!2355741 Mornin'. Your Watercooler post for today is right below this one, and ready for action. because I wanted to take this space to introduce a regular new feature atTennis.com, our own podcast. It will be featured at the home page, probably on a weekly basis, perhaps more often during peak activity on tour. In this first one,Tennis magazine editor-in-chief James Martin sat with Steve Tignor and me to talk about the revelations in Andre Agassi's new book. You'll hear many other voices from Tennis magazine over the coming weeks and months, including Tom Perrotta's.
I've done a bunch of these "new media" type things in the last year or two, and they're much easier and in some ways - maybe all ways? - more fun than sitting before a blank computer screen with Typepad or Microsoft Word staring back at me. Moreover, at some point I realized that despite all this jazzy Twitter, weblog, IM and video that dominates our lives, this podcast closes the circle. We're back to. . . radio! For that's just what this is, and in some ways the popularity of podcasts is a tribute to certain sensory pleasures that have been neglected since, as the New Wave pop song put it, Video Killed the Radio Star.
Star? l doubt it. We did a few trial podcasts before we posted this one. We determined that the originals were a little too stiff and formal. I think podcasts at their best make a listener feel like he or she is sitting down to a table where an interesting conversation is in full swing. More formal approaches may be enlightening and go deeper, but they're also less lively. A brief podcast is something you can tee up and listen to while you're brewing your morning coffee.
Doing a podcast with an easygoing tone and lots of repartee can be challenging, mainly because most listeners may have trouble attaching the voices with the identities of the speakers. Yet if you make an effort to minimize confusion, you end up with a pretty repititive, conversation-halting template: Thanks, Pete. Steve, what do you think about that?
And so on. . .
Anyway, give a listen if you get a moment, and I'd appreciate it if you dropped a comment on the podcast and how it was executed. Did you have trouble following the conversation? Did you know who was speaking, when? And if not, did it impair your ability to enjoy it? Was it too short or too long? Do you like this kind of thing? Is it confusing, to have it be so conversational?
Your input will be most welcome. Please keep your comments here targeted on the podcast, and use the post immediately below for general chit-chat about today's tennis.
-- Pete