A spin on great podcast content

It’s good to see that Matt from Citizenspin is back online with a series of posts from the recent Portable Media (podcasting) conference in California. I’m envious because I would have liked to enjoy some California sunshine. Sorry I’m a little late catching up with him. Matt works in the BBC’s training department, by the way. I didn’t know him at the Beeb, but I met him at London’s own Podcastcon earlier this year .

Matt reports that the message from the speakers at the “Woodstock of Podcasting” was “make great content”. Easier said than done, so I will tackle this by telling you a few things that great podcast content is not:

1. Great podcast content is not about putting up the audio of somebody making a presentation at a conference. Presentations do not translate into radio/audio programmes. Speaking to an audience is very different to speaking to a person at home. The latter is far more “one to one” in style. Besides, most presentations are dead boring. People go to conferences for the mixing and networking sessions. The atmosphere and the lively interviews can be captured in between the speeches. How many “new media” businesses think that putting a speech on the web is a podcast? I’ve heard it claimed so many times. At least they save bandwidth costs, because nobody listens to their “podcasts”. As if you are going to use your iPod to go around the house listening to some guy in a suit lose his Powerpoint slides. I mean, it’s pathetic.
2. Great content is not about two people just chatting about nothing in particular.
3. Great content is not about laughing at your own bad jokes like a 1970s DJ
4. Nor about having gimmicky opening sequences that go on for ever
5. Nor is it about getting too hung up about the technicalites of post-production, sound compression, graphic-equalization, etc, as some podcast “experts” tend to suggest. Most of these processes just make the sound worse and worse until it loses all its character. Technically, it’s more about holding the microphone in the right place to capture the sound cleanly (which can be tricky enough, believe me).

I don’t mean to pontificate, but I’m going to all the same. Podcasting is a little more difficult than blogging. Why? Well apart from the technical issues, you can’t rely heavily on what other people are saying, and just add your own spin, which is what a lot of blogging is about. There’s no linking in podcasting. You need to look hard for content.

Blogs are ready-equipped with a strong structure and architecture, with tags, comments, and a series of reverse-chronological posts. In audio, you have to create your own structure to give meaning to what you say. First I will talk about such and such. Then I will talk to so-and so. Then I will play some nice atmosphere…. By all means, ad-lib, but ad-lib within certain predefined limits. Think of rooms in a house. You can roam freely around the rooms, but not through the walls. You have to imagine this house before you begin to build it. It takes practice.

And I can’t understand why there are so many podcast music/chat/joke shows. The airwaves are full of free music already. Why do so many podcasts pad out their material with music? Why don’t they say what they have to say, and then stop. Make it short and sweet, and light to download.

Various efforts by business and the print media to get into broadcasting via podcasting show that “great content” is rather more difficult than just buying a microphone and plugging it into a computer. It requires thought and planning and, above all, a feeling for audio. Look at the iTunes top 10, and it’s dominated by shows made by radio broadcasters, even though, in theory, the net is a level playing field. So you see, it’s not that easy to make a good podcast after all.

I do think the Brits have a great advantage here. We have a great heritage in radio, and many of us grew up listening to Radio 4, which, despite its North London lefty tendencies, does make very high quality programming. So come on us Brits. The English language has belonged to us longer than it has to anyone else. Let’s use it.

This entry was posted on November 18th, 2005 and is filed under Best Practice, Blog Home. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or Trackback from your own site.