It Might As Well Rain Until September

It gives me great pleasure to announce the first podcasting series in Maltese from the MaltaMedia Online Network. Our first series deals with 9/11 from a Maltese perspective. The podcast series is based on the various webcasts that appeared on MaltaMedia.com in the wake of the attacks on the USA and eventual so-called war on terror.

The new series consists of 23 podcasts released daily starting tomorrow. You can hear an introduction to the series right now. A new file will be made available every day over the next three weeks and two days. The series starts with seven reports from the first week after the attacks in September 2001. A two-part interview with Dr Jesmond Schembri, who was Maltese Consul General in New York at that time, opens the post-trauma discussions, followed by a telephone account of life in Ridgewood, a small town in New Jersey, across the river from New York City, by Fr Ivan Sciberras.

Two commentaries precede the invasion of Afghanistan, followed by two more as the "war on terror" takes on a military dimension. I am particularly proud of my participation in the Bed-In for Peace organized by Amy Burk and Andy Cox in New Zealand. That episode will be made available as a podcast on September 11, 2005.

The series continues for a whole week after this year's anniversary of 9/11. I will continue with a podcast on life as I saw it in October 2001, a little over a month after the USA was attacked by terrorists. The 3-month and 6-month anniversary are marked with their own podcasts, leading to a two-part commemoration of the first anniversary in 2002.

Following the 21 podcasts with the webcasts I produced from New York, the series ends with two podcasts featuring interviews by Martin Debattista, MaltaMedia's Editorial Director. The first interview is with Peter Cordina, head of Malta's Civil Protection Department. The other is with Reggie Schembri, who was with the Laudate Pueri Choir from Gozo, and happened to be stranded in New York for the first few days after the attacks because all flights in and out of the USA were grounded.

Although most of the material in this series has already been available as webcasts through the MaltaMedia.com special features section since 2001, we feel that there's an added value to our listeners in presenting them as a series of podcasts. Besides, we are also starting the series with a newly recorded introduction, and I may even punctuate the series with a few new comments here and there...depending on the sort of feedback we get from our podcast listeners.

In any case, we hope you enjoy this first series of podcasts in Maltese. We are planning two more podcasting series for the coming months. More about that as they emerge from the pre-production stage they're in right now.

The RSS feed for the MaltaMedia Online Podcasts is here.