The new, two-hour format of the Monocle Weekly, launched in conjunction with the new radio station, is unfortunately a step backwards from what had been a pretty solid podcast. The first edition last week was blighted by the foolish decision to include "news" headlines at the beginning; fine if you're listening live, but useless when you're listening three days later (the fact that the newsreader kept fluffing his lines didn't help). In this week's show they've ditched the news, thankfully, but problems remain: the sound quality is pretty poor, and the slow fade out, then fade back in, on the musical numbers is irritating beyond belief. If you don't have the rights to the music, just play a quick snippet then fade quickly out, as you did before. The jingles between sections are also a bit of a mess -- there's one moment when, after about six seconds of silence, the jingle played over the introduction of the next section, which sounded pretty amateurish. Hopefully these things get sorted out as I was enjoying the Weekly in its previous incarnation, and so far the new version is not proving its worth.
