(First of all, sorry if you came to this post hoping to see a picture of an incredible product).

As you may or may not know, I recently became a podcaster. After kicking the idea around for over a year, listening to many other awesome podcasts, and actually learning how to do it, I have recorded and posted my first episodes. Click the link on the right side of the page to check it out. It’s no secret why I’m podcasting and why it’s important to me. I love talk radio and this gives me an opportunity to play in that format. Perhaps more importantly, I think this is the future of media consumption. That’s a pretty important concept.

If you’re at all plugged into the dialogue surrounding newspapers and television stations in North America, you’re probably aware of the financial hurdles before them. I’m not going to break it all down here, but it’s obvious that survival is a growing challenge for these media. Rupert Murdoch is working on finding somebody to pay for all his content, which, by the way, will be the only way media is describe eventually. The sad thing about his mission is that he isn’t the content provider. His writers, reporters, editorialists, etc… they are the content providers.

For example, when you read my blog, I provide the content. If I worked for Fox News (not that I would) and I filled a report on the Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen, I’d be providing the content, regardless of what channel you watched it on. Filing stories on a major network is not the only game in town. Here’s an example. Granted, the example I’ve provided has an obvious bias, but it’s hard to name a news brand today that is without. (More on brands in a bit.) So, content can be provided by just about anybody with gumption and distributed over a number of means on the world wide web. You no longer need a TV network.

Don Martin’s column doesn’t have to be in the National Post for me to want to read it. John Moore, Jim Richards, Dave Rutherford, Jim Rome, Adam Carolla… none of these guys have to be on the radio for me to want to listen. Kevin Newman, George Strombo….os, they don’t have to be on TV for me to want to watch. Blogging, Podcasting, and YouTube are all viable vehicles. But would you pay for it?

This is the question content consumers will be faced with. Some polls have already posed it. Soon, the market will. Will you pay for content. Many say they’d pay for commercial free television. How much would you pay? And how much television would you get? My cable bill looks like a rip off since all I want is Monday Night Football, Mad Men, and the Daily Show (and I think I should get a discount on Mad Men since it’s about advertising) but I end up paying for the full service. I use less than 1% of what they pipe into my home, but I pay full price. A la carte TV shows anyone?

Adam Carolla does a very entertaining podcast. It’s a seamless hour of funny conversation. It’s free right now, but I’d pay $5-10 for a one year subscription. That’s peanuts to me, but if all of his downloaders paid $5 for the right to hear his podcast, he’d have $12 million. That’s not entirely accurate. Those would be his earnings in week two of his podcast. I’m certain his audience has grown since then. I’m also certain that $12 million would be more than enough to entice him to continue providing the content he does.

The same goes for my favourite writers, authors, reporters… people who are limited by the vehicles they are currently stuck to.

When I think of how much I already spend on media – newspapers, television, magazines, movies, etc. – I feel that I could cut the costs and cut out a lot of the clutter when it comes to my content consumption. That’s a future I’d like.

Would you pay for content?

I was delighted to receive this email today because it game me something to read and react to.

“Dear Radio Underdog:

Yours,
Homegrown”

Thanks for the email, Homegrown. Incidentally, I once received an email on another topic by a fella of the same name. I wrote a long and meandering response, but never got around to posting it. Someday, maybe I’ll dig it up and put it online.

The Grey Cup, huh? Wasn’t that a thriller? I can’t say I’ve seen a better CFL Championship in my day. Nothing was more satisfying than sending all those Saskatchewan fans back to their regular-shaped province with nothing but watermelon hulls and tales of the big city and how they didn’t win the Grey Cup there.

Your question pertains to the influx of emigrants to Alberta. I like it. It’s hard to criticize people for wanting to live here and take advantage of the… Alberta… uh… advantage. It seems to me that the problem these pilgrims have caused in Alberta has less to do with their desire to work and make good bread and more to do with the ineptitude of the provincial gov’t here. It floors me that a province with an economy in “overdrive” couldn’t find a way to profit enough to take care of the people coming here.

What are the effects of all these inter-provincial interlopers? The effect should be awesome. More labour, more industry, more culture, more diversity, more awesomeness. Instead, they strain the system(s), but only because those trusted with keeping the system can’t keep up.

Here’s an easy one. If you’ve got people coming here in droves to work in a particular industry and, in some cases, they’re bringing people with them to work in other industries, doesn’t it make sense to ensure that those industries can fire on all cylinders? Maybe I have an oversimplistic response to this, but I tend to believe that if the industry is the provider, it should have a little more say in how it provides. There’s a lot of laid-off oil workers in town these days and I’m not content to lay the blame solely at the feet of the price of the barrel.

I think the AB gov’t has proven that it can’t cope with the amount of people drawing on its resources. This H1N1 fiasco has been a lovely dose of evidence. Alberta has to move to a competent administration that is less concerned with preserving increasingly irrelvant values and more concerned with adapting to the province its inhabitants are making.

Now, summing up: Foreign Labour… bring it on.