Before Podcasting? The Town Crier!

This podcast audio served as the source for the blog post “Podcasting Before Electricity.”

The transcript was rewritten to produce the blog post, which is the cornerstone of the Shortcut Content system.

Transcript:

Shayla: Thank you for joining us for the Shortcut Content Podcast. I’m talking with Dave Young who is the founder of Shortcut Content, and, Dave, in a previous segment we talked about FDR’s presidential podcasting, as you put it, but tell me more about the evolution of podcasting or content marketing. Can you go back even before that?

Dave: Sure. In a previous episode, we talked about FDR’s Fireside Chats as, in my opinion, being one of the very first podcasts, just because it was serial and it was the President of the United States addressing specific topics that would be of interest to his audience. But if you really want to look at audio, and not just technology based, but if you want to go back even before we had a means to broadcast audio, before we had a means to record audio and put it on the internet where people can download it and listen to it or have it attached to videos so that people can watch your face while you actually tell them something in verbal format, before all that, even before the written word, everything we knew as a species, everything we knew as human beings, was passed down through story telling, was passed audio, as spoken word communications from one person to the next, from one generation to the next.

There were people in every society that their entire job was to listen to the stories, remember the stories and be able to repeat the stories so that everybody could understand the history of our society, of the civilization that we were a part of at that time. And that’s regardless of whether or not we had technology to record things or technology to broadcast things. And that even extended out before we had printing presses and things like that. It’s always been one of the things you see in Shakespearian plays, and any time you think about a Medieval village, there’s always, what? A town crier. There’s somebody that stands on a stump or a soapbox and reads the news or gives the announcements or tells people what’s going on in town.

So this idea that podcasting is something new, or that creating videos that you can put on your website is something new, it’s just new technology, it’s just a new way of distributing it, and your listeners don’t have to all head to the town square to actually get the news anymore, they can just lazily sit back in their chair and click on a link or download it to their smartphone and listen to it while they go out for a jog. But it’s really nothing different, it’s nothing new, there’s nothing new under the sun, when it comes to human beings telling each other stories and whether that’s teaching, sharing news, or just passing along traditions. The oral story telling technique has been around forever and it’s never going to change. It’s always going to be one of the most accessible ways to both receive content, and create content.

Shayla: I think one of the cool things about Shortcut Content is you have several different ways for people to absorb that information. So if someone loves to listen to it, they have that option. If they’d rather watch they have that option. So how does someone get in contact with you if they want to discover how they can translate their information into content?

Dave: Well, at Shortcut Content we make it easy for people to do exactly that. You can create your content by spoken word, doing exactly what we’re doing here, and then we repurpose that; we transcribe, we turn it into videos, we turn it into edited podcasts so that people can download it. And then we rewrite it for blogs posts, for written content and the way to get in touch with us is at shortcutcontent.com. You can sign up for some of our free content or you can join our ever-expanding list of customers and start letting us help you create great content for your website.

Shayla: Thanks, Dave.