Ewan gets nominated for a BAFTA!

We're pretty proud of our wee Scottish podcaster Ewan McGregor Spence!! This is AFAIK another podcasting first!

 

Ewan Spence’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe Podcast notched up a number of firsts in 2005. Now he can add another to it, with a nomination from BAFTA Scotland for the Best New Media Award, 2005.

The nomination is a major endorsement of the new emerging medium of podcasting. “A year ago, nobody really knew what Podcasting was,” says Spence, “and now the genre will be represented in one of Scotland’s largest media awards.”

Thousands of people from around the world turned to Spence’s podcasts to find the hottest shows and discover what happened at this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe. His one-man show accessed via The Podcast Network, had listeners in Edinburgh and across the globe waiting eagerly every morning for the latest news, interviews and reviews from Scotland’s capital.

Podcasting is a brand new medium that broadly follows the format of a radio show and can feature news, interviews, music, etc. However, instead of being broadcast live ‘over the air’, podcasts are available on the Internet, for listeners to download and enjoy on their MP3 players, in their own time and wherever they happen to be.

The Fringe Podcast is the perfect example of Citizen Journalism – where one person takes on an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, and distributing news and information from an event, leveraging the power of the Internet to create an international daily show accessible by millions of people worldwide.

“With just an MP3 recorder, a copy of the Fringe Programme and a mobile phone, Ewan’s Edinburgh Fringe Podcast produced a huge amount of high quality audio programming over August,” says Cameron Reilly, co-founder of The Podcast Network. “With those basic resources, Ewan broke new ground as the first podcast to cover a non-technical conference. He increased the reach of the event to thousands of people all around the world, showcasing upcoming acts and new talent on a stage far larger than anything Edinburgh alone could provide.”

Spence continues to produce and host a weekly podcast of unsigned rock music (TPN Rock), and will be attending the upcoming Portable Media Expo in Ontario, California to continue promoting The Podcast Network.