made this for you | the future isn’t what it used to be

This American Life is by far our favorite radio show, and our favorite podcast all around. The last few episodes have been a little different, and sad. Not in terms of the content, but in the desperate cry for help in funding. This is the issue according to Ira Glass, the host and founder:

Hi everyone, Ira Glass here. It’s a sad fact of life that our free podcast and streaming aren’t really free. They cost the public radio station we work at $108,000 a year. That’s just for bandwidth. That’s not the cost of servers, or people to update the website, or anything else.

If you’re someone who listens here all the time, or who gets the free weekly podcast, your listening is paid for by all the people who contribute to Chicago Public Radio. They’re carrying you and everyone else who listens online.

Might you consider chipping in? A $5 or $10 contribution would cover all the listening you could possibly do in a year, plus a bunch of freeloaders who’ll never pitch in. If you’re feeling generous—and love merch—$50 will get you a poster from our last tour; $75 will get you a This American Life kite; $100 will get you the Chris Ware Lost Buildings DVD; $500 will get you all of those, plus our love. Okay, that last part’s a lie. You have our love already. Expressed in the form of a documentary radio show.

First off, I whole heartily support This American Life. If you listen to this show, DONATE HERE. If you haven’t heard the show, check it out here. It has been sad recently, to see some of my friends lose their jobs around me. But, I have been through that before during the .com era. I have never seen this sort of widespread job loss though. It is now truly heartbreaking to see public institutions like PRI suffering from this shitty economy.

I do think there is a better way for PRI’s This American Life to stay afloat. By licensing their content as creative commons, and allowing users to distribute it themselves through various social web techniques (peer-to-peer, mirrored sites, blog posts embedding the content, etc) , TAL would reduce their bandwidth costs to almost $0.00. This would allow donations from the public to support the people actually producing the content for the show. Evan Prodromou, the co-founder of WikiTravel, also brings to light this point in a comment on their site [read more from Evan here].

TAL already has a good hand in new media; distributing it’s content through podcasts and on their website archive. My hope is that the tough times that we are experiencing, will help bring to light other possibilities that new media has to offer. I don’t think I would listen to them weekly, if it weren’t for my ability to listen to them when I please. I hope these financial constraints that we are seeing, will help bring about change in business models that people may have been apprehensive about before.

With TAL being a well respected show with a large following, that is partially supported by the public, making these changes shouldn’t affect their bottom line as much. Supporters of TAL will help see them through with their donations. While reducing overhead costs should be able to help them retain staff in these tough times and keep the podcasts free for the users. I for one would give them twice as much as my initial donation, if I knew that they were taking the steps necessary to reduce overhead, and focus on what matters- the programming.

TAL’s wikipedia page even brings the podcast funding issue to light. It mentions how another popular show, Democracy Now, is able to distribute it’s podcast without incurring the added bandwidth cost.

For now, I’m hoping that this will only be the start to an ongoing dialog. I’ve written TAL and asked them for a comment on this matter; and I’m hoping that they will respond.

In the mean time, we wish This American Life all the best of luck. We heart you, and you have our support.

UPDATE: This article has been edited as originally we thought TAL was distributed through NPR.

UPDATE: There is also a discussion on this matter on their Facebook page here.