On the Media is a recent addition to my podcast regime. It airs at inconvenient times – 7am Saturday or 7pm Sunday – meaning that I’ll sometimes catch a story en route to the market or while making dinner, but rarely the entire program. What did we do before podcasts, you guys?

Every week I look forward to OtM’s interesting and incisive coverage of the media landscape – recent episodes have discussed the newspaper and publishing industries, the McChrystal debacle (and an interesting discussion of freelance vs beat reporting), the digital divide, and a particularly hilarious Twitter hoax.  The podcast runs about 50 minutes, making it perfect for my walk into work and the first 10-15 minutes of getting settled in, drinking my coffee, and catching up on email – or for a long weekend run.

I mention OtM today, though, because there were two particularly interesting pieces in this week’s episode – one that will appeal to all my information access nerds in the crowd, and the other that will appeal to my NPR nerds.  I suspect there’s a lot of overlap in that group, come to think of it.

First, an interview with Carl Malamud about his efforts to make government information accessible to the people that pay for its production (i.e. the taxpayers). I’m not an information access nerd, but Malamud is fighting the good fight and is also an entertaining interviewee, so I recommend checking out this clip and also Yes We Scan!:
http://www.onthemedia.org/flashplayer/mp3player.swf?config=http://www.onthemedia.org/flashplayer/config_share.xml&file=http://www.onthemedia.org/stream/xspf/157429

Second, OtM’s tribute to the late Dan Schorr.  By now everyone who listens to NPR has heard the Dan Schorr stories and tributes, but this one features a particularly funny story in tribute:
http://www.onthemedia.org/flashplayer/mp3player.swf?config=http://www.onthemedia.org/flashplayer/config_share.xml&file=http://www.onthemedia.org/stream/xspf/157463