Today’s Trucking On The Air

Shameless self-promotion is what this is, so I apologize in advance, but my father used to tell me, if you don’t blow your horn, nobody else is going blow it for you. We’ve launched a new feature on our website.

Some of you may already have discovered it. It’s a bi-weekly series of interviews with the people you read about in Today’s Trucking. The difference is, these are audio interviews, in a streaming format. You can download them too, and listen to them on your computer later or maybe on your MP3 player driving home from work.

When you read a story in the magazine, you’ll find quotes in our stories from the folks who figure prominently in the story. As a journalist, it’s my job to conduct an interview, and then pull the salient points forward and get them onto the printed page. We weave words around the quotes to pull the story together in a way that strays not too far from the point.

While we generally do a good job of sorting the wheat from the chaff in the magazine, but in staying on point and spinning a compelling tale there’s a lot in a half-hour discussion that we can’t fit it into a 1,200-word story. This new audio format gives us a lot more latitude to explore a topic, and to drill deeper than we can in print.

The interviews will run about 10 minutes. You can cover a lot of ground in a
10-minute conversation. The nice thing about the format — just like radio — is that you can keep on working while you listen. Or listen while you’re doing something else. You won’t have to set aside what you’re doing to make time to read or watch the story we’re presenting.

Over time, we’ll be featuring people you’ve read about in the magazine, and others with something interesting to say. We have hours of interviews banked so far, and we’ll be doing more as we move forward. If you’re a CBC listener, think of this as the As It Happens of trucking (sorry Barbara and Carol). Actually, that’s a lofty target, but I think I’m up to the task.

Before I came to Today’s Trucking and highwaySTAR, I worked at a radio station in Hamilton doing an all-night show for truckers. 820 CHAM had a really strong signal, and my show could be heard from Winnipeg to Moncton on some nights. I had a regular listener in Finland, too. He used to send me tapes of the show he’d recorded — just to prove he’d heard it.

In the age of Internet, broadcasting is no more difficult than setting up a mic and starting to talk. Posting podcasts to an Internet directory is as easy as e-mail. And the hours are better too — at least for the host. For the listener, the hours are anytime. Click and listen at your convenience, or as I suggested, download it and take it with you for the trip home in the car.

Ease of execution notwithstanding, what we think will make the difference in this case is access to the best, brightest, and most interesting subjects. We’re pretty well connected here, and we call many of the experts out there our friends. We’ll have no difficulty making some very engaging radio.

In addition to one-on-one interviews, we’ll be doing round-table discussions with small groups, and we’ll be taking our mics to various events and bringing you audio coverage of speeches, presentations and the like, that will be of interest you, the reader — and soon, the listener.

If you subscribe to any of the e-newsletter products we offer, such as Rolf Lockwood’s Product Watch, or NewsFirst, you be getting an alert about the latest audio installment. If you’re not yet subscribed, take a moment to sign up at www.todaystrucking.com.

As well, if you have any suggestions as to people we should be talking with, or topics you’d be interested in, drop me a line at jim@todaystrucking.com. We’re pretty excited about this new feature, and we’ve got more than a few ideas on how we can expand from the basic interview format.

Please visit todaystrucking.com and click on the “Truck Talk” icon to listen to the first podcast in the series — at your convenience. I think you’ll find it worthy of 10 minutes of your time.