Podcasts are talk radio on demand. If you're against podcasts, you're against talk radio. Or at the very least, you're against making talk radio more convenient and accessible.
I feel like podcasts are similar to, but not exactly the same as, talk radio. Most talk radio formats are built around listeners calling in, for instance, which can provide a degree of spontaneity that isn't possible in a prerecorded format like a podcast.
That being said, I do think the appeal of podcasts is pretty close to what people find appealing about talk radio: people like to hear other people talk.
I always hated it when listeners called in on talk radio. They very rarely had anything insightful to day, and even if they did, they general weren't able to convey it clearly.
I always inwardly cringe when they start going off topic and the host keeps trying to rein them in. But when it's someone who knows how to present themselves on radio, it's good.
There's this one show on CBC where listeners call in to a plant expert about their gardening problems, and he identifies them and suggests solutions on the spot. You get a wide variety of people who call in, but since the roles are reversed—callers are asking questions, not answering them—they tend to be much more to the point and willing to give up the floor. Despite not caring one whit about plants and gardening, I really enjoy this show.
If the expert doesn't know the answer, sometimes another listener will call in to save the day. One of my favourite ones is when a lady's tree saplings were starting to die after they got a new well drilled, and after a bunch of questions the plant expert was stumped. Well, a well driller called in a few minutes later and said it was almost certainly the oil coating used on the pipes to prevent rust during storage (totally safe for consumption, but apparently harmful to trees), and the solution was to wait until the oil wore off after a few months.
It sounds boring, but the plant expert is one of those old men who just have a way with words, and the CBC host is really good with prompting both the expert and caller with more questions or anecdotes.
There is a similar show in the Atlanta area where a professor from The University of Georgia answers gardening questions. I also find the callers on that show are a lot easier to listen to. I think you're right about them asking questions instead of just making comments.
Yeah, the whole "Long time listener, first time caller" thing where they take like a minute before they get to their question, if indeed they actually have one. To be fair, I see this sort of thing in person fairly often in scientific seminars where somebody "asks a question" but spends time first complimenting the speaker on the seminar, and then spends a couple of minutes just making comments rather than actually asking an answerable question.
Long ago I listened to a once-popular talk show host whose name is something in the neighborhood of Tush Pinball. He pushed his callers to dispense with all of that "Long time listener, first time caller from the heartland hills of Indiana" stuff and just start the call by saying "Ditto." Easy and convenient, a really time saver, right? Except callers somewhat quickly started saying things like "Mega-dittoes from the heartland hills of Indiana..." and little, if any, time was actually saved.
Pretty much every conference with Q&A ever. You can't avoid it in some settings, and sometimes a question will hit some point that the speaker obviously deliberately avoided, but for the most part Q&A is an anti-pattern at events. Provide some forum where the speaker can interact one on one instead.
Most podcasts I listen to record on a live stream and take corrections and questions from a chat room, which usually keeps me from yelling at the hosts "YOU FORGOT THIS ANGLE TO THE MATTER". Having it be a text chat room going on in parallel also avoids the say-nothing dud call-ins and the hemming and hawing of the general public.
Having listened to both I don't think this characterization is right. The sound of podcasts is heavily heavily inspired by the sound of NPR, but that is very different from what a lot of talk radio sounds like. The new-age analog of talk radio is streaming, it has a similar cadence and improvisation with the back and forth between rambling and participating with the audience.
I'm not sure what you're referring to (maybe the big names of current podcasting?), but I can assure you the rest of the world has podcasts too and may or may not have ever listened to NPR at all. This American Life isn't so old afaik, and I definitely listened to podcasts before that and never to any NPR stuff.
My apologies, I meant to say "This American Life in podcast form", or take Serial as an example that's often quoted.
But it basically stresses my point. It could very well be that it was a direct inspiration for the first podcasts, but nowadays it's used as "audio content, often episodic". Also people often name the production value and other criteria of the big ones. But my point is that podcasts are on average not high production value or even done by companies or in the type of certain radio programs. I'd even say a sizable chunk is just the same people talking about the same or related topic(s) - I don't think I've ever heard that format on a radio station. (Except the same person interviewing different people, if that counts as "the same topic".)
The on-demand feature changes the nature of the medium. With radio you are often joining mid-stream, whereas with a podcast you always get to hear the whole thing. Plus the live callers, as others have pointed out.
