Exercise 4 – Editing an Audio Interview for a Podcast

Occasionally, a producer will have to edit a piece of audio they didn’t record and make it work as a standalone podcast. This means cleaning up the audio to improve the sound quality, identifying the strongest elements and weaving them together to tell a cohesive narrative. They may also have to record wraparound narration and insert other audio elements, such as natural sound and music.

Instructions: In November 2016, I interviewed Meredith Somers, a reporter for Federal News Radio. The interview was edited and posted as an episode of the It’s All Journalism podcast.Continue Reading …

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Write a textbook? How about teaching?

Good things seem to keep happening thanks to this podcast.

In May 2016, I announced that I had signed a contract with Routeledge – Taylor & Francis Group to write a textbook about podcasting. After months of hard work and many interviews with some very smart podcasters, I turned in the manuscript last October. The book, Turn Up the Volume — A Down and Dirty Guide to Podcasting, is set to be released this July.

I enjoyed the project a great deal and can’t wait for everyone to see the finished product.

So, what’s next?

Of course, I’ll continue to work on the weekly It’s All Journalism podcast with fellow producers Nicole Ogrysko and Amber Healy. It’s still a lot of fun to do.

Continue Reading …

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#245 – Decades-old cold case comes to life in new podcast

Neal Augenstein wasn’t sure he’d ever return to podcasting.

His first foray into the medium, a podcast for CBS’ 48 Hours in 2016 covering the trial of a man arrested and later convicted of murdering University of Virginia student Hannah Graham, was a departure from his career in radio reporting. He had followed the case since Graham’s disappearance and, as a result, had a deep and broad understanding of all aspects of the investigation, having watched it unfold in real time and providing him with an extensive archive of material from which to pull.

Neal Augenstein is a radio reporter at WTOP in Washington, D.C.

Neal Augenstein is a radio reporter at WTOP in Washington, D.C.

To his surprise, Augenstein is back in the recording booth, this time reviewing and exploring the 1975 disappearance of Sheila and Katherine Lyon, sisters from Montgomery County, Maryland. The girls left their home to walk to the nearby Wheaton Plaza and were never seen again. For decades, nothing was known about their fate.

“That two girls could disappear made parents hold their kids tighter,” he recalls. “People who have been around point to that as a turning point in society in the Washington area.”

To prepare for the five-part podcast, Augenstein dug deep into archives to find newspaper articles from the early days of the investigation. He was able to meet with Mary Ann Kuhn, a reporter with the Washington Star at the time, who had written a particularly vivid account of interviewing the Lyon sisters’ mother in their home shortly after they disappeared.

In the article, Kuhn went into great detail about “the colors of the bedspreads they had, the fact that one girl had one rock star’s poster over her bed and the other girl had another star’s poster over her bed. She describes the mother drinking coffee and smoking as she hosted the visit. … As we talked about it, it was clear (Kuhn) was able to really remember the moment. It was better than a photograph because the emotion she felt when she sat down in that kitchen, she was able to relay to me for the podcast.”

As the case is preparing for trial – jailed sex abuser Lloyd Lee Welch was indicted on charges associated with the Lyon sisters’ disappearance within the past few years — Augenstein drove down to Bedford County to collect natural, background sounds. It is believed the sisters were taken there after they vanished.

He believes it will help him tell the story of the girls’ mystery and add some essential detail to the podcast.

The lack of audio from the original days of the investigation poses some challenges, he admits.

“There’s a real difference between my day job of reporting breaking news and the podcast, which allows a story to percolate over days and weeks and months,” he says.

It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell talks to radio reporter Neal Augenstein of WTOP in Washington, D.C., about his new podcast, Investigation Continues: The Lyons Sisters. The podcast focuses on the 1975 disappearance of Sheila and Katherine Lyon, sisters from Montgomery County, Maryland. Augenstein documents the decades-long case and the recent arrest of a suspect.

#168 – Periscope curious? We got your back

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#224 – David Jackson schools us on podcasting

 

David Jackson knows how to podcast. He’s been doing it for 11 years, far longer than most fans of the medium have known it existed.

Jackson started his first podcast in 2005,looking up information in a pre-Google internet world and capturing his attention and curiosity. “I uploaded a file and saw it come down in my podcatcher and said this has a huge amount of potential,” he said. As a corporate trainer, he saw an opportunity to teach people vital information while also providing him a paying gig as the latest round of corporate downsizing meant his trainer skills weren’t in high demand for a short while.

David Jackson is the founder of The School of Podcasting.

David Jackson is the founder of The School of Podcasting.

His first long-term podcast was an audio version of a newsletter he was already writing,The Musician’s Cooler. In April 2005, he launched The School of Podcasting, which has been running ever since.

Podcasting scratched a series of itches for Jackson. “It’s kind of geeky, the whole website, RSS feeds, the whole nine yards,” he says. “You can be as creative as you want. My biggest itch, being a corporate trainer, is I like to help people. I was able to do all of that.”

But what really made up his mind to dedicate so much time to podcasting was a phone call.

“My very first piece of voicemail came from a guy in Germany,” he recalled. “I almost fell out of my chair. When I got my first piece of feedback from a guy in Germany, that was it. I’m podcasting ‘til I die.”

There’s a very strategic approach that Jackson takes to developing the material for his courses, building on a lifelong habit of taking notes.

“When I’m learning a new subject, I write down everything I get stuck on,” he said. “If I get stuck, I know my students will do that. As I was going through and learning Audacity … it was just a matter of writing it down and coming up with a tutorial or something for future students. As my students came in and asked a question, oooh, that’s a really good question, let me come up with a tutorial. I’d answer it and then come up with a tutorial.”

His M.O.? “I’ve always wanted to help you avoid the mistakes I’m going to make,” Jackson said. “Let me be the crash test dummy. I’ll go in and figure out what’s going on and say, ‘OK, this is a really great tool as long as you don’t do this, this or that, and always do this.’ By doing that, I help you avoid headaches.”

But perhaps the most important piece of insight Jackson can offer is how much time podcasting really takes.

“I’ve timed it. It’s a four-to-one ratio,” he said. “If I want to do a 15 minute podcast, it’s going to take an hour,” by the time the subject is determined, research is done, the audio is recorded and edited and the final work posted, both in an audio form and written material used for promotion. “If you want to do an hour-long podcast? Congratulations, you’ve just sneezed away four hours.”

— Amber Healy

On  the week’s It’s All Journalism podcast, host Michael O’Connell talks to David Jackson, founder of The School of Podcasting about his 10-plus years as a podcaster and how he uses his experiences to teach others to do the same.

#221 – Follow the golden rule in podcast recording

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#221 – Follow the golden rule in podcast recording

It may seem like an obvious point, or counterintuitive, but the key to a good sounding podcast is giving it a listen in different locations.

Chris Curran, a podcast producer and founder of Fractal Recording and the Podcast Engineering School among other endeavors, said that while having content worth listening to is the number one factor when setting up a podcast, it’s important to use the tools at hand, and some common sense, to make a podcast that’s enjoyable to listen to from an audio quality standpoint.

Chris Curran is the host of the Podcast Engineering School.

Chris Curran is the host of the Podcast Engineering School.

“A lot of people who are getting into podcasting, especially if they’re a little more technical in nature, they really can go overboard with their audio,” he said. “They can stress over buying a microphone for three months or they can stress about their workflow and their equipment and their mixer. There is a danger of focusing too much in the beginning on the technology and the microphone. … You can have the tools. You can have a hammer and nails, but you can do a really crappy job building something. You have to know how to use the tool.”

Equalization of bass and treble is vital, he said. Some producers want to boost the bass, thinking it’ll add a deeper, “radio voice” quality to a recording but there’s a danger in that approach of making the recording sound “muddy,” he said.

“Most people don’t hear that because they don’t know frequencies,” Curran added. “They don’t know what they’re listening for. The human voice is … a midrange sort of instrument. The really critical part of the human voice is in the midrange. It’s not really in the low end, 80 and 100 hertz. That’s too low.”

Secondly, when possible, podcasters should use separate channels to record guests and mix them together later in the final edit, in order to make sure louder, more booming voices don’t overpower quieter ones. There are services, like Auphonic, that can help tweak recordings to bring loud and soft voices to the same level.

“The golden rule of audio engineering is record it properly the first time. Period,” he said. “Because if you don’t record it properly, then you’re going to have to get into all these fixes and tricks and techniques and plug ins. You’re going to have to jump through nine hoops to make it sound better, but it still won’t sound great.”

And to check your work, he encouraged podcasters to listen to their recordings on a phone, on a wireless speaker, with headphones, with earbuds, in a car.

“If you listen in the car, that’s when you’ll notice the bass. You’ll be like, ‘Oh my god, there’s all this low end. It’s so muddy and it sounds so huge and almost unintelligible,’ because in your car you have big speakers with better bass. … Let’s say for the first 10 episodes, if you take every episode for the first 10 episodes and listen in different places and then make tiny adjustments for the next episode, you’ll dial it in over 10 episodes. You’ll tweak it and then it’ll be really good.”

— Amber Healy

This week on the It’s All Journalism podcast, host Michael O’Connell interviews Chris Curran, a podcast producer and founder of Fractal Recording and the Podcast Engineering School, about what goes into creating a really great sounding podcast.

#187 – How to build a successful podcast

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#218 – Podcast explores DC culture beyond Capitol Hill

Most reporters know the pain of having an interview that feels too good to cut down to a soundbyte, but what do you do with a 30-minute interview and a 40-second spot?

If you’re Rachel Nania and Jason Fraley from Washington, D.C.’s WTOP radio station, you turn those interviews into a podcast.

Jason Fraley and Rachel Nania of the Capital Culture podcast.

Jason Fraley and Rachel Nania of the Capital Culture podcast.

As the Living editor and the Entertainment editor, respectively, for the station, Nania and Fraley launched the Capital Culture podcast a few months back as a way to take better advantage of the interviews they conduct for their daily pieces.

“We just had all this extra tape and these interviews you can’t really get into,” Nania said. “We were looking for a different medium, a different way to display those interviews.”

Fraley, a previous It’s All Journalism guest, often interviews celebrities in town for events at the Kennedy Center or film or TV projects, including recent interviews with Kevin Costner, Tim Meadows and Henry Winkler about new endeavors, all of which only typically have about 20 to 40 seconds worth of content included in his entertainment spots.

“It just felt like we were doing a lot of work, getting a lot of cool content from these great people we were talking to, and it seemed like a shame to shoehorn it into a 40-second interview. I post the full article to the web every day, but I’m not sure how many people are reading or listening to the whole thing.”

The easy part of their new podcast is the interviews, but even that’s been a learning experience for Nania and Fraley.

“When I go out on interviews, I’m so used to the mic being more pointed at the subject, because I’m getting their tape for the air” and wrapping her voice in at the beginning and end of the piece. But as Capital Culture kicked off, their editor mentioned the need to make Nania’s voice sound good as well.

But perhaps the driving force behind Capital Culture even more than finding a good home for otherwise wasted tape? Showing the world there’s more to D.C. than what they see on CSPAN.

“It drives me mad when people just associate this town with politics,” Nania said. “There’s a huge creative community. This city is so much more than just what happens down on Pennsylvania Avenue and Capital Hill and all the lobbying firms in between.”

That mindset inspired the podcast’s tagline: “If you think D.C. is all politics and traffic, think again!”

— Amber Healy

This week, It’s All Journalism host Michael O’Connell talks to Rachel Nania and Jason Fraley of WTOP radio in Washington, D.C., about their new podcast, Capital Culture. They discuss the challenges of coming up with story ideas for the lifestyle and entertainment beats and how podcasting has given them a new platform to go long-form on their previously short radio spots.

#188 – Oscar’s on the horizon for WTOP’s Fraley

 

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#217 – Levi breaks down big ideas for Curious Minds

Podcasting might not be as ubiquitous in Israel as it is in North America, but that isn’t enough of a challenge to dissuade Ran Levi. Not only is he the host of one of the only professionally produced podcasts in Israel, the Hebrew-language Making History, his Curious Minds podcast specializes in taking intimidating-sounding topics and making them understandable.

“Curious Minds, as the name suggests, is targeted to those people who are interested in the deeper questions of our technology, of our science, trying to understand things,” he said. “The basic idea I go by is that you don’t have to be knowledgeable in economics, for example, to understand the deeper ideas of economics. You don’t have to be a scientist in genomics to understand how the genome works. You only have to have the curiosity and the openness to absorb ideas, not be too frightened by big names or big ideas.”

Ran Levi is the host of the Curious Minds podcast.

Ran Levi is the host of the Curious Minds podcast.

If someone can explain big, complex ideas or concepts in an easy-to-understand way, just about anyone can learn just about anything, Levi continued.

He dedicated an episode of Making History to discussing quantum mechanics and the philosophy of mathematics, “topics which I think mainstream media will rarely try to tackle because it seems to frightening for the general audience. … Some people just, you know, they get frightened from the name. I don’t have that fear and I try to open the minds of people to really understand the hard ideas, the tough ideas behind it.”

Learning and understanding big ideas has been a lifelong pursuit for Levi, who tapped into his curiosity at the age of 10 when he read an encyclopedia found in his home. Following his mandatory military service, he studied to be an electrical engineer, a job that required some education and training in chemistry, math, physics, biology and other sciences.

He’d been writing for himself for several years before, in his mid-20s, he decided to write a book on the history of perpetual motion machines. Ultimately, the book didn’t sell well, but “I still had the desire in me to teach people. When I finally got to hear about podcasts in 2006, it was very natural for me to start a podcast about those topics, hoping that it would fare better than writing books,” Levi said.

“Actually, the Hebrew podcast is the most successful podcast in Israel, I am happy to say, with some 50,000 to 100,000 downloads per week. So it’s going really well,” he said.

The key to explaining big ideas to the general public is to first overcome the notion that science, technology, math and other similar subjects are boring. He tries to lead the audience into a story before disclosing the topic of the episode, so the listener is already invested and curious about the topic. “Just be open to new ideas. That’s the non-technical challenge you see there,” he said.

Levi’s other guideline is to acknowledge from the beginning that a single podcast episode will have to let some of the history or complexities of a topic slide by the wayside.

“You have to decide consciously what are you going to talk about in a certain topic and what you’re going to ignore, because you can’t say everything within an episode of 45 minutes or so,” he said. “You have to let some important stuff go. Disregard it. Ignore it. Don’t explain it. Just keep things simple and focused.”

— Amber Healy

On this week’s It’s All Journalism podcast, host Michael O’Connell talks to Ran Levi, an Israeli writer and creator of two podcasts, the Hebrew-language Making History and  Curious Minds. He discusses his passion for science and technology and explains how to take complex ideas and make the accessible for a mass audience.

#PM16 – Ear Hustle: Podcasting from behind bars

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#215 – Learning from the best of the best in sports

In newsrooms, it’s easy to shrug off the sports department. Bats, balls, bases, nets, hoops — that’s not serious journalism.

It’s an unfair statement, as there are things to learn about time management, self-control, discipline and psychology that can be gained from talking with athletes, said  Richard Parr, producer and host of the Best in the World with Richard Parr podcast.

Richard Parr

Richard Parr

Parr spent six years, across two assignments, in Qatar with Al Jazeera, during which time he “covered absolutely everything. The thing about working in the sports department of a news channel, you’re not necessarily appealing to a big sports fan. You’re kind of appealing to maybe the casual fan, a news junkie who maybe has a little interest in sport. Yes, we covered football, because it’s massive. We covered cricket, because it’s huge in India and Pakistan. We’d cover American sports. And then you’ve got the big events like the Olympics and the World Cup.”

His first stint with EuroSport, in 2005, was with the football department, but he didn’t get many opportunities, so he struck up conversations with people in other departments “who did the random sports.” This led to him editing footage of sports like freestyle motocross, an event about which he knew nothing.

Over time, Parr developed an interest in other areas of journalism and news production, like so many, but he didn’t want to branch out into one of the areas in which he had great interest but the landscape is already oversaturated.

“I really like the interviews with people who are the best in their field,” he said. “Why not listen to people who are the very best in what they do in sport? I tried to get people who are world or Olympic champions, people who have broken world records in whatever field it is. I tried to get people in all different sports to get a cross-section of ideas.”

It’s a simple but eye-opening premise he’s taken. “I want to know what they do different for nutrition, rituals, training, maybe they’ve got different sleep patterns, the kind of financial difficulties they’ve had to go through, how they manage their time, psychology,” he said. “Hopefully, some of my listeners who might be interested in a certain sport, maybe it can help them in their sport or their everyday life. I know when it comes to time management, I could certainly learn from some of these top people.”

Among his guests so far are Stephen Hendry, a seven-time snooker world champion, and Richard Faulds, an athlete from the UK who, in the 2000 Olympics, defeated the reigning world champion in shooting. He’s also interviewed Olympic gymnast Shannon Miller, now five-years past a cancer diagnosis, who detailed how her experience with gymnastics helped her through treatment.

“What I find is, it’s how people can push the barriers” that make them successful, Parr said. It might seem so easy to give up when trying something, whether an athletic endeavor or otherwise, but these athletes don’t do that. “These people have this mental fortitude. It’s quite interesting to learn all these different things.”

— Amber Healy

In this week’s It’s All Journalism podcast, host Michael O’Connell talks to Richard Parr, a journalist who recently covered the sports beat in Qatar for Al Jazeera English. On his podcast, Best in the World with Richard Parr, he talks to athletes about the challenges they faced on the way to becoming champions in their particular sports.

#54 – Greg Wyshynski talks hockey, sports blogging and the serious side of whimsy

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#214 – Digital magazine caters to podcast fans

 

When Margaret Brown first saw the iPad, she saw her future.

“I have loved magazines since the time I could read,” Brown said. “I’ve subscribed to magazines my whole life. I always read every single magazine my parents subscribed to. That’s my passion, that’s my experience.”

With more than 25 years as a magazine publisher on her resume, Brown went to the owner of the publication she was working on at the time and suggested starting a line of digital magazines. He declined because “no one else was doing it.” Without the cost of paper, postage or print, Brown decided to try her hand at digital publishing.

Margaret Brown, publisher of Shelf Media

Margaret Brown, publisher of Shelf Media

She started a digital book review magazine, Shelf Unbound, in 2010 with the intention of building it up and selling it off. Within a few years, Shelf Unbound had built a steady readership of 125,000 with distribution in the U.S. and 75 other countries. “We distribute it for free and make our money by ad sales,” mostly from self-published authors who appreciate the “large audience of people interested in the literature.”

Shelf Unbound has been nominated for a Maggie Award each year of its existence and won in 2015. In 2016, Shelf Media, Brown’s company, won another.

Like many others, Brown became enamored of podcasts when she first heard Serial. Naturally, she decided to launch a new publication focused on podcasts, called Podster, which first published earlier this year. She also launched her own podcast in 2015.

“Our magazine is targeted to listeners of podcasts,” she said. “We have a lot of podcast creators who subscribe to Podster, but we’re really following the same model (as the previous publication). We’ll get it out to a large number of listeners, we’re going to curate the best podcasts, large and small, and we anticipate our advertisers are podcasters new to the game.”

Each issue of Podster features four “big interviews”: Two known entities in the podcasting world and two relative newcomers. Most of the production is done in-house, but there are some contributors, including Colin Miller from Undisclosed, a follow-up podcast to Serial focusing on the criminal justice system.

Going with a magazine about podcasts was an easy decision to make for someone with a love of, and experience in, magazines.

“I think we bring a quality of design and editorial to (Podster) that some online things don’t have,” she said. “I wanted to retain the magazine experience. I wanted it to feel like you weren’t at a website. We’ve really tried to maintain the feeling of being in a traditional magazine.”

— Amber Healy

On this week’s episode of It’s All Journalism, Producer Michael O’Connell talks to Margaret Brown, founder of Shelf Media. After 25 years in the print magazine industry, Brown turned to the online environment to launch Shelf Unbound, a review of digital books. Her latest online publication, Podster, features reviews of many favorite and unknown podcasts and their creators.

#189 – How publications can thrive online

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#PM16 – Patreon: Keeping crowdfunding simple for podcasters

Wouldn’t it be cool to make money from your podcast? Not a lot, just enough to pay your monthly hosting fees. Or maybe you want to pay your contributors or buy some new microphones or just get a cup of coffee for your effort. That would be sweet.

Jordan Cope of Patreon

Jordan Cope of Patreon

Crowdfunding has become a popular way for podcasters, journalists and artists to raise money from their audience in order to pay for worthy projects.

While many people have found great success with crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter, Indiegogo and GoFundMe, those platforms are all built around single, fundraising campaigns. They’re great to get startup capital, but what about providing sustaining income for an ongoing product, such as a podcast?

One crowdfunding platform that does just that is Patreon, which allows fans of an artist or podcaster to provide support through monthly contributions.

I interviewed Jordan Cope of Patreon at the 2016 Podcast Movement conference in Chicago. He explained how Patreon works and the simple way it can provide sustainability for a growing podcast.

— Michael O’Connell

 

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