Looks like the Hindu Business Line quietly rolled out some new features recently - a mobile site and podcasts. On April 25th, the first podcast went up on their site - a weekly business news roundup hosted on a Wordpress blog. This certainly is a poor attempt at a podcasts section; for a big media house, I would have expected some investment in design and development. There’s a lack of design integration with the main Hindu Business Line website (just a podpress theme with a masthead doesn’t cut it). Often there’s a context to stories and interviews that doesn’t make it to print (and in case of newspaper websites - to the sites). I’d prefer that the podcasts be integrated with existing stories as an additional perspective, or a separate story altogether (a web-exclusive, maybe). In that context, the podcasts are far too short - most are less than two minutes long; one thing I did like - some of the audio content is in a local language - in Tamil.

Amusingly, the mobile version of the Hindu Businessline is a collection of links to the printer-friendly pages of the main content on the site; the assumption is that if the page is light, it should work for the mobile; that’s not entirely true: I tried it on the mobile, and the pages have horizontal scrolling, and the content is just as wordy (and lengthly) in the mobile version as it is in the online version…too much scrolling. While on business news sites: I like what Mint has done with its blogs - OneWaYTicket, in particular. Still feel, though, that content discovery and frequency of updates on Mint blogs is a bit of an issue.