CBC Radio is wonderfully, fantastically open to freelancers. But one of the harder aspects of working with them is their understandable reluctance to use phone interview clips.
Little wonder: phone conversations sound awful, and nearly always have some irritating background buzz that can stump even the most gifted sound engineer.
But if you want to do a story where the setting goes further afield than just across town, what’s a freelancer — without a handy travel expense account — to do?
The answer may be to download Skype, the free Internet telephone-without-a-phone-complany software. Available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and even Pocket PC, Skype users can call each other online and enjoy high-quality audio conversations without paying a dime in long distance charges.
Now the BBC is getting in on the act, according to BuzzMachine:
It’s not only podcasters who are using Skype for interviews, the BBC is… because it offers higher quality than a plain old phone line.
I’m going to be on the BBC’s Up All Night sometime Monday night to blather on blogs and in the process of setting up, Kevin Anderson said they use Skype because it’s so good. From his emails:
Yes, we’re using Skype heavily. We recently conducted an interview with Mr Behi, an Iranian blogger, via Skype. It’s very useful for us in that repressive governments can’t block it due to its distributed nature. And seeing as on a good connection, it’s a full 44Khz signal, it’s just below the quality of the very expensive ISDN broadcast equipment we have.
There’s a corollary to all of this: if you want to pitch yourself as a source to broadcast journalists, a Skype download should probably be in your future, too.
A friend alerted me to spyware problems that he had after installing Skype. As well, he indicated that the program reactivated his old dial-in TCP/IP and he had to go to a fair bit of work to change his settings back to DSL.
Short answer: Skype isn’t spyware. Download it from their web site, and you don’t have to worry about it.
Longer answer: Your friend almost certainly actually installed a recent version of the file-sharing program Kazaa.
A little history: the two Scandinavian guys behind Skype also built Kazaa, released just as the recording industry was closing in on Napster. A subsequent court judgement in the Netherlands ordered them to prevent copyrighted material from being distributed on the Kazaa network; they responded by selling Kazaa to Sharman Networks.
Sharman Networks began bundling adware with Kazaa, and was less than direct with its users about what the adware did and how it would affect their computers. (Sharman disputes suggestions that the bundled software is spyware. I don’t feel like getting into the argument with them, so let’s just call it destructive, destabilizing crap that you really don’t want on your computer. Some call it scumware. I can live with that.)
Late last year, Sharman Networks also began including Skype with every download of Kazaa. From Skype’s standpoint, it was probably a way of exposing their software to a huge new range of users (and the larger the installed base, the more useful a program like Skype becomes).
The downside, of course, was the renewed association with Kazaa. Russell Shaw, ZDNet’s telephony columnist, reports that his computer was infested with more than 2,500 scumware files after a Kazaa/Skype bundled install. (He also discovered that the licensing agreement that comes with Kazaa’s scumware actually prohibits you from removing it on your own.)
Downloading Skype on its own – which is how the Skype web site distributes it – means you don’t get any of that.
Moral: Before downloading and installing (or buying and installing, for that matter) any software — whether it’s FreePornSurferPro or a Windows XP service pack — go online. Search Google, Google Groups and Technorati to see what people are saying about the software.
You aren’t just protecting yourself from spyware and viruses. Even perfectly legitimate software can go horribly wrong, from the Mac OS X update a few years ago that would wipe out entire hard drive partitions to Internet Explorer’s various security holes.