No, this isn’t an article about using Snapchat and Instagram to promote your podcast. This is an article about packaging the contents of a single episode of a podcast by borrowing (read: stealing) a big part of Instagram stories. Which they stole from Snapchat, so turnabout’s fair play, right?

Many podcasts are highly produced, often requiring more than 100 hours of work to put out a single, 30-minute long episode. Other podcasts require almost no extra work, where people just get behind the microphone and start talking. (Stop looking at me.)

Between these extremes is room for many, many different effort-level approaches. One format made popular by newsletter publishers and Instagram influencers hasn’t yet taken off in podcasting. That approach is to create content “on the fly” throughout the day -- or sometimes the week --. Newsletter writers typically save the publishing until the entire “send” has been assembled, where IG stars publish each discrete bit as they go through their day.

I think podcasting might be able to leverage those concepts, either as a new technology play or by Mechanical Turking our way to a new method of creating content that, for some shows, might be actually better than what they are doing today

If you've listened to Podcast Pontifications for a while, you know I'm a big proponent of what I call Advancing Podcasting. That's the idea that software and technology should make podcasting better, not just easier. It also assumes that brand new business models will appear, which themselves necessitate new podcasting formats and approaches.

This idea of assembling and producing content on-the-fly might be one such approach.

Plenty of podcasts gather content on the fly. The work of James Cridland at PodNews.net comes to mind. James dutifully gathers the best podcasting news of the day, writes up his very popular daily newsletter, and also records a short “headlines only” version released as a podcast episode.

He’s not alone. Many podcast producers gather news/information/inspiration throughout the day, write their notes about each element, adding in their own commentary on each or as a whole, create a final script, and then sit down behind a microphone to record the whole thing.

Enter the Instagram Stories approach. What if, instead of only writing about each bit as it happened, the podcaster grabbed the microphone and narrated their thoughts on just that bit. OK, some writing is likely warranted. But once the writing for that bit is done, you’d narrate it. Just that bit.

Were this really an Instagram Story, you’d publish that bit. And that doesn’t really (thankfully) work in podcasting. Instead, you would “publish” the bit in some sort of a queue or draft-mode. Today you could just save it locally. Though this presents an opportunity for some custom software that will enable this to be better.

Rinse, repeat that five or six times throughout the day, and all that’s left to do is assemble those individually produced bits. That could be a simple as dragging your intro into your DAW (Digital Audio Workstation), maybe narrating an overview, dropping in your produced...