KRCC is the NPR affiliate for Colorado Springs and much of southern Colorado. Our weekly cume is about 60,000. We started podcasting in April, and currently we have 204 subscribers to our podcast. The only product we offer is our twice-weekly 30-minute local/regional news magazine, Western Skies.

The decision to podcast was pretty much a no-brainer. We were already offering, and continue to offer, the audio and transcript of every edition of Western Skies on our website. As the news director, I feel like we should do anything we can to make our product more available and to give it life beyond [traditional] broadcast. Our news department is only two FTEs, so our commitment to turning our radio product into an Internet product means one of us spends four hours per week turning our broadcast into an attractive, easily navigable, keyword-searchable web page. Adding podcasting to our regular web updates adds less than five minutes of work per week. It's just that simple. In August our podcasts consumed about 15.5 million kb of bandwidth. This hasn't put us over the edge of the $100-worth of bandwidth we get via an underwriting trade. So podcasting essentially costs us next to nothing.

We were listed on the original NPR.org podcasting list. They found us; we didn't ask for a listing. We saw a significant spike in hits after that, which has since leveled off. Now that NPR's list has grown from about 10 podcasters to 139 podcast links, we don't get much traffic from them. We're also listed on Pubcatcher, which Delaney Utterback, our IT guru, says hasn't resulted in a lot of hits. But he thinks it's useful as a place that winnows the zillions of podcasters out there down to just those from public radio. Delaney said our hits really (really, really) jumped when iTunes started listing podcasts. We were on their site the day it came out (due to Delaney being right there on the cutting edge). At present, most of our podcasting hits come via our webpage (http://www.krcc.org/ and/or http://westernskies.krcc.org/).

We don't have any huge goals for podcasting, other than to make our news product more available and to be more useful to listeners. Delaney isn't convinced it isn't just a passing fad, but he's also not convinced that it won't take over the world and make FM radio obsolete. We don't see it as a potential revenue stream and just wouldn't feel right about charging people for something we broadcast for free. We also don't see making our podcasts available only to members; our gut says that that would only result in us losing about 95 percent of our podcast subscribers.

If you're interested in checking our casts out, I recommend editions number 44 -- seven-minute feature on the Dragon Man 9-11 Memorial Machine Gun Shoot, and number 43 -- a piece on the Pikes Peak Derby Dames roller derby club.

Eric Whitney is the news director at KRCC in Colorado Springs. He has been an AIR member for, gee whiz, several years now. Before taking this staff job in 2004 he spent four years working (without a net) as a freelancer, including nine months in Cape Town, South Africa. Contact him at eric@krcc.org or (719) 473-4801.