By Frank Barnako, Marketwatch
While National Public Radio has been a pioneer in podcasting, some local member stations are not happy.
It comes down to the relationship with listeners, according to Rafat Ali, publisher of PaidContent.org. He's covering the Public Broadcasting New Media Conference in Seattle this week.
"If you thought that the newspaper people were in the grips of a siege mentality, you should come and see the public radio and TV people," he wrote Friday.
Local stations worry that contributions from listeners will dry up if their programming is distributed through NPR's uber-guide, NPR Podcast Directory:
"Organizations like NPR and PBS are arguing that there should be a centralized aggregation effort, a bit like a destination site," Ali reported, adding that affiliates "want to make their local sites as the destination sites."
Meanwhile, almost 500 international newspaper publishers, editors, and marketers are in Paris wrestling with how the Internet has changed their business.