Voice of the Podcast?

Interesting post from Bill Thompson on his blog, looking at what to call Vox Pop in the world of podcasting.

Vox Pop or Vox populi, which means literally in Latin ‘voice of the people’ is a term used in the world of Broadcast Journalism to describe an ad-hoc interview with the average ‘man on the street’.

I personally hate doing Vox Pops, I’d much rather interview someone in a studio with a pre-prepared question sheet and acres of information at my fingertips - however Vox Pops have a place and play a very valuable part of broadcasting.

The Vox Pop plays on the adage that “There is a story behind every door”, that every person has a great story to tell.

They are used heavily in radio, especially for outside broadcasts where you have a huge amount of time to fill - send a reporter over to speak to that funny looking bloke in a big hat.

They are also used to sometime balance out a story, so you have an interview with an animal rights campaigner who says everyone should be vegetarian - you balance it by going out on the street and asking people if they could be vegetarian.

Back to the point (again), Bill Thompson was looking for the name because he’s going to be producing a daily podcast for the Cambridge Film Festival (given me an idea for the Jersey one) where he will be interviewing members of the audience before they go into the film.

He wants to give each section of the show a name and so following a growing trend of finding pod related names for podcast features he’s settled on Vox Pod.

However I personally think that, although it’s a bit cute, sweet, funny to podify something, Vox Pop would still be fine for this segment as it’s still doing the same thing it used to do on radio.

The Media Guardian ‘Media Talk’ podcast (which is very good by the way) has a feature called PodPost where they broadcast messages sent in by users but this could also easily be described as a Vox Pop (without the journalist).

Although I can see a need for a new name for this sort of delayed phone-in concept - you call an answer phone and it’s played out.

The thing is though, podcasting, by default is a Vox Pop or Voice of the People as every man, woman, dog or child has the ability to podcast (note I didn’t include cat as cats are evil and plotting to take over the world).
So maybe, with the fact that every podcast is by default a Vox Pop in mind, maybe there is a need for a new name for the bit where other people get to speak and give their opinion.

But what? I don’t know about Vox Pod - what isn’t that saying, what does it actually mean - Vox (voice) Pod (podcast) Voice of the Podcast - that’s the presenter isn’t it?

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