Podcasting Experiments

Today’s guest is Geoff Woods from the podcast The Mentee.

There is a change of direction in the podcasting world, ever since Serial, where narrative podcasting has become more popular. We are still at the very beginning of the bell curve of podcasting’s popularity because we’re still in the realm of the early adopter. Many people still don’t know what podcasting is.

There is going to be an increasing need for podcasts because it will become more popular and the professionals are realizing it. There are narrative journalists who did that as their profession who are bringing that talent and skill set to the podcasting world. With that, you’re starting to see podcasts coming out with incredibly high production quality and budgets for production as well. You don’t have to do that to compete moving forward, but recognize that the quality is going through the roof and if you want to stand out you have to do things differently.

Geoff’s approach

• Geoff started recording the conversations with the incredible, high-level people he was spending time with as a way to document his journey from employee to entrepreneur. He got feedback from the listener that what they really wanted wasn’t necessarily just an interview but that they wanted to hear private conversations that were genuine, that actually led to results in his life.
• His podcast is a mixture of the conversations he was having, interspersed with his own narration about it. As he documented his journey over the last year, there were times where he felt compelled to share his thoughts and document his journey and carrying a recorder everywhere enabled him to do that. He says he has only used perhaps 5% of those little moments in the podcast but it aids in the rawness and authenticity of his podcast. It shows the true emotion, including fear, that he’s going through but also when the lightbulb comes on in his head too.

 Advice for narrative podcasters

• Recognize that you need to document every interaction not only for your own retention but also in case there is a snippet of gold that you can use for the podcast. Also of course ask for permission to use what snippets you choose in the podcast. You have to document it and form some system of marking the date you talked to them, what you talked about and moments of gold.
• When you start a podcast or a blog, when you do anything that puts you in the position of being a reporter, you end up doing something that creates an immense amount of value for yourself. This is why Geoff started his podcast. Not only to add value to other people (which was his number 1 goal) but also to give a way to add value that was unique, and get in front of the people he wouldn’t have had access to otherwise.
• If you were to walk up to those people and ask to pick their brain, the chances are the answer will be no. However, when you put yourself in the position of reporter, all of a sudden you are giving value to them because you have a platform and are giving them exposure. Everyone wants exposure. It feeds the ego. Regardless of how big their podcast is, this is true. Some people will ask you how big your podcast is and how big your reach is, and that’s ok, but most people will just want the exposure.
• Take Damon John from Shark Tank for example. The odds of getting him to have coffee with me, he’d likely say no. Geoff recognizes that if he wanted to get in touch with those kinds of people, he needed to step his game up even more. Using a brand like entrepreneur.com behind his name gives him even better access to those kinds of high-level people. Therefore, he set out with the aim of becoming a contributing writer for entrepreneur.com for the specific reason of being able to network.
• When he found out that Damon John was coming out with a book, he recognized the opportunity, as a reporter for a...

Today’s guest is Bryan Orr from Podcast Movement: Sessions.

Bryan's podcasting story:

Bryan got into podcasting doing a typical interview show around small business. He found he was getting bored listening to his own content. Some guests were great and the application was strong but it wasn’t grabbing attention the way shows like 99% Invisible and This American Life had done. He had a real discontent with what he was producing, so he began Mantastic Voyage with his brother. Now he does more of a narrative style with Podcast Movement: Sessions. It’s not quite storytelling, but synthesis: synthesising information into a story.

Define narrative:

A narrative is anecdotes, so descriptions of things that happened, plus emotions or moments of reflection. If you take something that is an occurrence and add in elements of reflections or emotion into it, that can become a narrative. Another way to describe a narrative is to raise questions but be much more slow to answer them using occurrences or a sequence of events. In a question based podcast the host would ask a question and the guest would answer it. But in a narrative based podcast you explore the answer, and you find it by weaving through a set of occurrences.

The pros and cons:

• A good reason to have a narrative of any kind is if you are wanting to make an emotional connection. If you have no interest in emotion whatsoever, making an emotional connection or getting people’s emotions to rise and fall, then don’t do a narrative. If all you’re wanting to do is simply express information and have information absorbed, then narrative doesn’t make sense.
• But Bryan challenges anyone who says that all they’re doing is relaying information because information is absorbed when it’s attached to emotion. If we have no relationship to information given to us then you’ll have a tough time remembering it. But if you can attach information to an emotion, then you’ll remember it. Humans are hard-wired for story. As soon as you hear a story, you’ll listen to it.
• The only reason to decide not to do it is if you don’t have the time, the discipline or a subject matter that has any emotion whatsoever. If you don’t have any time, if what you’re wanting to do is simply create a content machine and not actually go through and edit and write, then don’t do narrative. Narrative requires a great amount of effort on the front, middle and back end in order to pull it off. It requires a time investment a lot of people don’t have, and for certain niches, it may not be worth it.

The steps required:

• The steps required depends on the type of narrative podcast you’re doing. Some are content-centric. For example, Podcast Movement: Sessions is content centric. Take the content that you already know you want to talk about and find the best story you can from within that. It’s easier than starting from scratch. Fiction podcasts start from scratch and are much more difficult because they centre around really good writing.
• First, distill one idea, even if it’s a content-centric podcast. Figure out what the one idea is that everything you’re doing is surrounded around. Think about how you want the podcast to sound: intense, mysterious, funny. How do you want it to sound generally speaking?
• Then start to lay it out on a timeline. What are some pieces you can fit in, and then see the gaps that need effective narration or sound clips to augment it.
• Bryan's editing process has evolved over time as he has used different programs and learned to be a better podcaster over time. His process is to record the audio and load it into Reaper, which is non-destructive software so you can make changes and go back later not having lost the...

Today’s guest is Elsie Escobar. Elsie runs a yoga podcast and has extensive experience in the performing arts. She doesn’t have personal experience creating narrative style podcasts, but she does have a lot of experience listening to them and some really great insights to share.

• http://thefeed.libsyn.com
• http://shepodcasts.com
• http://bit.ly/elsiesemergencyexcitement

Elsie’s story:

Elsie started a yoga podcast on her own, which had nothing to do with narrative. She was in Los Angeles and the LA podcasters were all storytelling podcasters at that time. All were creating what we would consider to be more of a storytelling type of a podcast, minus all the hyper-produced musical interludes and overtone of the narrative between the conversations. They were done in a way that struck me as a human being telling stories.

Tim Coin had a podcast called The Hollywood Podcast. Dan Class had The Bitterest Pill. Lance Anderson had Verge of the Fringe. Kush had Things I Say. All four of these guys were producing a podcast telling stories, and all did it completely different from each other.

For Elsie this was an incredible learning to understand how powerful a narrative could be in that it doesn’t have to be a specific type of way.

She also worked as an actor for 10 years, did theatre and movies and TV, and worked in Hollywood for a while. In hindsight, she says she didn’t have confidence in who she was as an artist, she didn’t trust herself, and that was one of the reasons she quit. She didn’t have the creative life she wishes she could have had. Elsie says podcasting gives that to her, the creative control and expression she was searching for.

A listener perspective on narrative podcasts:

• When working behind the microphone with all the editing and producing, we can forget what it’s like to be on the other end of the microphone. Even when we listen to podcasts we forget what that listener experience is like. Working in theatre is similar. Doing musicals, Elsie always got notes from directors that would say ‘you have to earn the right to start singing the song’. There are times in some narrative podcasts where she felt that they had not earned the right to insert that piece of music there, or to narrate this portion, because it’s more contrived. It needs to be furthering the throughline of the storytelling process.
• Although like anything else in podcasting there are very specific ‘rules and regulations’ around what constitutes a strong listening audio piece, there is also the ability to mess with them to the point where you don’t have to follow any rules. Creative juices sometimes get stuck in the technical world. Elsie explains the technical stuff comes from one side of brain and creative comes from the other. If you’re thinking about the technical that’s the editing and producing etc. The narrative and storytelling and strategy and heart of the piece is the creative. It’s either too ‘out there’ with no form, or it’s too form-ish with no impact that you’re looking for. A balance between both is what makes the most incredible narrative podcast.
• You’re into it, you create the thing, maybe you have a team. But then find someone not a part of the “in crowd”, maybe they’re the audience, maybe there’s a person who would benefit to listen or someone you want to reach. You have them listen to see if it works, like a mini focus group.

Tips for planning and crafting the narrative:

• Make sure before you start that you/the team have the key points you want to drive home or the overarching theme and WHY of this podcast. What’s the bottom line of this podcast? How is it that in the...

Today’s episode features Eric Johnson from Podcast Talent Coach.com. He has a lot of radio experience and he helps people create stories from their podcast. We talk about storytelling in great detail. He also has worksheets and other resources for telling great stories on his website at podcasttalentcoach.com

The Pros and Cons

One reason to do a narrative podcast is that it’s not prevalent right now in podcasting. Most everybody wants to do an interview podcast, because that’s the easiest type to do. Doing a podcast by yourself where you’re presenting the information is a little more difficult. The most difficult type of podcast to put together is the narrative podcast. It takes a lot of work to create but it’s one of the more entertaining and effective podcasts that you can put together.

Eric recommends narrative style because:

1. It’s not prevalent right now, not many people do it.
2. It’s incredibly entertaining
3. It makes you unique because it’s a creative and artful form of podcasting.

However, it’s incredibly difficult and unless you know what you’re doing it’s not something you should dive into headfirst. Experience in podcasting, broadcasting, audio recording and editing will help. If you don’t have that experience, creating a narrative podcast as your first podcast is going to be very difficult.

When you listen to NPR, they have professional editors that sit down and edit the piece together so it comes together in one nice story in 2 minutes. But that person’s job is to edit stories all day everyday. Be aware that it’s not an easy thing to do unless you know what you’re doing.

The Steps Required

Once you’ve recorded, you have to catalogue the interview, the questions you’ve asked, the details the guest provided. Then once you have the interviews recorded, you have to step back and write the story, find the pieces of the interviews that support your story and piece them in.

The toughest part is knowing what parts to leave in and what to leave out and still tell the complete story. You have to be an incredible storyteller, which is difficult and it’s also an art. You need people to interview that are lively, entertaining and energetic but also that will speak in complete sentences to help tell your story. And then you have to catalogue it all so you can put it together in a way that makes sense, so that your listener can understand the complete story.

The first thing you need to do is decide what story you’re going to tell. The most well known narrative podcast is Serial. It was telling a story of a guy who got locked up, but the question was ‘did he do it or did he get locked up unnecessarily?’ The creators knew the outcome before they started editing. They knew how many episodes they wanted to create and they worked their way backward.

Figure out what the conclusion is of the story you want to tell, and then work your way backwards to figure out exactly how much information you need to include to properly tell the story and reach your conclusion. That will help you figure out who you need to interview and what questions to ask. Until you know what story you want to tell, you can’t begin creating the podcast.

The Four Key Elements to Storytelling

1. A powerful introduction. What do you want to make your audience feel, laugh at, marvel at or better understand? What do you want the audience to walk away with? It must be an intriguing introduction. Create the first few seconds to hook your audience and bring them into the story like an amazing opening scene of a movie.

1. Create vivid details so your story comes to life in the theatre of the mind. The images are dancing in the listener’s mind. When you create with wonderful images and vivid detail,...

Today’s episode features Dave Jackson sharing his expertise about creating narrative style podcast episodes.

Pros and Cons of doing a narrative style:

The big pro is that stories engage audiences more than just a plain interview. There’s a reason every movie, every book, every TV show and almost all media is a story of some sort. It’s the Hero’s Journey: the audience gets sucked in and wants to find out what happens next.

The main con is that it takes a lot more time. To do just a host talking into a mic is a 4:1 ratio. If you’re making a 15 minute podcast like that, plan on spending an hour working on it. However other kinds of podcast have a much bigger ratio, because now you’re trying to get things to sound a specific way and create a mood so it takes much longer.

Dave’s tips for how to approach it:

Start with an idea first, break it down into specific topics next and then construct it into a narrative story.

Write it down and start fleshing out the idea, even write your show notes in advance. This helps because often during this process you will come up with cool ideas for production.

Choose guests via a criteria so that they fit the goal of the episode. That will mean you will get more of the sound bites you want from them and hopefully less will end up on the cutting room floor.

When trimming down interviews to get to the narrative elements, focus on the parts where the guest actually answers the questions you ask. Remember, you are the buffer between the guest and the audience and you don’t want to make the audience sift through content that isn’t relevant.

Ask yourself “What’s the point of telling the story, what’s the objective?” Do you want people to laugh, cry, groan or be entertained? Write it out so you can see the ebb and flow of the story. Then you will know where it tugs on their heart strings and where you need to lighten it up a bit so it’s not so heavy etc.

Sometimes you have good content that wasn’t relevant to the particular narrative, so it got cut. However, you could still use it for a promo for the episode or you can also release the full, raw, uncut interviews as well. For example, The Podcast Producers do this in between seasons.

Techniques to transition between clips or parts of stories:

Use music or sound effects, for example, at the end of a segment. Fade in music that sets the tone of the point you were making. It’s also useful for the audience to help the point sink in, let them ponder a bit.

Have a commercial break. This is a common way and audiences are familiar with it because it’s used so widely in mainstream media.

Simply use a dramatic pause followed by a question. Using a dramatic pause (think Paul Harvey, the king of radio) to let the idea sink in. Then start off next point with a question, to signal to the audience a shift of direction.

Resources or sources of inspiration

The book “Resonate: present visual stories that transform audiences” by Nancy Duarte.

Listen to Serial or Radio Lab or StartUp. Listen to enjoy the story, but also listen for the technical aspects of what they’re doing so you can reverse engineer them and use them yourself.

A portable recorder, to try to capture your thoughts in a moment, or your surroundings.

Welcome to the Creative Studio podcast, where we conduct experiments with podcasting! Throughout this season, we have explored how to create a narrative or journalistic style podcast. This is the tenth and final episode in this series.

Today, we will hear from several of our special guests regarding resources to help you create narrative audio. We’ll also hear some general tips from them that will also help throughout this process. Today’s guests are:

• Bryan Orr
• Corey Coates
• Daniel J.  Lewis
• Doc Kennedy
• Jessica Rhodes
• Jessica Abel
• Dave Jackson
• Erik K. Johnson
• Rye Taylor

I also want to thank Else Escobar and Geoff Woods for being guests this season as well.

As we wrap up this episode and series, I want to invite you to get a free gift. I have put a detailed PDF together with everything mentioned in this episode. To get this, you don’t even have to enter your email address – just click the link to download the PDF right away. I know that this episode and corresponding PDF doesn’t have everything we covered in this series, but if you’d be interested in getting something with all of this either in written form or video, please let me know!

I really want to thank you for taking the time to listen to this podcast. If this series has helped you, I really want to hear from you. You can go to the contact page or send me an email directly to [email protected].

Now, as we are wrapping up season 4, I am working on some things for season 5. The tagline for this podcast is “podcasting experiments,” so I’d like to follow that vein and interview podcasters that are creating podcasts that are different from the “standard” podcasts. Maybe it’s the format that they use. Or the combination of formats they use. Or maybe it’s how they record the podcast. Or maybe it’s the way they combine niches to create a new niche. I’m going to be on the lookout for such podcasters, but I’m open to suggestions. If you or someone you know is creating a podcast that you think is a little different from the rest, please let me know.

Listen to really great narrative podcasts

• Radiotopia podcasts
  • 99% Invisible
  • The Memory Palace
  • The Allusionist
  • The Kitchen Sisters
  • Lost and Found Sounds
  
  

Listen to podcasts that tell you how-to do narrative

• How Sound hosted with Rob Rosenthal
• Out On the Wire with Jessica Abel
• Book: Out On the Wire
• Third Coast Festival in Chicago for Audio Storytellers

Blogs

• Transom.org
• AirMedia.org
• Here Be Monsters

Just Do It (even if you don’t publish it)

• Start by telling stories about yourself or your family

Don’t outsource

• Learn how to do everything yourself
• Cutting own tape
• Doing your own logging
• Write your own narrative
• Edit music

Do raw interviews

• “Art of Non-doing”
• Hunt for your own music - work with composers
• See what happens
• Oversaturated with...

Welcome to the Creative Studio! This is the podcast where we talk about and explore ways to experiment with podcasting. We are close to wrapping up our series on narrative or journalistic podcasting. This is the ninth episode in this series and we have one more after this. If you haven’t listened to the first eight episodes yet, I encourage you to do that first because we have already covered everything you need to create a narrative podcast.

In this episode, we are going to take the next step. We have already talked about the editing process and the fact that sometimes a lot of things get cut out of the final piece. We’ll be looking at some things we can consider doing with these pieces of audio that are left on the cutting room floor. Corey Coates and Jessica Rhodes from the Podcast Producers starts us off.

[Corey]

[Jessica R.]

[Dave x 2]

Dave Jackson of the School of Podcasting can always be counted on to bring great thoughts. One concept I’ve heard him share about many times regarding editing is in reference to targeting only a certain length of time.

[Dave x 2]

Erik K. Johnson adds to the thought about repurposing audio for future episodes as well.

[Erik]

[Jessica R. and me]

I also had the thought that bloopers are another thing that could be used. Several podcasters I know of use this either regularly or sporadically. I know that bloopers on TV shows and movies are really popular, and I think they can be effective in audio as well.

Before we wrap up this short episode, I did want to mention a great new resource that you can get ahold of. Jessica Rhodes not only does The Podcast Producers with Corey, she also has her own show, Rhodes to Success, and her business, Interview Connections. One of her specialties is connecting podcast hosts with podcast guests. She helps to facilitate interviews on both sides, so she has written a book about how to rock the podcast from both sides of the mic.

Here are just some of the topics you'll discover in this powerful book:

 *  Getting Started with Podcasting

 *  Positioning: The Power of Celebrity

 *  Rock the Interview

 *  Getting a Return on Your Investment

 *  How to Launch and Then Soar

 *  Leveraging the Power of Guest Interviews

 *  How to Monetize & Market

 *  Podcasting to Actually Grow Your Business

Plus, Jessica includes her exact, step-by-step blueprint and the resources she uses to make podcasts happen!

I’m going to dive into this book more in the next episode, but you can check out http://www.creativestudio.academy/rockthepodcast for more...

You just want to think of the mood and emotion, you want to make sure that the timing is appropriate, that you are giving people enough time to digest what just happened and then transition them emotionally into what is about to happen next so obviously music is a huge part of that and I can go into a little bit about music if you want. 

1

But in many cases as we know when we are editing and trying to construct this, you know life just doesn't always fall that way because this is largely unscripted material.  So we have to find a way to bridge from one to the other and in many cases what I would find, as I mentioned earlier, was that if I can't make a bridge between two components of audio, two spoke parts but I do want to put then close together, that is a good opportunity for a narrator to jump in.

2

The two tricks I can give right now are if you can get two pieces of audio to stitch together naturally without having to do any tricks, do that first and if you have to get some narration in there, put a little space, put a little music, give the narration and then narration and go back into it.

3

You know each time I need to go from one part to another I think about you know, how I want to connect to the thing that happened, you know raise a new question.  Like at the end of one section, you want to sort of raise a question that you are going to answer in the section following so there is that.  If you are using music, music is a good way to bridge parts like that.  But yeah, I mean you have cycles in a story, where you have hourglass, at least a long time ago it used to go by the 45 second rule that every 45 seconds you need to have a new little mini arc happening in the story.  I think anywhere between 45 seconds to 2 minutes of time in your story, you need to be raising a question, answering a question.  Starting into a new thing so you have like narration, you have a quote, you do some music, and you need to think about it in little arcs like that.

4

Well you got to give expectations for your audience.  In narrative podcasting, one of the keys that you have to.  One of the things that is great about narrative podcasting is you can be very creative.  But the one thing that you also got to do is make sure that you got a box to think out of.  Okay.  It is very important in narrative podcasting that you actually create a structure, a framework, a box, whatever you want to call it.  But you got to have a formula in place that your listener can expect, okay.

5

And what you do with that is just like I was telling you a story and you were like and then, so as soon as I tell my audience that I fell off the back of that gator and I knew that I was about to get bit, I actually go into the introduction, my normal, standard introduction that they can always expect.  So they are expecting the end of the story but it is just the beginning, I am just foreshadowing what is going to happen at the end of the episode and then all of a sudden my theme music kicks in, my normal standard introduction kicks in and then they are like oh we got to wait for the rest of the story, but what it does is it engages them to the point that, "Oh, okay, this is the formula, he gives us the teaser, we know he is going to finish the story later in the episode but we got to wait for it, so here is the music, here is the into, here is another part of the story and he will get back and tell us what happened on the back of that alligator as soon as he fell off."  And that is how you can weave it in and those are the kinds of transitions I am talking about.  You want to have a specific structure in mind for your narrative podcast always to go

CS 407: Enticing Your Listeners

Welcome to the Creative Studio podcast where we conduct experiments with podcasting. We have been delving into the world of creating a narrative podcast, whether that is a journalistic, fiction, or NPR style. This is our seventh episode in this 10-part series, so if you haven’t listened to the first six, it would probably be best to do that first.

I’d like to start by giving a special thanks to today’s guests: Rye Taylor, Bryan Orr, Jessica Abel, Daniel J. Lewis, Geoff Woods, The Dave Jackson, Corey Coates, Jessica Rhodes, and Elsie Escobar. We’re going to explore the peaks and valleys, the stakes, loops, emotions, and more.

1 – [Rye’s story about wrestling the gator]

We just heard from Rye Taylor sharing his story and leaving it on a cliff hanger and go into some kind of a transition.

12 – Foreshadowing (Rye)

I guess this is where Paul Harvey should come in. But, we have Bryan Orr to continue this thought.

3 – What is at stake? (Bryan)

[music]

10 – Raise a question (Jessica Abel)

That was Jessica Abel. I mentioned this several times, but you really need to listen to her podcast and buy her book, “Out on the Wire” by going to CreativeStudio.Academy/wire.

Not only do you need start with an intriguing teaser by foreshadowing, determine what is at stake, and figure out how to raise a question in your listener’s mind, you need to look at the overall story you’re telling. You need to see the ups and downs. Daniel J. Lewis calls these peaks and valleys.

14 – Start with a peak (Daniel)

Not just should you start and end with a peak, Bryann Orr adds to this by suggesting that you start with your best tape first to draw them in.

4 – Best tape first (Bryan)

18 – Set the stage (Geoff)

Geoff Woods of the Mentee Podcast states this well. As the host or narrator, it’s important for us to set the stage by giving the context and necessary information to understand what’s about to come. He continues by talking about loops.

19 – Open loops (Geoff)

We are driven a lot by our emotions. Really think about the decisions you make. There are certainly some that you make after logically thinking through the matter, but there are a lot of times that our emotions direct what we do. Emotions draw us into TV show, movies, and other forms of story. Dave Jackson defines some specific aspects of emotion that apply here.

11 – Emotion (Dave)

6 – Emotional markers (Corey)

That was Corey Coates of Podfly Productions and the Podcast Producers podcast. Bryan Orr and Daniel J. Lewis bring the conversation back to those peaks and valleys, or emotional bounce.

2 – Emotional bounce/balance (Bryan)

13 – Ups and downs (Daniel)

Else Escobar joins us again to blend her experience as an actress and podcaster by talking about pacing and breaking the rhythm.

15 – Pacing/break the rhythm (Elsie)

Jessica Rhodes is the co-host of the Podcast Producers with Corey. She mentions differing the vocals to change the pace as well as using music as a...

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