Why Start “The Briefing”?

Today, we announced - though, if you have been following me and Stewart on Twitter, then the ‘surprise’ wasn’t really a surprise - a brand new podcast called “The Briefing”. As we have said in the introduction:

No music, no commentary, no fanboys and no talking heads – so basically, way different from TECHGEEK Weekly. Just the week that was in technology – and in a under ten minute package so you can download this and listen while you’re in bed on a Sunday Morning, or while you travel to work on Monday.

But why?

Well, to be frank, most of the technology news podcasts are all opinion based. TWiT, Tech News Today, the former Buzz Out Loud, and the Vergecast are simply based around talking heads discussing technology. Heck, even TECHGEEK Weekly is the same. And like political opinion - some can be based on truth, some based on personal biases.

90 Seconds On The Verge is more newsy than opinion, but it’s really short. Of course, it’s daily and in video, so it does take a lot more time processing and editing the video.

But my inspiration comes from CNET - and its former Daily News podcast. Yes, I was online at a time to remember that podcast. It simply just reported the news of the week. Sadly, this ended as they invested more on video than podcasts - which, eventually, saw the end of many of its podcasts this year including Buzz Out Loud. Another inspiration comes from the BBC World Service. I’ve always had a fascination on how they report the news. Even without the pictures and video.

They do it daily - we’re doing weekly. Why weekly? Well, as the title represents, it is meant to a summary of the week so you can be kept up to date of the latest technology news and stories.

The Briefing will be purposely barebones - there might be a very short intro music, but I haven’t decided yet (it will be initially without music). It will be very direct, and like every podcast, a link dump from stories from us and across the entire tech world will be included so you can read more from our summary. It will be direct, and it is under ten minutes tomake surewe are direct. To force us to summarise clearly.

A rotating panel of people will be doing the podcast, but initially it will mostly be me and Stewart rotating each week. We could expand this as well to bring editors on the podcast with prerecorded bits so if we were invited to a gadget launch, we can bring them in to explain what they saw - like a correspondent. We possibly could bring other people in to also explain. We want to do that, but of course, we’ll have to see what we can do and its limitations.

The Briefing is an audio podcast, and we have no plans to do video. Of course, this fits in with the barebones podcast setup we have and plan to do with this podcast - because we want this out, and of course, edited during the Sunday if news breaks that requires us to edit the episode itself. This also has to do with the fact that audio makes it easier to download and stream on mobile devices.

I do hope you enjoy listening to The Briefing. Of course, if you have any suggestions, do tweet us at @techgeekcomau, @tgbriefing or directly to me at @terencehuynh.