Editing Versus Live


In the early days of podcasting, there was a sense of pride in the gritty amateur quality of it. It was just you, your mic, and the Internet. It was real. It wasn't polished and fake like the radio and TV announcers' teleprompted speeches. Like real conversation, you were talking with your listeners, not at them.

But because some of us were not schooled in announcer-speak, we sat in front of our microphones and stuttered, paused, and said "um" way too much. Sometimes coughing or sneezing would cause unpleasant spikes in the audio file. And we realized that cutting out these occasional gaffes made the podcast better to listen to.

The Pitfalls of Editing

Although we advocate editing your podcast, there are legitimate reasons for going "raw."

We have spoken with several podcasters who, like ourselves, have uploaded an unedited file that they thought they had edited and were mortified when listeners started asking, "What gives?"

Now, if none of us worried about editing, this would have been fine, because listeners would have been used to the consistent flubs in our podcasts, but a habit of editing makes an unedited podcast stand out like a nihilistic teenage writer at a baseball game. So whatever you choose, stay consistent.


The line separating the editing podcasters from the live podcasters is drawn definitely... in sand. Some podcasters feel that if they edited, they could not do their shows as frequently as they manage. Others want to keep the conversational feeling and think that editing will remove that from their show.

For the record, both of us edit our shows extensively, removing mistakes, slow parts, any and all bodily noises (no Senseo burps on our shows), and household interruptions such as dogs barking and phones ringing. We cover this topic in depth in Chapter 10, "The Great Editing Debate."




Tricks of the Podcasting Masters
Tricks of the Podcasting Masters
ISBN: 0789735741
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 162

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