Listening to Clubhouse?

There's always been a niche place for drop-in conversation (just look at ham radio). It's never been enormous, but it has been durable. People like to be surprised, and if an application like Clubhouse can replicate that ham radio, "drop-in" conversational feeling, then there will be a place for it.

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There will always be a big place for live-to-tape conversations, on radio or podcasts. So long as there are interesting people, there will be others who want to hear them speak. And a good interviewer (like Anne McElvoy) is capable of asking conversational questions of an interesting person that exceed the quality of the content that person may be able to generate on their own.

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What podcasting has brought to America is scripted, heavily-produced audio programming. It's not something we've done very much -- certainly not by contrast with the work of public broadcasters like CBC Radio One and BBC Radio 4. In those markets, speech-based radio programming (that isn't "talk radio" in the American political sense) is very popular. That makes similar programming a growth market in America, and it ought to long persist in growing as producers become more sophisticated.