A new documentary called The Age of Audio traces the history and impact of podcasting, exploring the resurgence of audio storytelling in the 21st century. In a clip from the doc in the form of a short, Ben Hammersley tells the story of how he coined the term “podcast.”

I’m Ben Hammersley, and I do many things, but mostly I’m the person who invented the word podcast. And I am very sorry.

I can tell you the story. This was in 2004, and I was a writer for the Guardian newspaper in the UK. And at the time, the newspaper was paper-centric, which meant that all of the deadlines were for the print presses to run. And I’d written this article about this sort of emerging idea of downloadable audio content that was automatically downloaded because of an RSS feed.

I submitted the article on time, but then I got a phone call from my editor about 15 minutes before the presses were due to roll saying, “Hey, that piece is about a sentence short for the shape of the page. We don’t have time to move the page around. Can you just write us another sentence?”

And so I just made up a sentence which says something like, “But what do we call this phenomenon?” And then I made up some silly words. It went out, it went into the article, didn’t think any more of it.

And then about six months later or so, I got an email from the Oxford American Dictionary saying, “Hey, where did you get that word from that was in the article you wrote? It seems to be the first citation of the word ‘podcast.’ Now here we are almost 20 years later, and it became part of the discourse.” I’m totally fine with it now.

(h/t Jason Kottke / Kottke.org)