News.blog: Pentagon starts podcasting

The Pentagon began podcasting on Monday. The 5-minute segments, delivered as radio-style news reports, are produced by the Pentagon Channel, a cable TV channel for military news and information that the Department of Defense launched in May.

The debut programme features a report on bird flu and a recap of a briefing with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on military rotations. It's pretty dry fare for the lay person, but Brian Natwick, general manager of the Pentagon Channel, thinks it will appeal to members of the military, especially soldiers deployed in Iraq. "Almost everyone has an MP3 player over there," he said.

The Pentagon podcast is not the first to come out of the US military. The Air Force began its Around the Airforce programme some time ago.