By Daniel H Steinberg

Podcasting and Blogging

In a way, podcasting has two parents with distinct histories: radio broadcasting and blogging. Podcasters can learn from each side and it is best to think a bit about what sort of podcast you want to produce before you begin.

Blogs can be fairly formal or end up being a serial collection of thoughts. A blogger could decide to be an unedited beat reporter: one person writing about a specific topic with solid research, helpful links, and careful attribution. Some bloggers act as filters or portals and provide posts based on links to interesting stories they've seen on the web. Other bloggers write what has happened to them in the last week, day, or hour. There are blogs that mix these styles but make it easy for readers to pick out the bits that might interest them by using categories. Generally, though, a blogger has decided what blogging means for them.

What does podcasting mean to you? Are you collecting music and stories that you want to share with others? Are you chronicling your day? Is there a specific topic on which you want to speak? Do you want each piece to live on its own or is there a sense of belonging to a series? Think about your audience. Are you producing these pieces for yourself, for your friends, or for a wider audience? There are no right answers, but you might find it helpful to decide what you intend to produce.

It helps to consider what sorts of podcasts you like to listen to. Think about what captures your attention. Think about podcasts that you subscribed to but no longer listen to. Why did you stop listening?

Why Podcast?

There is something that you feel compelled to communicate or some idea you feel driven to explore. Why is a podcast the best medium? For music it is essential. For reviews of music or movies, audio is an important medium. I subscribed to the Charlie Rose show on Audible.com http://www.audible.com for a while. There is little on his program that requires the video track. On trips to New York I used to catch the audio track from Sixty Minutes on the radio. You'd be surprised at how vivid a picture they create in sound.

Writing remains a powerful and important medium. For the most part, however, the reader hears your piece in their own voice and not yours. For example, my relationship to Garrison Keillor's writing changed after I began listening to him on A Prairie Home Companion. http://prairiehome.publicradio.org I could now hear his voice when I read his prose and it changed the flow and the feel of his writing.

Of course, you can convey emotion in a written piece, but there is something very personal about allowing others to speak directly to your listener. A little live sound and we've transported a listener to a second-grade classroom, the rescue efforts for Hurricane Katrina, or the Space Shuttle. An ordinary piece can come alive with the actual words of one of those second graders, a refugee who has just been reunited with a loved one, or an astronaut who has just repaired a malfunctioning robotic arm while looking down on the Earth from a vantage point that few have enjoyed.

In Your Ears

Be careful when you look at your download numbers and realize that hundreds or thousands of people are listening to you. It can be tempting to talk to those people all at once. You've heard this on radio shows. There are hosts who say "ladies and gentlemen" and who address their hundreds of thousands of listeners as if they are gathered together in one large space. You should not think of your microphone as if it were attached to a public address system, making announcements to a large crowd. In fact, the old notion of an announcer has been replaced by a "personality."

Radio listeners tend to listen alone or in small groups. They are in their cars, living rooms, kitchens, bedrooms, or at work. They might take the radio with them in a portable device that they play for others or they might tend to listen using headphones. For podcasting, your audience is even more likely to be listening to you one at a time using headphones. They are often listening on an MP3 player, in their car, or at their computer. They aren't "ladies and gentlemen," they are "you." Talk to them, not at them.

And respect your audience. The order in which you say things has a subtle but important effect. For instance, you might give the weather forecast like this: "It's going to rain this afternoon, so pack an umbrella." That's almost insulting. That's your mother telling you it's cold, so put on a sweater. If instead you say, "Pack an umbrella today; it's supposed to rain this afternoon," you are now helpful. The umbrella reference set up the rain message. It's a small issue, but these little touches change the tone.

Talking personably to your listener can be a challenge for podcasters. The problem is that you tend to record your podcast looking at a microphone and possibly a script in a room without any people around. How do you keep those people targeted? One technique that can help at first is to tape a picture of a typical listener in a spot that you can see while you record.

Realism vs. Radio

If you want to drive from here to there, you don't need to see every house, tree, or even road along the way. If, however, you are a tourist in town to see the sites, visit some museums, and to eat out, you need to be able to find these points of interest. A map should have just enough purposes for your journey. A truly accurate representation of a city block would be as crowded with information as the block itself. Maybe the target audience for the map is interested in the layout of the sewer system, in the buildings, or just in the boundaries of the various lots.

In sound, the most accurate representation of what someone said is just to play the entire recording of what they said. There are styles of podcasts where that is entirely appropriate, where you can and should include every pause, every "ummm," every misstep. That will have a raw and authentic sound that is appealing to people particularly interested in the topic or in the interviewee. Remember that much of the appeal of podcasting is that it is a reaction to the overly slick production that your listeners encounter on radio. Getting to hear audio live or uncut can be a great differentiator for you.

But pause a minute and think of one major difference between audio and print. It is very difficult to skim an audio program the same way you might skim a print piece. You can quickly glance over a blog or an article and decide if there's something there worth reading. It is harder to get a good overview of an audio piece. Musicians wanting to make it commercially know the importance of having the first 20 seconds of their piece be compelling.

You have an obligation anytime you cut a piece: You cannot change the meaning by making editorial cuts. Imagine that your interviewee said, "Of course he should be recalled and I'm not just saying that because he is my political opponent. If I refused to pave the streets of any ward that didn't vote for me, I too should be removed from office." Clever editing could trim the ends so that he says, "I refused to pave the streets of any ward that didn't vote for me." Some ethical situations in editing are more subtle. By changing the order of quotes, you can create impressions counter to those the interviewee intended. You can shorten and change the order of pieces to improve a production; you just need to do it in a way that is consistent with the original meaning.

From Broadcasting to Podcasting

It strikes me how many things are the same and how many things are different about podcasting. In my last radio job we were recording onto a computer hard drive and filing sound and editing commercials that way. But then I think back to what was considered good advice and training when I first started.

We never went on an assignment without change for a pay phone. In those days, before phones had sealed handsets, we also were adept at unscrewing the mouthpiece and clipping the leads from our tape recorder onto the contacts to send sound back to the studio.

In the studio we would edit on one or more reel-to-reel decks using a grease pencil, razor blade, and tape. You would play back an edit and watch the tape get close to the playback head and brace yourself for any mistakes in the edit that might need fixing. You'd cut down an interview and have all of the pieces you wanted to use taped to the side of the tape deck in some order. You'd listen back to a splice and realize you'd laid the tape in backwards or in the wrong order.

For a final mix in a well-equipped studio you might use a 4-track or an 8-track machine and lay down the music in this track and the voices in that track and some sound in another track, getting everything just where you needed it, and then mix it down for air.

Now everything lives on my Mac. I can record live sound using Audio Hijack Pro, or use Skype to record a phone conversation. I can use a variety of programs from Audacity to GarageBand to Pro Tools or SoundTrack Pro to edit and sweeten the sound. Even my sound effects are stored on my hard drive and not on a series of vinyl records. It's an equivalent of Moore's Law for audio production—the space required for high-quality audio production has shrunk from an entire studio to a 12- or 15-inch laptop.

Because all of this functionality is available, it is easy to not work as carefully as we used to have to when studio time was precious. If you knew you only had an hour in the studio, you walked into that studio prepared. You had listened to your tape and had a good idea of what sound you were going to use and what you were going to do with it. You had your script prepared to do a nice wrapper for the material. If you were doing an interview, your questions were organized because your time was limited.

It's analogous to moving from writing longhand to using a word processor. When there was time and effort required to rewrite a draft you took care to mark up your rough draft pretty comprehensively. Now you try something and move this and delete that. Editing has become so easy that you can often lose your voice. As you electronically edit your material, save copies so you can listen later to hear if the subsequent versions are improved.

Something else that's been lost by having all of the equipment so small and handy is that often you're able to put a show together by yourself. Although that's an advantage, it's often nice to have a second set of ears in the room. When you needed an engineer or producer or others were in the room when you were cutting tape, you could quickly play your latest version for someone and get quick feedback. "No," they might say, "you should lead with that piece there." You didn't always take their advice, but the piece tended to be stronger with the input of others. That is still true. Take time during your production process to run what you are doing past trusted ears. Save a file somewhere that others can listen to before you finish.

The other problem with access to technology is the speed with which you can push something out. Unless time is an issue, let your initial podcasts sit for a while. Listen to them a couple of days after you've recorded them. Do they still sound as good or as bad as they did when you created them? If you haven't recorded voiceovers before, you may be uncomfortable with the sound of your own voice. Give yourself time to get used to it. Others won't hear what you think is wrong with your voice because that's the way they've always heard it. If you wonder if you are that nasal, or high pitched, or muffled, the answer is yes.

My final thought comes from doing a morning show at a top-rated station in Cleveland. I told the guy I partnered with how bad I'd been on air that morning. He said, "Listen to the tape." We airchecked every show with two types of tape. One just started when the microphone was turned on; the other ran continuously. He said, "When you think you've had a horrible show, listen to the tape and you'll hear it wasn't that bad. On the other hand, when you think you've had a great show, listen to the tape and you'll hear it wasn't that good. Most days we do a pretty good show that is of roughly the same quality and it's never as great or as terrible as we might think."

Daniel H Steinberg is an editor for O'Reilly Media, where he leads the podcasting efforts and produces the program Distributing the Future. Steinberg worked in radio as an on-air personality, news director, and producer in a wide variety of formats. Trained as a mathematician, he is also a longtime technical writer, trainer, and developer with Dim Sum Thinking. Several of his books are available here. He shared these thoughts on what he's learned in his long journey from radio to podcasting.