Part of the daily task in the newsroom of most daily newspapers means writing a budget or your story ideas for the day. You write a one-sentence description, how many inches the story would fill in the paper and if it has art, such as graphics or photos.

The editors gather all the story ideas, look at the size of their news hole and then decide what goes in the paper. Editors debate, look for angles and then add or cut stories that they decide can wait another day or never see black ink on white paper.

I listened to an enhanced podcast last night from G4: Attack of the Show. To me, it showed what newspapers and other big media could do to show the people behind what stories run and the thinking that goes into the process. Big media seems so impersonal. These are the kinds of meetings where the personailties show.

An enhanced podcast, as demonstrated by Phil Torrone, essentially allows you to show images and create chapters in your podcast. The chapters are like a playlist. You can skip to the chapter you want or listen to it as it progresses. If you have an iPod, you would see the images for each chapter appear on the iPod screen.

By using an enhanced podcast, the guys at G4 turned a meeting about what to run on their site into an entertaining glimpse of what stories get presented, which ones the editors like and which ones they don't. (Word of Zoolander II with Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson got groans from the group.)

I kept the chapters open the whole time. A little icon of a book appeared in iTunes, which allowed me to see the different images. I could listen and see what they referred to in their meeting. True, these guys are entertaining and their topics are eclectic but more so I received a new insight into how they make decisions about what to get on the site.

Could big media do this? Podcast their budget meetings? Make them enhanced? The mass media get a lot of grief these days for their ways of reporting the news .But if they did podcasts of those morning budget meetings, then we'd get an idea about what they were thinking about covering that day. Take it a step further and you could have the reporters podcasting as they research and interview. The community gets involved each part of the way up to the time the story actually goes to the press and gets delivered to your door.

Now that's a paper I'd read.

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