Opinion | Trade war, pandemic and more: this has been the sound of SCMP
- International Podcast Day on September 30 marks the continuing growth globally, and in Hong Kong, of the number and the diversity of podcasts on offer
- For the Post, which launched its own podcasts two years ago almost to the day, this has been a challenging but rewarding journey
Two years ago, the sound of an earthquake marked the launch of SCMP podcasts. It was an episode detailing the anniversary of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, with first-hand interviews recorded by our journalists who had travelled back to the scene of the disaster to find the stories of people who had witnessed and survived that tragic day.
This podcast stands as a benchmark for what would become the South China Morning Post’s podcast production style: staff from different desks and departments working together, voice-overs translating Mandarin interviews into English, and important lessons learned about how people listen to their audio.
September 30 is International Podcast Day, and it seems apt that one of the most international newsrooms in the world also gets to celebrate two years since it began publishing podcasts to platforms like iTunes, Spotify, and Stitcher.
The voices in our podcasts reflect the faces in our newsroom: you’ll hear accents from Hong Kong, Beijing, Sichuan, Shanghai, Tianjin, London, Singapore, Canberra, Ulster, Mumbai and Vancouver, to name just a few.
Back in 2018, we had been publishing to SoundCloud (“the YouTube of audio”) for months before properly launching podcasts. We experimented with formats, styles, content and different presenters and we continue to use it to this day as a test bed for drafts, new ideas, try-outs and experiments.
These were not the first podcasts the Post had published, however. On April 18, 2005, the Post published its first podcast – the same year the New Oxford American Dictionary declared “podcast” the word of year, and just 13 months after journalist Ben Hammersley, writing in The Guardian, coined the portmanteau joining the words “iPod” and “broadcast”, to describe audio delivered to a device via RSS feed.