So you want to start a podcast? Join the club, and it’s a big one. Data released in May by Edison and Nielsen researchers put the number of active podcasts out there at more than 850,000, totaling over 30 million podcast episodes.
So long, radio, we hardly knew ye.
But back to starting your own podcast. What do you need? To begin with, a good idea and a specific, compelling topic. And if possible a catchy name. Technically speaking, you need not be a recording whiz or own sophisticated equipment.
Start with a good microphone, advises Jon Ewell, a San Diego podcast and music producer. Either purchase a microphone, or that mic in your iPad, computer or iPhone will do. The simplest strategy, says Ewell, is to record on your iPad and utilize a built-in recording studio like the one facilitated by GarageBand. Audio quality aside, “Make sure your content is interesting and engaging,” said Ewell.
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Angela Carone, director of podcasts at Turner Classic Movies
(Courtesy photo )
Angela Carone is director of podcasts at Turner Classic Movies, a position she’s held for four years after working 13 years at KPBS in San Diego. “There are a lot of really well produced, moneyed podcasts that have all of the bells and whistles,” said Carone, who’s currently overseeing “The Plot Thickens, a documentary podcast about filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich, “and there are some that are like indie and gritty and just making it happen out of someone’s closet.” What determines the memorable or the unmemorable in your own podcast, she said, are topic or story.
“It’s got to be a topic you love. If it’s a story, you better love the story.”
Kinsee Morlan of KPBS
(Christopher McIntosh / PRX)
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Kinsee Morlan, podcast producer and project coordinator at KPBS today, tells border stories on her “Only Here” podcast and emphasizes the importance of “narrative.”
“It’s creative nonfiction, basically, where podcasts shine,” she said. “When you have producers who are thinking about who the story is about and who the story is for and how that person is going to feel after hearing the story, that’s what podcasts do best — make people feel things.”
Podcasts can tell stories. They can be motivational and impart advice. They can comment and provoke, entertain and enlighten, provide insight or expertise. While radio offers a lot of the same things, “The difference is mobility,” said TCM’s Carone. “Everything comes back to the phone in our hands. That’s your platform. That’s how you engage with podcasts. And there’s the ability to publish outside any kind of traditional corporate mechanism. Podcasts offer all of these different voices and ways to engage with your interests. You don’t have to rely on just one funnel of morning radio. If you have any interest, there’s a podcast about it. There’s something for everybody.”
Added Morlan, who’s been working on podcasts since 2006, “For better or worse, radio is on a clock and there are all these time constraints. And podcasts are conversations. If you go into a podcast space with a broadcast voice, it sounds weird, a little disingenuous.”
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No one has made the transition from radio to podcasting on a greater and more successful scale than Norm Pattiz, founder of the radio syndication network Westwood One and today the head of the on-demand digital podcasting network PodcastOne. Pattiz, who’d been in radio for 35 years before founding PodcastOne in late 2012, has been called the “Prince of Podcasting.” His celebrity-studded network enjoys more than 2 billion podcast-episode downloads annually.
Norm Pattiz, founder of the radio syndication network Westwood One and today the head of the on-demand digital podcasting network PodcastOne
(Courtesy photo )
“When I left Westwood One, they asked me if I would form a boutique or consultancy that could keep a lot of the talent that was attached to me over the years. While I was doing that, a mutual friend introduced me to a young guy named Kit Gray. He was repping a couple dozen of podcasts a day from his apartment. I didn’t really know very much about podcasts. By the time we finished talking, I thought this is Westwood One for the digital age without having to distribute our programs through radio stations. This was really cool.”
Today Pattiz is executive chairman of Podcast One, Kit Gray is president and that future they discussed all those years ago is now.
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Besides his PodcastOne roster of podcast hosts such as Dr. Drew, Geraldo Rivera, Barbara Boxer and Shaquille O’Neal, Pattiz’s network has started up Launchpad, a free hosting service for fledgling podcasters who may be without advertisers or even substantial audiences.
“We’ve already got 1,000 podcasts on it,” said Pattiz. “They pay us nothing for it. What we get in return are the rights to digitally insert two spots from a national advertiser, even though each of these podcasts may have an audience of only a hundred or two.”
The “Prince of Podcasting” looks for this in a podcast: “We want our listeners to be able to listen in on a conversation. It needs to be authentic. We try not to edit very much because that’s what creates the connection: the authenticity and a conversational nature.
“You’d be surprised compared to other mediums how little the actual sound quality matters to listeners. When you have a personality that they want to follow and that they’re a super-fan of, they actually like the hiccups and the flubs because they want to be part of it. They want to listen.”
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TIPS FOR STARTING YOUR OWN PODCAST
- Decide on a specific focused theme.
- Determine who your target audience is.
- Concoct a memorable title, the catchier the better.
- Lacking a studio, record your podcast on an iPad or other computer device in which you can use GarageBand for IOS.
- Make sure you have a reasonably high-quality microphone. If the mic built into your iPad, laptop or desktop computer is substandard, you can purchase a better microphone via online retail for anywhere between $25 and $50.
- Make your shows natural and conversational; avoid “announcing” a la radio.
- Strive for content that is interesting and entertaining.
- Promote your podcast through word of mouth, social media and a website you create where listeners can stream podcasts as they’re aired live or archived episodes.
- Choose a hosting service that is able to track who and how many people are listening to your podcast.
- Ultimately, seek to monetize your podcast (find an advertiser/sponsor).
Coddon is the co-host, with Gerald Poindexter, of a podcast titled “The Best Version with Dave and Dex” that has been recording and streaming episodes for more than three years.
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