Think Humanist:

Juliet, one of our Friday Coffee Morningers, has been doing some media work for the Humanist Society of Scotland.

She had the rather Web 2.0 idea of matching Radio Four's non-secular; 'Thought for the Day', with a series of podcasts from the Humanist, secular perspective.

Here's what Juliet had to say about the idea:

'When I started doing the media work for the Humanist Society of Scotland one of my firsts thoughts was to call up the people who produce thought for the day on Good morning Scotland and the Today programme and ask if they would have humanists on. they said no, they wouldn't. I thought that was a shame then saw a good opportunity for PR. So I decided to set up a website where we could podcast secular thoughts for the day and launch it with five notable figures podcasting for the first week, launching the site on Darwin day.

Tim (Mr Juliet. Ed.) came up with Think Humanist as a name and we have Stewart Lee (Jerry Springer the Opera creator), Kate Hudson (Chair CND) and Humanist philosophers AC Grayling, Julian Baggini, Nigel Warburton podcasting this week.

The site has been linked to over 7000 humanist orientated organisations throughout the world.

Obviously we hope to get on Thought for the Day at some point but we intend to keep the site going and invite thinkers from around the world to podcast and will continue to try and get notable people to podcast too. Humanists such as Stephen Fry, Harold Pinter and Iain Banks are all on our wishlist.'

(Mike again:) What I particularly like about these podcasts, apart from the rivetingly intelligent perspective of course, are the high production values, which let's be honest, are often lacking in many a podcast.

Lots of people bang on about consumer/user generated media, and that it's 'the future', but it takes a professional ear, and a lot of skill to make broadcasts like these. Something most of the 'user generators' haven't a scooby about.

Comments

[Mike]

I think that's an excellent idea Tim.

I'm sure Gerry would be up for it, and do a belter of a job.

(However, I do have a feeling Gerry might be of a Non-Secular persuasion?)

Whatever, he'd be top notch, you should ask him.

[Tim Maguire]

Thanks for the coverage Michael: I don't know if you get Creative Review, but by a strange coincidence, in this month's issue, Mother chose to do an interview with Think Humanist's first podder AC Grayling on the ethics of advertising, which was cool and made us think: how can we get in touch with some of advertising's bigger brains like Naresh Ramchandani, Paul Arden, Gerry Farrell and others to ask if they'd like to do a TFTD for us?