Buzz Out Loud

» see cnet.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

On 30 March 2005, two CNET editors sat down to record what they described as five or so minutes of tech news every second day. The subtitle they gave it was "CNET's podcast of indeterminate length", which turned out to be the only accurate thing in the pitch. Tom Merritt and Molly Wood talked about patent suits and DRM on that first show, the word podcast had been in use for about a year, and within a year of their own the format had settled into forty minutes of news and argument every weekday.

The staffing moved around constantly and the show survived all of it. Veronica Belmont started as the silent producer and grew into a co-host, then left on 20 July 2007 for Mahalo. Molly Wood cut back to one appearance a week in January 2009 and came back full time on 8 February 2010. Tom Merritt left on 14 May 2010 to host Tech News Today at TWiT, which left Wood as the last of the original desk, with Brian Tong and producer Stephen Beacham alongside her to the end.

Daily audio in 2005 was a broadband product, and broadband arrived in Turkey on its own schedule. I had a TTNet line by about 2006, which is roughly the first moment a forty-minute MP3 every morning was something you could actually keep up with here, and by then Buzz Out Loud had a year of episodes behind it and a US phone number for listener voicemail that nobody in Ankara was going to dial. It was a show about the American tech cycle, reported from inside it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what a daily show costs ~

Buzz Out Loud was not a two-microphones-in-a-closet operation. It had a studio and salaried staff, and above them a parent company: CNET Networks, bought by CBS in 2008 for 1.8 billion dollars. That is what made five episodes a week possible for seven years, and it is also why the decision to stop was taken upstairs.

The decision came down on 23 March 2012. CNET announced on episode 1,586 that production would stop, framing it as a move toward more on-demand content and away from the daily live format. The audience got two weeks of notice.

~ the roster it seeded ~

The alumni list is the real legacy. Tom Merritt went to TWiT for Tech News Today and later built the Daily Tech News Show, which is still running the same five-days-a-week discipline two decades after Buzz Out Loud started it. Veronica Belmont went to Mahalo and then through a decade of tech video and podcasting. Molly Wood moved into public radio and ended up hosting Marketplace Tech.

The template came out of here too. A fixed daily slot with a rotating desk of hosts who disagree out loud, plus listener mail treated as a segment rather than a bonus, was not obvious in 2005 and is standard now. The Daily Tech News Show still reads the mail.

~ the last show ~

Episode 1,588 went out on 5 April 2012 under the title "Loved the Show", which was how listeners habitually signed off the letters that got read on air. The alumni came back for it, Merritt and Belmont among them, and the current desk sat in with them. The title came from the audience, like most of the show's running jokes.

~ where it lives now ~

CNET's own feed is long gone, but the run survives as a mirrored collection on the Internet Archive under the identifier cnetbuzz, where somebody's description of the show still carries the precise dates of every host change and the full guest list of the finale. The show was cancelled by a media company and preserved by a library, which is how almost every podcast in this archive ends up.

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