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Video news in a world without TV

Posted by johnford
May 17, 2008

I’ve abandoned the world of television. It’s been about six months now since I’ve given up the burden of paying for and watching brainless TV. Of course, if there is a TV show or a movie that I absolutely have to or wanna watch, there’s always Netflix or torrents. But the one thing I really pined over and truly felt that I might be missing, although this too may be just something I convinced myself of, is watching TV news. Of course you can always read the news on-line, still there is something easy and dare I say fulfilling about watching television news.

So how do I get my video news fix without TV? Video podcasts. Two of the ‘big’ broadcast networks. ABC and NBC both offer video podcasts of the nightly news. ABC’s feed is hands down the best. ABC produces a separate podcast feed especially for the the web with Charlie Gibson. Gibson is friendly and personable while maintaining an authoritative news presence. The ABC feed is available every day at about 4ish Eastern Time and again updated around 7 or 8. The feed contains elements especially produced for the podcast including a Google segment. Although I subscribe to the NBC feed, I find myself almost never watching it. The newscast is a feed of the recorded nightly news and unfortunately isn’t available until sometime after 10pm ET. So by the time I get around to watching it, it’s usually the next day. The NBC feed is almost an automatic delete the following day. NBC also offers a weekly podcast of “Meet the Press” in its entirety. ABC makes available the Sunday morning roundtable “This Week,” if you can handle the no-talent, ponderous George Snuffleupagus.

CNN offers a couple of interesting feeds. By far my personal favorite is “In Case You Missed It.” This podcast is news stories cut together as a vignette, without a talking head. Kind of a “produced” raw feed. Usually there are one or sometimes two daily feeds of “In Case You Missed It.” The other CNN feed I use is “Now in the News.” These podcasts are usually around 3 minutes, updated every few hours and are produced much like “CNN Headline News.”

On the international front, Sky News offers a couple of different podcasts. After subscribing to a few of them, I’ve paired it down to just one: “Sky News Headlines Update.” Very similar to the “Now in the News” CNN feed, but from a Brit perspective with both international news headlines and news from the UK. Well worth the subscription. By far, My favorite podcast subscriptions for news come from Link TV. Link offers a few news related podcasts including: “Mosaic,” “Mosaic Intelligence Report” and “Global Pulse.” “Mosaic” is an insightful program with news reports from numerous MIddle East broadcasters in a half-hour format. I highly recommend it. “Mosaic Intelligence Report” is Middle East broadcast reports with commentary and dare I say, sometimes unnecessary opinion. The excellent “Global Pulse” reports on news stories from a perspective of numerous international broadcasters. It’s informative and telling to see how different countries and broadcasters report on the same story. “Global Pulse is by far my favorite news podcast.

Here’s my “short list” of recommended video podcast feeds, formatted for iTunes subscriptions, of course:

If you’ve got any other suggestions for video news podcasts that you think are worthwhile, please share em’.