scientist, February 13, 2005:

The ubiquity of MP3 players, the emergence of easy-to-use, inexpensive audio-editing software, and the explosion in the number of blogs where information on new podcasts is posted, has created an environment ripe for podcasting. There are now more than 700,000 different podcasts to subscribe to, compared with 5000 only three months ago. While some traditional broadcasters are now podcasting, the majority of postings are by geeks who keep up with the emerging technology. As a result the casts tend to be a little rough at the edges, and some are positively bizarre. Fancy musical news? Try the Tapdancing News, a satirical news round-up sung by California-based Sondra Lowell while she tap dances.

Radio to the MP3 degree: Podcasting, Byron Acohido, USA Today, February 9, 2005:

Big tech and media companies could not have foreseen this potentially disruptive hitch to their grand strategies… Like the blogging phenomenon, podcasts have come out of nowhere to attract an enthusiastic grassroots following. They’re being generated by a wide cast of characters — from professional broadcasters to rank amateurs. Listeners can download shows to their computers, or, with a bit of know-how, automatically export shows to an Apple iPod — hence the term “podcast” — or any MP3 player.

‘Podcasting’ takes broadcasting to the Internet, Associated Press, February 7, 2005:

Less than a year old, podcasting enables anyone with a PC to become a broadcaster. It has the potential to do to the radio business what Web logs have done to print journalism. By bringing the cost of broadcasting to nearly nothing, it’s enabling more voices and messages to be heard than ever before… For listeners, podcasting offers a diverse menu of programs, which can be enjoyed anywhere, anytime. Unlike traditional radio, shows can be easily paused, rewound or fast-forwarded. The listener doesn’t need to be near a PC, unlike most forms of Internet radio.