Way beyond

As the BBC whips us up into a frenzy ahead of Tuesday's game-changing arrival of the already-arrived BBC Sounds app, James Purnell, Director of Radio and Education, and Bob Shennan, Director of Radio and Music, have been talking to The Guardian.

"Until recently the BBC was banned from creating online-only podcasts for competition reasons, meaning it is now making up for lost time, Shennan says. To this end a  'few million pounds' a year will be given to commission podcasts purely for an online audience."

Much publicity was accrued from the announcement of a Today podcast, called "Beyond Today", a daily 20 minutes to be released at 5pm weekdays, on a single news topic. It will be presented by Tina Daheley, 39, who will presumably thus hold on to her £150k salary, newly arrived in the last financial year, and Matthew Price, 46, who will surely make the breakthrough this year, if only in terms of the BBC's new transparency and commitment to equal pay.

The editor is John Shields, a long-serving Assistant Editor of Today (not as cheap as asking a production assistant to sort out the podcast), who had the idea six months when studying as a Knight Wallace Fellow of the University of Michigan, on the outskirts of Detroit. John was cogitating on "mitigating the loss of public trust in broadcast media". John says the podcast is being produced with "a brilliant bunch of colleagues"; Matthew Price says there's "a hugely talented team of producers". I've found at least five ranging from senior journalist to producer/researcher, proudly tweeting they're on board. You can hear them all being very demotic and under-34 in the trailer. I'm guessing there's £750k a year going into this, minimum.

No pressure, then, from inside or outside.  BBC colleagues working on, say, PM's budget coverage, or Newsbeat's budget coverage, or 5Live's budget coverage, or the Business Unit's budget coverage, etc etc, will be looking for the differences at 5pm.