10 comments

1. I love reading AND listening, yet I prefer reading by far! My brain seems to focus better reading, as well as my note taking! I love transcripts. You can even listen AND read at the same time, if doable! Both work for most of us.✝️📖🙏👍😊

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2. Personally I find it quicker to listen than read whilst tractor driving. Haven’t listened, but having come from a denomination that went in for lent I’m looking forward to listening.
   Greg.

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   • Greg,

     Start with part 1:

     https://heidelblog.net/lent

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3. How I wish you would publish transcripts of the podcasts. I am heartsick that you don’t. I can read much faster than I can listen.

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   • Bob,

     Heartsick seems like a very strong reaction. Disappointed I could understand.

     Have no fear. If you listen to the podcast via Apple Podcasts (and I suspect this is true of other apps) there is an automatically generated transcript. I can’t vouch for its accuracy. I suspect that it misses some religious, biblical, theological, and historical terms.

     Personally, I think you’ll be missing out. There’s no cowbell in a transcript and not no vocal inflection.

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     • Dr. Clark, Bob Taylor is right.

       I realize your background is in radio, not print, but there are reasons why text pages get far more views than most pages with video or audio. (Yes, viral videos are the exception — there are things video can do that text cannot.)

       Most people can’t take an hour or two to listen to a podcast or watch a video. Some do and that’s fine. For some people, they can play a podcast while commuting to work and I sense that may be more of an issue in Southern California than a lot of other places. If people have an hour or more of nonproductive time, a podcast can make that time productive.

       But reading something in text takes only a small fraction of time it takes to watch a video or listen to a podcast.

       Providing transcripts would, I think, greatly increase your audience.

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       • Darrell,

         I’ve written three books, edited a few others, and contributed to other books, journals, and magazines. I have a book to be published, Dv, this summer and a 1,000 page book forthcoming in November and I’ve published thousands of pieces on the Heidelblog, so it’s not as though I’m not invested in writing.

         If people want to read transcripts of the Heidelcast, that’s their choice. I’m only pointing out that the podcast is not meant to be read. It’s meant to be heard and because of the differences in media the reader of transcripts will miss out.

         I also want to question the premise that the principal thing about podcasts is information transmission. That’s an essential part of what happens in a good podcast but that’s not the only thing.

         I understand being busy. I have two full-time jobs. I have to be selective in pods to which I listen but I’m still able to listen to a number of them each week.

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         • Fair enough, Dr. Clark. Definitely did **NOT** mean to say you didn’t value print or text. You are a college professor, after all.

           There are people who believe such things, or act as if they did. That’s not you, and it shouldn’t be anyone in the Reformed world.

           Please permit me to expand on what I was trying to say, but probably not saying very well.

           I’ve been saying for decades, long before the internet had the reach it does today, that the three traditional forms of news media — print, radio, and TV — were going to experience convergence as the number of people with access to the internet expanded. The internet was once only available to a small number of college students, professors, and people on corporate computer networks getting “free” access through their universities or companies, and then later to people willing to pay major money via CompuServe and then AOL for dialup access from their homes. While I learned to program in FORTRAN and COBOL on mainframes with punchcards, when it comes to personal computing, I go back to “ancient days” of RS232 modems and owned a Radio Shack TRS-80 that cost somewhere in the $4000 range for the best model available with 48K of RAM and 5-1/4″ floppy drives, and I remember when the first six newspapers went online via CompuServe. As prices rapidly dropped and the number of people with online access expanded into the millions, by the late 1980s it was clear that a very small media operation with online capabilities could run circles around the Christian Reformed denominational apparatus in getting the word out about what was wrong in the CRC. You were teaching at Westminster by that time and you’re well aware of the role technology played in reaching laypeople to alert them to what was happening.

           Journalism schools will teach that traditionally, print media had the advantage of being able to provide depth and detail. Radio could provide immediacy as well as audio — “BREAKING NEWS: Japanese Bomb Pearl Harbor” — and by the 1950s, television added the ability to provide video as well as immediacy, which is a big part of why we lost the war in Vietnam with people seeing, up close on their living room TVs, the realities of what war looks like in ways that were previously impossible. But neither of the two types of broadcast media could provide depth or detail, leading to 30-second sound bites becoming the norm.

           What the internet can do is provide all three — depth and detail, immediacy, and both audio and video — and allow small operations the ability to rival major network radio and TV stations if they know the basics of audio and video production. It no longer takes a $20,000 TV camera and a half-million dollar studio and lots of staff and massive antennas and a broadcast license to transmit video via a television station, or a substantial fraction of those numbers to transmit audio via a radio station.

           What you’re doing on the Heidelblog would have required budgets in the high six digits, if not the low seven digits, as recently as the early 1980s, and it would have been (at most) a weekly magazine, probably biweekly or monthly. I don’t know your stats, but you probably reach more people online every day than the largest publications associated with J. Gresham Machen and the movement that became the OPC reached with each of their print issues, which (I think) were produced weekly or monthly. (The PCA’s history with the Southern Presbyterian Journal is somewhat different and that publication had a far larger circulation than the Northern equivalents.)

           What I’m trying to say is that text has a place. It’s crucial for Reformed people who value information over experience. You know that or you wouldn’t be a professor writing books.

           But I’m quite aware of the role of radio and TV in journalism, and while I’ve resisted for years trying to produce an online video news summary, I’d say different things if I had someone available sufficiently cute to be an anchor. That’s a reality of news: Looks count in TV, and nobody wants to look at short fat ugly Italians like me.

           I hope that expanded commentary makes clear I wasn’t trying to criticize or attack. Podcasts have value.

           But it would be nice, though perhaps unrealistic due to time, if someone on your staff (or a seminary student volunteer) could review and edit the auto-generated captions many computer programs can produce from an audio file and post a podcast transcript. If it’s time-prohibitive, I get it. There are many things I’d like to do that I don’t have the time to do, either. Perhaps as AI gets better and training AI to recognize voices becomes more sophisticated, what is now time-consuming editorial work to produce transcripts of multi-speaker audio will become easier.

         • Bad typo in the post sent a few minutes ago. Yes, I’m fully aware you are a seminary professor and have been for many years, not a college professor. Not sure why I wrote that; I may have been thinking of your time at Wheaton College when I began working at Christian Renewal and I realized what the internet could do to get conservative news past the Christian Reformed denominational gatekeepers. My wife has a Wheaton doctorate, though you and she never crossed paths, and you left Wheaton for Westminster long before she enrolled at Wheaton.

           Apologies for the unintentional demotion in educational instruction level — not at all meant to deprecate you or the seminary.

4. I misspoke in the first moments of today’s podcast. I referred to Lefevre as “French Reformed.” He was certainly French but I don’t know that he ever became part of the Reformed churches. There is disagreement amongst scholars as to whether he became allied with the Protestant cause.

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