My first podcast was in 2007. It will never work, I was told. And now!

In the summer of 2007 Apple did something extraordinary. It sent me a free laptop. It did. But that really wasn’t the favour. It was that it hosted my podcast.

Yes the year is 2007, 17 odd years ago and I blogged about it here .

The arch of content creation was bending more and more to personalised content creation and I’d found discussing the personal to elide with trends or items of news values brought in listeners.

“Listeners also subscribed to Newsnight, From our own correspondent and Today”, said the blurb. Many years ago I’d worked in Newsnight, so naturally I was pleased.

At about that time too I was tasked with training Britain’s regional newspapers the art and science of videojournalism. You don’t get any prizes for seeing the future. Perhaps and award, but then.

Podcasts really started to take off around 2016, and video on i-phones as a means of videojournalism is now baked into our psyche. But something else is turning, and just as data informed me about previous media, so it does about the present-future. The impact of AI in video making and podcasts, as a separate entity to the status quo will be dramatic.

We’ve been training the next generation of content makers on our Masters program at Cardiff University and the overwhelming feedback is one of surprise and positive. But there’s a need to share widely, and particularly across regions in Africa where innovation and training is in demand.

I’ve been invited to share my thoughts at a forthcoming AI Storytellers & Machine conference. The talks resides around methods to create based on learning structures like digital ethnology — here you recreate video archives. There’s also safe guards I’ll discuss that point the way for the efficacy of AI.

You can get a glimpse of the direction of AI in factual, news, journalism and documentaries by pressing any of the links on www.viewmagazine.tv. Unfortunately for me, this time around I don’s see a free Apple book in site.