Podcast review: The Skeptics Guide: 5×5

After sampling a number of business-related podcasts and failing to find one that inspired my loyalty, I heard The Skeptics Guide 5×5 and shouted Eureka!

The Skeptics Guide 5×5 is a weekly production of the New England Skeptical Society. I think that it does almost everything right:

Title and tag line:  The Skeptic’s Guide 5×5: “Five minutes with Five Skeptics.” The title caught my eye and correctly led me to believe that this would be a skeptical inquiry into a topical story involving religious, paranormal, pseudo-scientific hokum.  The weekly topics that appear in the title are also irresistible:  Man regenerates finger, Surgery under hypnosis, Ghost photographs, Steven Spielberg to create paranormal online community.   The tag line, “Five minutes with five skeptics” is in the first sentence spoken by the host, and tells me that I only have to invest five minutes — a major attraction for my limited attention span, and a benefit I’d like to incorporate into my own podcast title or tagline.

Concept viability:  The Skeptics Guide hasn’t missed a week since it debuted in January of this year and the dozen episodes that I’ve listened to have all featured the same 5 skeptics who are identified only by their first names. A major strength of the concept is that there is no shortage of preposterous paranormal stories to debunk. In world where an appearance of the Virgin Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich makes the front page, The Skeptics Guide 5×5  will never be in danger of running out of material.

Audience targeting:  Perfect for the secular humanist such as I who is exasperated by the popular willingness to suspend disbelief over the latest miracle, ghost story, UFO sighting or Virgin Mary appearance. An important ingredient of The Skeptics Guide is that it’s both sober and entertaining.  It doesn’t shoot fish in a barrel. The panel is scientifically savvy and examines the story at hand with dispassionate analysis. No matter how ridiculous the reported event is, they debunk without disparaging the perpetrators or the nitwits who are falling for the story.

Promotion:  A banner for The Skeptics Guide 5×5 is featured on the organization’s home page along with their “main” pod cast which features longer interviews.  As a non-profit probably operating on a shoestring, they probably don’t have the budget for off-site promotion.

Production.  Overall, very good.  The five panelists are professionally mic-ed, their voices are distinguishable from each other, and there’s rarely any cross-talk. The theme music is original and appropriate, which just a hint of sci-fi. The one significant flaw is the absence of title artwork, which, to the skeptical podcast surfer, signifies that this production is probably in the home-made category. It definitely is not.

The Skeptics Gude 5×5 archive

Blog review: The Bobosphere: Bog Garfield’s Book, Bitching and Random Bloviation.

Bob Garfield is a senior editor of Advertising Age, one of the two leading magazines that track the advertising industry, the other being Adweek. Garfield is also co-host of NPRs, On the Media, which I subscribe to in podcast form.  He’s generally regarded as the industry leading ad critic. A positive review of your campaign by Garfield is something to include on your resume.

The main blogging challenge for a critic would seem to be in making it significantly different than your regular column, which, by nature, is similar to a blog in that it’s a forum for your personal opinions.

Garfield generally succeeds by consistently using his blog in two ways that are distinctive from his columns. One is to comment on a range of topics related to the ad industry, such a the recent suicide of a leading creative executive at the agency, DDB.  The other technique is to deliver mico-critiques, such as a recent post that pointed out that Bud Lite’s campaign featuring a guy who responds to series of situations with the single word, “Dude” is virtually identical to a campaign for the Ford Focus that ran 8 years ago.

This is an example of what I value most about the Bobosphere: Garfield’s long-term perspective on an industry that seems to be perpetually undergoing radical change for all the obvious Web 2.0 reasons. For me, a middle-aged guy who’s paddling fast to stay current in a youth-crazed industry that’s seems to be having a panic attack as it tries to convince clients that it still has the answers, Garfield is a refreshing and reassuring voice of reason. He knows from whence we came and uses his blog to remind us that the media may change, but the principles of good branding and effective persuasion never go out of style.

Visually, there’s nothing in the masthead of the Boboshere other than the title and subhead that distinguish it from Garfield’s regular column.

My main gripe with the Bobosphere is the irregularity and infrequency of it.  The last two posts were April 29 and March 2, which suggests that Bob isn’t exactly embracing the concept of having yet another deadline.  I’m hoping that he’ll blog about the pain of having to blog because your editor said you have to now. As a writer who is still reluctant to launch my own blog for fear of taking on another deadline, I’ll keep tuning in to the Bobosphere to see how Bob is feeling my pain.

The Bobosphere