The guest today is Corey Coates from The Podcast Producers.

Choosing the right medium for your content

Corey’s experience has shown him that you have to make a decision as to who is going to be the one actually telling the story before you decide whether or not to do a narrative style. When doing narrative podcasting, people usually imagine as the narrator that they are “telling” the story, but the reality is a really good narrative podcast is one where the story is being told by the participants and almost unfolds on its own. There’s clearly a choice to guide the story in a certain direction, to edit in a certain way and to present the story that you might want to tell but before you even think about why you want to do it, ask “who is going to be responsible for telling the story?”

A lot of people are interested in the method of doing it this way largely because of the popularity of some narrative podcasts. When you listen to RadioLab or Serial, they sound beautiful and they’re fun to listen to. Corey knows how attractive that idea can be, but doing it just because a lot of the most popular shows or the ones you enjoy are in that fashion doesn’t necessarily mean that’s what you should do. Choosing the right medium for your content is critical.

If you’re trying to bring pure information from individuals to individuals, maybe the interview format is the way to go. If you are trying to demonstrate, as Corey and Jessica did in The Podcast Producers, that there’s a lot of experts, information and ways to look at the exact same thing, then maybe the narrative way of going is better for you. Ultimately it comes down to deciding ‘who is telling the story and what is the story being told?’ and then choosing the format that goes around that.

Start with the story arc

It always starts with the story arc. From beginning to end, what is the story you want to tell? Decide how you will subdivide that into chapters, which can become the episodes. For The Podcast Producers, Corey and Jessica knew they wanted to do 10 episodes, because it was a time constraint and prevented the project expanding for the rest of the year. From beginning to end they brainstormed a ton of questions or topics, what would be a logical order to arrange topics, and who might they be able to talk to on some of those subjects. It was about the questions Corey, Jessica and their community had, who are some of the people that might be able to provide the answers, and then how can you link one answer to the next, or one question to the next answer that takes someone through the journey but most importantly leaves them where we want them to be, which is wanting more. When you get to the end of it, there’s conclusions and ideas but nothing is really conclusive.

Choosing interview subjects

Corey and Jessica specifically targeted certain individuals for their knowledge base and their experience in the industry. It’s tough because in a lot of cases you have folks that are the most vocal and prominent, that may not necessarily be the ones with the best information, they’re just the loudest so they tend to get the most attention. Having been in the industry for 10 years and 3 years respectively, Corey and Jessica were able to tell whether folks were really legit, they know their stuff, and they’re really making a contribution, or if they were jokers and they’re coming in marketing themselves but not really having the skills needed. So they laser pointed their pitches and ended up getting 95% of the people they wanted. The 5% that didn’t were often the ‘shot in the dark’ people, and usually the reason was that their schedules wouldn’t allow it or it wasn’t going to fit Corey’s production...