This week’s podcast is a joint interview with three of the minds and voices behind CNET’s Buzz Out Loud — Tom Merritt, Natali Del Conte and Jason Howell (Monday co-host Molly Wood was unable to make the interview).

Buzz Out Loud may be an audio (and video) podcast, but it utilizes many of the same techniques that beatbloggers use. In fact, Buzz Out Loud is one of the first major instances of a mainstream media outlet utilizing two-way communication and interaction as a major part of their work. If you listen to Buzz Out Loud, you’ll realize that without its listeners, the show is not possible.

“They are essential,” Merritt said about the show’s listeners. “That is what makes the show. It has been that way from the beginning.”

Buzz Out Loud, for those unfamiliar with the show, is a daily tech news podcast that mixes news and commentary together. Listeners of the show send in tips every day for stories they think the co-hosts should discuss. Listeners also send in e-mails and voicemails, the best of which are read or played on the show.

Many journalism organizations have begun podcasting in the past few years, often with mixed or little success. Buzz Out Loud is a show that anyone who wants to start a podcast should listen to. Many journalists, especially newspaper journalists, don’t harness the medium properly when first starting a podcast.

These podcasts are often dull and dispassionate. What may work for a newspaper, may not work for a podcast. A large part of Buzz Out Loud’s success is due to the passion its co-hosts have.

Building a community with user interaction

User interaction is the key, however, to Buzz Out Loud’s success. Listeners feel a part of a community, and it’s co-hosts are easy to get a hold of. The show accepts voicemails, e-mails, has a forum and its co-hosts can be found on a variety of social networks.

“When we started we had no idea what people were going to like,” Merritt said. “We decided to build in as a much user feedback as possible so that we could listen to people.”

User feedback has caused Buzz Out Loud to evolve over time. The show started as a short five-minute, every-other-day podcast and has morphed into a daily audio/video podcast that runs around 40 minutes. This transformation happened because listeners said they wanted more, and the show has always tried to be what its listeners wanted it to be.

That may not sound revolutionary, but most journalists don’t really listen to readers on what kind of content they be should producing. But for a show like Buzz Out Loud that is so much about interaction and building a community, listening to users is essential. As more journalists embark into social media and beatblogging, it will be important for them to listen to their users.

This doesn’t mean Buzz Out Loud is entirely dictated by its users. The show combines user feedback with the co-hosts’ editorial judgment. We’ve seen this from other beatbloggers like Eric Berger, and it has worked well.

“It’s more of an art more than a science, but you want to listen to that audience all the time, take the temperature of that and kind of inform that with your own judgment,” Merritt said. “If you just did it democratically, and said ‘okay people vote on the stories’, the show wouldn’t be as good.”

Users send in tips about tech news each day, and the show’s co-hosts pick which stories to discuss. If the same news item is sent in several times by various listeners, Merritt said that means it is something that listeners want them to discuss. This has proven a good way to gauge the importance of a tech news story.

The wisdom of the crowd

Experts are one of the biggest benefits to building a strong network like Buzz Out Loud. Buzz Out Loud’s co-hosts cover a variety of tech and science topics that would be hard for any journalist to be an expert on. With the knowledgeable and active user community that Buzz Out Loud has, the co-hosts don’t have to be experts on every topic.

“The listeners of the show that give us feedback really are the fourth or fifth co-host on the show,” Howell said.

Scientists, lawyers, doctors, Web developers, plumbers, carpenters, teachers and more from all over the planet are among the user community. These listeners often call in to add to the conversation or clarify points made on the show. Their contributions are invaluable.

“If we didn’t have Dave the psychologist, Bob the patent lawyer, Dr. Carl, Frank the trademark Lawyer out there to help expand and explain the conversation, it wouldn’t be nearly as enjoyable,” Merritt said.

But how does one build a base like Buzz Out Loud has?

“Let’s face it, there is a lot of people who are podcast fans out there that don’t have a podcast of their own going,” Howell said. “So,”If you’re doing a show, and you’re encouraging that feedback and showing them, ‘hey, look, if you give me a valuable nugget you’re going to be a part of this show’, they’ll feel a part of the whole process and they feel special that they actually made it through — that they are being broadcast out to an unknown number of listeners, who are kind of their peers.”

Building a knowledgeable user community is a great way to harness the wisdom of the crowd. In aggregate any journalist’s audience is much more knowledgeable than single person or a small group of people could be.

“The collective brain of the audience is much smarter than you’ll ever be,” Merritt said, “because each one of them only has to know one little bit.”

Buzz Out Loud’s co-hosts have ran with the concept that its users know more than they do. Every day they read e-mails and play voicemails from users. Some of the most in-depth information on the show comes from listeners who are experts on a given topic.

“There is a sense of acknowledging people who know things you don’t,” Del Conte said about playing listener voicemails and reading their e-mails on the show, “because it happens all the time that we get things wrong or we miscalculate or we might ask for expertise in something that we know we don’t already know.”

Some other topics discussed:

• Why did you decide to start Buzz Out Loud? What was the original iteration of the show like?
• How do you build a base like Buzz Out Loud has?
• How is your passion about tech and tech news important to the show?
• Why  does Buzz Out Loud regularly have guest hosts?
• What was it like the first time a listener corrected you?
• How long does it take to put together the show each day?
• What backgrounds do each of the co-hosts have and how did they get into podcasting?
• What can we expect over the next year or two from Buzz Out Loud?

Click here to stream the interview. Or download the MP3.