Windows on the Web: Check Out Growing Menu of Podcasts

By Bruce Kratofil
NABE Webmaster

The Internet allows “narrowcasting.”  Cheap production costs and what seems like almost infinite capacity allows you to produce content for very narrowly defined audiences – such as economists. Here’s a look at podcasts of interest for people like us.

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While some other fields (tech or sports, for instance) may have a far greater selection, there are a number of podcasts that allow you to fill up some of your under-utilized time.

NABE – let’s start with the home team. NABE now has 24 podcasts freely available to all, plus another series (our survey teleconferences) available to members only. Normally, we charge for podcasts for the first two months after they go online, and then convert them to free. A number of very timely podcasts, such as the March podcast on sub-prime mortgages, are made free immediately. Most podcasts are recorded from our teleconferences, and about two a month are added. They average 30 to 60 minutes. We are also experimenting by recording some sessions at meetings and making them available as podcasts.

The National Economists Club (NEC), NABE’s Washington chapter, began recording the speakers at weekly meetings in January 2007. By the time this issue of NABE News is released, NEC’s 23rd podcast will be released [link]. The podcasts are free, but many of the speaker slideshows are reserved for members only. Most NEC podcasts are about an hour in length.

Bloomberg on the Economy – Tom Keene of Bloomberg hosts a short, daily podcast where he interviews “experts - economists, strategists, politicians - and takes the time to cover deeper topics affecting today's, and tomorrow's markets.” Most of the names will be familiar to you, for many are NABE members. Most of them are 10 to 20 minutes long.

EconTalk – EconTalk is hosted by Russ Roberts of the Library of Economics and Liberty and George Mason University. He interviews professors and authors and mostly covers topics from a libertarian perspective. The weekly podcasts are usually over an hour.

Radio Economics – Radio Economics [link] has a similar format to EconTalk. It is hosted by James Reese, an economics professor at the University of South Carolina Upstate. There are typically new episodes once or twice a month.

Cato Daily Podcast –  as the title says, it is daily and it features scholars and researchers from the Cato Institute. They are typically less than 10 minutes long.

These happen to be the ones that I subscribe to, although I can’t always keep up with the new episodes. Searching around the iTunes Store’s podcasting section shows a number of other economic-oriented podcasts, although not always as frequent as the ones above. They include the UBS Economics Podcast; Economic Insights by Ken Mayland; It’s Always About Economics; The Wandering Economist, the Korelin Economics Report; A.G. Edwards Weekly Economic Comment; Strategic Economics: Introductory Game Theory; and the University of Washington Business & Economics podcast.

When we say that a podcast is available by subscription via Apple’s iTunes store, it doesn’t mean that you have to pay Apple. The subscriptions are free; they are only a mechanism to keep track of when new podcast episodes are released. (They are also a mechanism by which Apple sells iPods.) You can also listen via non-Apple mp3 players, or listen right from a computer. We have a Podcasting FAQ page online that should answer any questions you may have about listening to podcasts.

And Finally…

Late summer or early fall will see some changes at nabe.com. NABE has been using membership database software that’s a bit long in the tooth. In fact, it predates the rise of the Web as an important tool for associations. Anytime we make a dynamic, data-driven Web page we have to export data from the database as a spreadsheet, convert it into tab-delimited files or MySQL files, and upload the new data to the website. In most cases, we need to do these things monthly. By the same token, any data we collect on the website  (such as for teleconference or meeting registration, new membership or renewals) gets sent to the NABE office, where it is cut and pasted into the stand-alone database.

That’s just so 20th Century. We will be moving to the 21st with a new membership database that actually resides online (on a secure server) that will reflect in real time any changes that we make. That means if you change your job, the new information will be online as soon as you hit the Submit button, instead of at the beginning of the next month. The new software should also let us set up special features available only to roundtables, and other things that our old jury-rigged system made too burdensome.

We’ll be letting you know more later. In the meantime, we need to read the manual!