Podcast Master

By Ben Green

Senior multimedia producer at the Guardian, Ben Green, tells you everything you need to know about podcasting.

Ben Green has been podcasting for over a decade. He has been responsible for several top podcasts, including Football Weekly, the UK's number one sports podcast,and the Guardian Guide to Running podcast.

In Podcast Master, he provides a one-stop insider’s guide to everything you need to know about hosting, editing and producing online shows. It is packed with recommendations to help you get the right software and gear, advice on sponsorship and advertising, and tips on everything from platform selection to promotional artwork design.

Green’s enthusiasm for the medium’s breadth and depth is infectious. With wit and verve, he takes us through the history of podcasting, shares his recommendations for the podcasts you should be listening to, and reveals proven techniques for reaching and building your audience.

Whether you're broadcasting from your bedroom, or are a brand looking to enhance your profile, this authoritative, easy to follow and cutting-edge guide will give you the tools to start a podcast from scratch – or maximise your current one.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 26, 2015
• ISBN: 9781910859063

Ben Green

Ben Green is the highly acclaimed author of Before His Time (the subject of a PBS documentary), The Soldier of Fortune Murders (which sold more than 100,000 copies and was the basis for a CBS miniseries), and Finest Kind. A former Bread Loaf Fellow, Green lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with his wife, Tracie, and two daughters, Emily and Eliza. He is a graduate of Brandeis University and is on the faculty of Florida State University.

Book preview

cover-image.jpg

Podcast Master

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

podcast (noun)

Introduction: Podcasting is hot (again!)

Chapter 1: The voices in my headphones

Chapter 2: Getting started – and getting better

Chapter 3: How to monetise and grow your podcast

Chapter 4: The pick of the pods

Chapter 5: How the future sounds

Conclusion: The golden rules of podcasting

And Finally: Thanks and acknowledgements

Copyright

Endnotes

Podcast Master

Ben Green

Canelo

For Noah and Louie. Sorry this Book With No Pictures isn’t as fun as the one you’re used to.

podcast (noun): a digital audio file made available on the internet for downloading to a computer or portable media player, typically available as a series, new instalments of which can be received by subscribers automatically. Origin: early 21st century, from iPod + broadcast.

Introduction: Podcasting is hot (again!)

You’ve probably noticed that podcasting is having something of moment right now. True, it had one around a decade ago too, but this – this is something special. As a recent report from Edison Research concluded: Podcasting is hot (again!)¹.

Ever since the term was first used in 2004, podcasting has been looked upon as the future of audio. The initial boom, however, fizzled out as the technology was overtaken by more exciting digital innovations: Facebook and Twitter; YouTube, Spotify and Netflix; the iPhone, tablet computers and the rest.

It wasn’t until the autumn of 2014 and Serial – an American podcast series that reinvestigated a 1999 murder case in Baltimore – that podcasting was catapulted to the forefront of the cultural conversation. Yes, the technology remains much the same as a decade ago – but the ubiquity of mobile and Wi-Fi, and the audacity and quality of the programming, means that podcasting as a medium in itself is now being taken very seriously indeed.

Some numbers. There are more than 250,000 unique podcasts in more than 100 languages on the iTunes Store. Apple reports that there are well over one billion active podcast subscriptions.² 11 per cent of people in the UK listen to a podcast or on-demand radio every week. Podcast consumption in America has almost doubled in the last seven years.³ 95 per cent of all podcast listeners will download or stream every episode from each series they follow.⁴

You get the picture.

These loyal and engaged audiences are considerably younger than traditional radio audiences – some of them may not even own a radio – and are also, in the main, well educated, tech literate and media savvy.⁵ They are like manna from heaven for advertisers, not least because – unlike in other media, where the trend has been to cater to shorter and shorter attention spans – podcasts celebrate long form storytelling. Listener engagement is high, especially due to the fact that most people are listening through headphones. Podcasts are therefore generating big bucks for creators and sponsors alike.⁶

This is an overnight success story ten years in the making. But it doesn’t matter whether you’ve been listening to podcasts since the beginning, or you’ve just encountered them after being swept along in the post-Serial wave – this book will have something for the casual listener, the curious audio consumer and the podcast fanatic.

I’ll tell you about the history of podcasting and how we got from the ramblings of Ricky Gervais and his two best friends to the President of the United States sitting down in a Los Angeles garage to record an hour-long conversation with a comedian. Whether you’re a budding broadcaster, professional producer or accomplished presenter; an established media company; or a brand looking to advertise or create your own content – I’ll share production tips and advice on presentation. I’ll help you choose the right software and the best hardware for your budget, ensure you get onto the right podcasting platform and even share some insider knowledge about how best to reach and build your audience. And apart from anything else, I’ll guide you towards the best podcasts around – because that, in the end, is what this is all about.

Here begins your journey into the podosphere.

Chapter 1: The voices in my headphones

Some of my closest relationships are with people I have never met.

I’m in my mid-30s, married, with two young boys and a cat who is far too fussy about when she’s in the mood to be stroked. Going out is – generally – something I used to do. But away from my family – when I put in my earbud headphones – my headspace is filled with hours and hours of speech: intimate conversation, idle chatter, inspiring life stories, or just plain old nonsense.

Podcasts.

Marc Maron from WTF. Wittertainment’s Simon Mayo and Mark Kermode. John Oliver and Andy Zaltzman from The Bugle. Radiolab’s Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich. Helen Zaltzman and Olly Mann from Answer Me This!. Alex Blumberg and Lisa Chow from StartUp. I’ve never met these people⁷ but I always look forward to hearing from them. In many instances, our relationship goes back years. I’ve known them longer than my own children.

There’s something incredibly compelling about podcasts, and I listen to a lot of them.

I walk to and from work – it’s about an hour each way – and that’s my prime podcasting time. I also have one earphone in when I go to bed, a holdover from childhood, when I had audiobooks accompanying me to sleep. Add to this a dose of radio in the form of BBC Radio 4, BBC 5 live or Absolute 80s in the morning and a fair amount of TalkSport in the evening – strictly for professional reasons – and all told, I spend around four hours of every day engaged with audio.

My audio diet is eclectic, to say the least. This week I’ve listened to the deconstruction of a landmark interview with Barack Obama (WTF 614: The President was Here⁸), a film review round-up ( Kermode and Mayo’s Film Review), a documentary about a giant squid (Natural Histories), an hour-long conversation with the world’s strongest man (Talk is Jericho 165: Mark Henry), and several episodes from a series following the journey of two women as they try to build up their online dating site (the second season of StartUp).

But listening is not just my hobby.

I’ve been making podcasts for the Guardian for almost a decade now.⁹ Prior to that, I spent four years in commercial radio. Recently, I’ve also made radio programmes for BBC 5 live, edited a slate of sports documentaries, consulted on a comedy show, produced a nine-part podcast series about pregnancy and early parenthood, and somehow found myself as the voice of a running guide.¹⁰

A life in audio means I spend my working days with my headphones on, recording and editing other people’s speech, scripting shows, and generally helping presenters sound funnier and/or more knowledgeable than they actually are. Audio production – and this is especially true of commercial radio, and even more so of podcasting – doesn’t have the scale or hierarchy that you find in television. You are the runner, the researcher, the guest booker, the editor and the studio manager all in one. You manage the programme budget – such as it is – and probably the show’s distribution and afterlife on social media too. In other words, you’re responsible for everything on-air and behind the scenes. It’s a huge responsibility, but it is, for the most part, enormous fun.

---

Media students and wannabe podcasters often ask me how I became a producer. Here’s a potted history which – rather conveniently – ties in more broadly with the history of podcasting as a whole.

I was involved in student and local radio whilst completing my degree in American Studies in Birmingham. That’s always the best place to start.¹¹ I was then accepted onto the prestigious postgraduate Broadcast Journalism course at City University¹² where I made no bones about wanting to work behind the glass in the control room as opposed to being on the microphone.¹³ This was a matter