Hometown Tales

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Hometown Tales

Host(s)	Gene Fitzpatrick Bryan Minogue
Website	http://www.hometowntales.com/
Update Schedule	Weekly

Hometown Tales began as a public access television show and website exploring urban legends, folklore, historic oddities and local culture. In its infancy it aired on cable access in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New York. The show began as the creation of a NJ born producer Gene Fitzpatrick and Santa Fe writer Bryan Minogue who explored making an independent film but eventually settled on telling short stories of bizarre culture. Within a short time the show gained popularity in New Jersey despite being compared to a popular local magazine, Weird NJ. To distance themselves from this comparison, the two creators always insisted “Hometown Tales” was about legends all over the world and not just a specific state, despite the shows popularity in New Jersey. After toying with the idea of a “radio” version of the program on local college or independent station, Fitzpatrick got involved in the early trend of podcasting, which launched the show into greater popularity.

The podcast, unlike the TV show, touches on a variety of news, tales and stories from around the world, as well as usually featuring a specific theme in each show. It is produced twice a week and can be heard online, on KYOU AM and Sirius Satellite Radio as part of Dawn and Drew Present and PodShow (although the program is not officially contracted with Adam Curry's PodShow). It rarely plays promos, music or has guests and usually revolves around Fitzpatrick updating listeners on the strange news from around the world and Minogue adding witty and colorful commentary while reading email from listeners.

The podcast opened up more doors for Hometown Tales, as it soon became a vidcast/vodcast featuring some of the segments from the Public Access Show as well as new segments. The vidcast/vodcast enabled Hometown Tales to be seen by a wider audience throughout the world via RSS feeds and programs like iTunes.^{[citation needed]}Both shows and the Hometown Tales website are highly popular and largely downloaded online.