“Pardon the Interruption” Podcast Offers Authentic Show Experience

“Par­don the Inter­rup­tion” is one of the most pop­u­lar sports debate shows on ESPN. PTI, as it is com­mon­ly referred to, is a pop­u­lar show because it is very unique and creative.

The hosts of the show, Tony Korn­heis­er and Michael Wilbon, rep­re­sent every day liv­ing room per­son­al­i­ties. They ban­ter through­out the show, mak­ing it very enter­tain­ing to watch.

The hosts make the show more about life than just sports. They do a fan­tas­tic job talk­ing about all the news in the world.

The PTI pod­cast I chose had sev­er­al top­ics. The pod­cast was almost iden­ti­cal to the tele­vi­sion show. How­ev­er, since the show is 30 min­utes, the pod­cast was only twen­ty min­utes, because there are no com­mer­cials. This was very con­ve­nient as a lis­ten­er. Noth­ing is more frus­trat­ing than being engulfed in a juicy seg­ment that is quick­ly sent to a commercial.

I will admit, I do not lis­ten pod­casts that often. I get most of my infor­ma­tion either from live shows or online arti­cles. Radio shows are prob­a­bly the clos­est things to pod­casts that I lis­ten to. How­ev­er, I learned a lot about pod­casts dur­ing this assign­ment. I enjoyed lis­ten­ing to the PTI pod­cast because it was almost iden­ti­cal to the show with­out com­mer­cials. I can lis­ten to the seg­ment on my phone and watch it on my own time schedule.

The hosts of the broad­casts were the usu­al hosts, Michael Wilbon and Tony Korn­heis­er. They dis­cussed sev­er­al top­ics dur­ing the show. The main top­ics were the off field issues in the NFL. The NFL issues has dealt with many domes­tic abuse alle­ga­tions in the last cou­ple months. There have been at five accu­sa­tions in the last cou­ple months, the most notable cas­es being, Ray Rice and Adri­an Peterson.

The pod­cast was very engag­ing because the infor­ma­tion was accu­rate and the hosts pro­vid­ed valu­able insight on the very dif­fi­cult top­ics. These top­ics were very hard to talk about. In fact, ESP­N’s Stephen A. Smith was sus­pend­ed for mak­ing insen­si­tive remarks about women ear­li­er this sum­mer when talk­ing about the Ray Rice case.. The hosts did a great job talk­ing about the dif­fi­cult top­ics, and relat­ing them to the every day fan.

One neg­a­tive thing about the pod­cast was that there was no area for lis­ten­er inter­ac­tion. There were not any polls or visu­al aids. How­ev­er, the hosts offered links to check out dur­ing the pod­cast, which did add an ele­ment to the show. I would rate the pod­cast an 8–10. The length was per­fect. Twen­ty min­utes was a per­fect amount of time because it fit right in with the aver­age dri­ving distance.

In con­clu­sion, my over­all impres­sion of the pod­cast was a pos­i­tive one. I am going to lis­ten to PTI pod­casts in the future because I did­n’t real­ize how sim­i­lar they were to the shows. It is a per­fect solu­tion to mak­ing up a show when you miss the live pro­duc­tion. I was able to do home­work dur­ing the broad­cast, so mul­ti­task­ing was an option. How­ev­er, I would use pod­casts as a back up to live pro­duc­tions as a jour­nal­ist. I would not use it as my pri­ma­ry source of deliv­ery, but it is an excel­lent solu­tion for the, “con­sumer on the run.”