The Pub's How to Podcast
Radiotopia
Here in the twilight of podcasting’s punk-rock/underground/DIY/Kumbaya-we’re-all-in-this-together phase, there are a lot of amazing podcasters who are still eager to share their trade secrets rather than hoard them. This moment won’t last forever, so if you want to be great at podcasting, listen to these shows while they still exist. (Photo by Laura Fong.)
An audio introduction to this playlist.
An audio introduction to this playlist, from Adam Ragusea, host of Current’s The Pub.
Pondering public media and podcasting
Jenna Weiss-Berman is a public radio vet who has gone on to dominate the for-profit podcasting world, starting Buzzfeed’s Another Round and, more recently, her own production company called Pineapple Street Media. In this episode of Transom.org’s Transom Podcast, she interviews arguably the most important executive in the world of public radio podcasting, WNYC CEO Laura Walker.
On positioning Buzzfeed as an audio publisher
Because I can’t get enough of Jenna Weiss-Berman, here she is in an older conversation with Nieman Journalism Lab director Joshua Benton on his show “Press Publish,” talking about her transition from public radio to for-profit podcasting.
Intelligence as connections
When Mike Pesca left NPR to start his own daily podcast at Slate called The Gist, it was like King Kong had broken out of his cage. His enormous, pent-up creative and intellectual energy spilled into what I think is still the best daily podcast around. Here he appears on Mooj Zadie and Mickey Capper’s fantastic podcasting/radio-shop-talk show Tape.
Talking craft with Terry
Terry Gross’s Fresh Air sounded like a podcast decades before podcasting existed, so it’s not surprising that her successful NPR radio show is also a successful podcast. Here she talks about her craft with Max Linsky on his show The Longform Podcast. Linsky is co-founder of Pineapple Street Media with Jenna Weiss-Berman.
Scoring stories with original music
This American Life producer Jonathan Menjivar is probably the preeminent thinker on how to use music as scoring for podcasts/radio. Here he is talking specifically about how to work with original music on Rob Rosenthal’s incredibly helpful show HowSound, a guide to audio storytelling from PRX and Transom.org.
Growth from inside Gimlet
Gimlet Media is perhaps the highest-profile for-profit podcasting company because of “StartUp,” their podcast about the process of starting up Gimlet Media. Since the end of its first season,”StartUp” has branched off into telling stories about other start-up businesses, but it occasionally returns to telling the Gimlet story, as it does in this episode in which Lisa Chow steals the mic from her boss, Alex Blumberg, and takes a critical look at the company’s organizational challenges.
Mastering audio for great results
British mastering engineer Ian Shepherd makes an entire show about the audio production step that is most tragically neglected by podcast producers: mastering! In this episode of “The Mastering Show,” Shepherd does a whole show on how to master podcasts.
A new height of meta-ness
I record lots of episode of my show before a live audience, and here is one such show in which the sole topic is how to record shows before a live audience. My guests are Andrea Silenzi, host of Panoply’s “Why Oh Why” and founder producer of Slate’s “The Gist,” and Tyler Greene, events producer for WBEZ, where he has helped produced live recordings of “Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me” and “The Moth.”