Welcome back to the Creative Studio, where we conduct experiments with podcasting. In this fourth season, we are talking about narrative podcasting. This is episode 6, and we’ll be discussing the editing process. In the previous episodes, we discussed various things regarding planning, preparation, and recording for a narrative podcast. If you missed those, you’ll definitely want to go back and listen to those.

In this episode, we’ll be hearing from:

• Bryan Orr
• Corey Coates
• Doc Kennedy
• Dave Jackson
• Erik K. Johnson
• Rye Taylor
• Elsie Escobar

There is a lot involved in the editing process. As we discussed in episode 402, editing shows up many times throughout the narrative workflow. Here’s a quick review of that workflow or roadmap:

1. Idea
2. Research enough to pitch idea to group
3. Research more
4. Conduct pre-interviews
5. Adjust story concept
6. Pick interview subjects
7. Interview
8. Transcribe
9. Write first draft of script
10. Edit
11. Second draft
12. Edit
13. Third draft
14. Full cuts
15. “Read to tape” as group
16. Group edits
17. Fourth draft
18. Tracking
19. Rough mix
20. Listen to the rough as a group
21. Another group edit
22. Rough sound design
23. Listen as a group
24. Edit
25. Fix sound design
26. Pass off your final master
27. Final mix
28. Send out
29. Get notes
30. Fix based on notes
31. Review again
32. Green light
33. Publish

This workflow is roughly based on the process that Roman Mars shared during his keynote presentation at Podcast Movement 2015. There are at least 5 edits mentioned in this process – some are individual and others are group edits.

There are a couple ways that editing can be approached. Each has its benefits and drawbacks, and I think that each one is helpful, if not needed, in the workflow. One way to edit is in written form and the other is in audio form. There may be other approaches and various combinations of these forms, but these are the two that I will focus on for this episode.

It is good to start by getting a transcript of the tape you recorded. I didn’t do this for the first several episodes of this series because it costs either time or money – and I didn’t want to give up either at first. I finally gave in and paid someone on Fiverr.com to transcribe some for me.

Here’s what I did.

I had already listened to all of the audio after the interviews and separated the clips based on the overall topic of the section. There were some sections that I copied and put into a couple topics. In the end, I had anywhere between 10 minutes to 60 minutes of audio for each topic.

I put the clips for one topic together on one track and mixed it down to a single mp3 file. I sent that off to the person on Fiverr. There were one or two episodes where I trimmed out my side of the conversation to made the file shorter because I was paying by the minute. I also wasn’t using any of my side of the conversation in the end.

When I got the transcript back five or six days later, I would read through it and mark out things that I knew I wanted to cut out. This would include my side of the conversation if I didn’t already take it out. Sometimes the guest would cover a couple topics together, so I would take out parts of the guests’ answers that didn’t pertain to that particular topic. Sometimes the guest would go into stories that were related to the topic, but weren’t necessary to make