Podcasting for profits: Why isn’t local media playing?

If Leo Leporte can make $1.5 million a year in advertising revenue through podcasting, surely local media companies can find a market large enough to make it worth their while.

Yet podcasting has never quite delivered on the potential that many Internet pundits saw 10 years ago. (Remember, Evan Williams and friends were working on a podcasting company called Odeo when they stumbled on the idea for Twitter.) For news companies, it usually comes down to return on investment. For most, podcasting means more work and an unproven revenue stream.

I’ve always believed in the potential of podcasting, probably because I’m an avid listener to dozens of different podcasts. And much like the business model for publishing a web site, if you can grow an audience, you should be able to find a way to make money. “Whether you’re a band or DJ or TV show or yourself or you sell cigarettes or a douche, it doesn’t really matter,” says Adam Corolla, one of the pioneers of podcasting. “If you can get an audience, there’ll be some money that will follow that audience.”

ESPN knows this. The sports giant now has more than 100 podcasts and sells integrated sponsor packages across multiple media that can include advertiser images that appear on the show’s icon within iTunes’ podcast directory, according to Marc Horine, VP of Digital Media at ESPN. That is just one of the examples of profitable podcasting examined by David Spark in his 15-part series, “Making Money from Podcasting.” (For the reader’s digest version, see his post on Mashable.)

“For many, creating a podcast is something that’s done solely out of passion,” Spark says. “But even among those who do it strictly for the love of podcasting, after awhile, once you’ve built up an audience, there comes a time when you think to yourself, ‘I can’t keep doing this for free.’”

The good news is that podcasting is one of the most efficient forms of online publishing – and one of the cheapest. Most people can talk faster than they can type. And authentic, informative podcasts take very little editing and production time. When I first started doing them around 2005 at The News Tribune in Tacoma, Wash., it was nothing more than about 10 minutes of editing in Audacity (which is free), plus a Garage Band loop for the intro and the exit, and we were finished.

Back then, if we wanted to interview a newsmaker from outside the newsroom, that person would have to come to our building, which is a pain. With free tools like Skype, you can now do interviews from anywhere, making the process that much easier.

Every day in newsrooms across the nation journalists are creating content that could become podcasts, just by doing the natural collaboration that comes with reporting and publishing news. Todd Bishop, a former Seattle P-I business reporter who is now managing editor of TechFlash.com, says that is exactly how he and partner John Cook recently started their podcast.

“We’re doing the podcast primarily for ourselves. We’ve worked together for years, and it’s part of our routine to get together when we can to catch up on things in person, talk about the past week and, ideally, think ahead to what we should be thinking about next on the site.”

With this low barrier to entry, and the desparate thirst for new revenues, it seems like a natural product-market fit for local news companies. Do you know anyone doing local that is taking advantage of this opportunity?

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