ZA Tech show: A local podcast worth listening to

Been meaning to write about this for a while now. The ZA Tech show, journalists “indulging in beer and opinion”, is fast turning out to be one of the country’s top podcasts. This week’s podcast, with Simon Dingle, Ben Kelly, Brett Haggard, Jon Tullett and Duncan McLeod, is particularly good. They have the hilarious David Bullard as a guest… love him or hate him, he’s hilarious. Bullard speaks about his firing from the Sunday Times over his controversial column, and his relationship with editor Mondli Makhanya.

They also look at the “future of media” with Stuff Editor and gadget guru Toby Shapshak and discuss the future of print and newspapers. I think newspapers will be around for while, they’ll just become more niched. In many senses, it’s almost non-sensical to talk about the death of newspapers or magazines when they are still cash cows for their organisations. It’s also an irony that most original online quality journalism is derived from newspapers whereas online news sites tend to carry wire reports or be aggregators, yet it is print that is under threat. Yahoo! which has one of the biggest news sites in the world has only a handful of reporters. And let’s be frank, although blogging is a wonderfully democratic expression of online publishing — bloggers just don’t have the resources, co-ordination or training to produce investigative reporting on the same scale of reporters at a corporate media organisation. It’s naive to think any differently. I believe that blogger-big media partnerships produce some of the best results.

The podcast also looks at Grand Theft Auto IV, which is the hottest game release of the year and the reason I am going to be divorced soon. The ZA Podcast is a good listen, although they need to sort out their design and logo, as well their browser icon, which looks a bit rough and lets the overall product down.

It’s a cookin podcast — so, if you haven’t done so already — point your RSS feed there and geddit.