Time-Tested Show Prep Techniques


Show preparation isn't difficult or mysterious. And, best of all, any time and effort you put into show prep will be paid back many times over in the quality of your podcasts and the ease with which you'll be able to produce them.

Some simple techniquestime-tested by podcasters and radio personalities alikewill allow you to approach your podcast with more confidence, cover all of the material you want to cover, and complete your post-production as painlessly as possible.

The ABC Technique (Always Be Clipping!)

Noted radio consultant Walter Sabo once observed that top-tier radio personalities spend four hours out of every day on the air and the remaining twenty hours engaged in show prep. His point was not that these broadcasters are constantly obsessing over their show. What Sabo meant was that top-tier broadcast personalities always keep their eyes and ears open for material that might be useful on the air. If you're going to be a top-tier podcaster, you'll want to do the same thing.

The technique is simple: Keep a file folder and a recorder handy. When you're thumbing through newspapers and magazines and you come across an item that you might want to use in your podcast, clip it out and drop it into your file folder.

The same principle applies to listening to the radio or watching television. Chances are, you own a portable recording device for recording sound-seeing tours or other podcasts from the field. (Because of their size and attractive pricing, Rio MP3 players with built-in recording technology tend to be most podcasters' portable recorder of choice.) When you hear something that might be useful or interesting, simply turn on your recorder and capture it.

Your objective is not necessarily to record the audio for use in your podcast (although that's certainly possible as long as you respect the appropriate copyright constraints). Instead, you simply want to capture the information or idea that struck you as interesting so that it's available when you sit down to plan your show.

The specific information you're looking for will depend, of course, on the nature of your show and your audience. If you're like most podcasters, your show probably targets a specific audience and you'll want to focus on those items that are most likely to interest them. Beyond that somewhat obvious strategy, you'll want to pay attention to your own instincts and reactions. If you find something interesting, chances are your audience will, too.

Collect More Than You Need (Way More!)

If you listen to talk radio, you'll hear a constant theme among the more popular hostsand it doesn't matter whether they're conservative or liberal. Each host will phrase it differently, but every one expresses the same thought: "We've got so many things to talk about today, I don't know if we'll be able to get it all in."

You might to tempted to think that these hosts are simply hyping their shows to keep listeners tuned in…and there's certainly some of that going on. However, it's also true that these hosts are being accurate. They're not talking about the relative amount of news that's occurred on a given day, though. (After all, every day can't be a big news day!) What they're referring to is that fact that they are over-prepared. In the course of their show prep, they've collected more things to talk about than they'll ever have time to cover. It's an effective technique on the radio and it will work just as well for you in your podcast.

The Usual Suspects

Unless your podcast is highly specialized, you'll probably want to keep an eye on certain publications and websites that are reliable harbingers of trends in pop culture and/or technology. These resources, such as The Drudge Report shown in Figure 4.1, set the agenda for water cooler conversations across the country.

Figure 4.1. Love it or hate it, your listeners are probably looking at The Drudge Report regularly.


As you prepare for your podcasts, here are some of sites you should consider checking out:

  • CNET News (http://news.com.com/)

  • CNN (http://www.cnn.com/)

  • The Drudge Report (http://drudgereport.com/)

  • Google News (http://news.google.com/news)

  • The New York Times (http://nytimes.com/)

  • USA Today (http://usatoday.com/)

  • Wired News (http://wired.com)

  • Yahoo! News (http://news.yahoo.com/)

Almost all of these sites provide RSS feeds to which you can subscribe. This will make it easier for you to keep an eye on information and late-breaking news that might be of interest to you and your listeners. The summary of the USA Today RSS feed in Figure 4.2 shows how effective the technology can be at compiling and summarizing the news you need to know.

Figure 4.2. RSS provides convenient summaries of the news you need at a glance along with hyperlinks to more complete information.


In addition to these sites for the general public, there are a few destinations on the Web that are specifically designed to assist with show prep for broadcasters and/or podcasters. A few of the more useful ones are

  • Corey Deitz Show Prep Guide (http://www.radioearth.com/)

  • Prep Links (http://www.preplinks.com/)

  • Radio 411.com (http://radio411.com/prep.htm)

If you keep your show prep antennae tuned in to sources such as thesealong with others you'll accumulate for yourself over timeyou'll have gobs of material waiting whenever you decide to sit down and produce a show.

Design the Flow of Your Show

It's just about time to record another show. You've got a file folder full of interesting material you'll want to cover. What now?

Well, as we mentioned a moment ago, just having a file folder that's full of material will put you in a much better position than you'd be without it. But a just little more planning will yield even greater results from your show prep efforts.

Molecules or Electrons?

Much of your show prep work will be done online. As you find material on the Web, you're probably tempted to just save the bookmarks instead of printing out the material you discover. While it's certainly possible to do that, printing out your material and working from paper is a much better approach.

When you're recording your podcast, both you and your computer are going to be extremely busy. Moving back and forth between your web browser and your recording program introduces unnecessary opportunities for things to go awry. Working with printouts of material you find on the Web will allow you to keep your computer focused on recording while you stay focused on the show.

Also, paper allows you to keep your material spread out in front of you. This is a much more functional approach than trying to navigate among multiple windows on your computer. Paper also allows you to easily highlight a particular item or passage so that you can refer to it quickly when you need it.

Finally, the rustling of paper as you move from one item to another can provide an audio flourish that enhances your show's listenability. (One prominent radio personality uses this trick as a staple in his nationally syndicated program.)


The following sections describe a three-step approach that will organize your show prep material for maximum usefulness.

Prioritize Your Material

Once you start recording a podcast, you'll often find that it takes on a life of its own. A show that you thought would take 15 or 20 minutes will sometimes whiz right past the half hour mark while you're feeling as though you're just warming up! (Conversely, of course, you'll occasionally find yourself covering one topic after another at a breakneck pace. That's why it's so important to be over-prepared!)

This part of your show prep begins, then, by performing a rough sort of the material you've collected into order of importance. The most important, must-discuss items should be placed into their own pile. Everything else goes into a second pile that consists of items that are interesting but not critical.

Mix Up Your Material by Topic

Your next step is to take a look at the items in your first pile and separate them by general topic. For example, let's say you're doing a podcast on science fiction. In your pile of show material, you find one article about an upcoming movie version of a Philip K. Dick novel. Somewhere else in the pile, there's an article that speculates on whether or not there's going to be a movie based on Marvel Comics's Dr. Strange. There are a couple of ways you might handle this.

One approach would be to group them together. If your treatment of each item is going to be brief, that could be a plausible option. A more likely scenario, though, is that you'll want to devote a bit of time to discussing each of those two similar items. In that case, it's much better to separate them in your podcast.

Look at it this way: Either your listener is interested in sci-fi movies or he's not. If he is interested, then he's much more likely to stick with your podcast after your discussion of the first movie so that he can hear you talk about the second one later on. If he's not interested in sci-fi movies, then he might stay with you for a discussion of one movie, but you'd certainly lose him if you talked about two in a row. In either instance, your prospects for keeping a listener's attention are improved when you separate similar topics.

Mix Up Your Material by Tone

Podcasting is, at its heart, entertainment. As a new medium, it is in the process of evolving some of its own rules. Even so, many of the basic rules that have developed over time in other media apply to you as a podcaster. One of these rules is that you should constantly vary the tone and pace of your show in order to keep your audience's attention.

On The Tonight Show, for example, you won't ever see two comedians on back-to-back. A singer in concert won't perform two ballads in a row. And Good Morning America will almost always alternate hard news segments with human interest segments. All of these entertainment outlets know that it's easy to lose an audience's attention with a monotonous format. They mix up the pace and tone of their showsand you should, too.

If your podcast is about technology, for example, you might follow an analysis of Apple's new operating system with some listener feedback before you get into a review of the new line of iPods. Adam Curry's Daily Source Code provides a great example of this technique. There are several elements that are regularly featured in that podcast:

  • Technical banter

  • Non-technical banter

  • Podsafe music

  • Mashups

  • Promos for other podcasts

Curry tries to mix these elements in a way that keeps his listeners' attention. That variety doesn't happen by accident. It's the result of a show prep process that follows the principles we've discussed here.

Keep an Eye on the Clock

As a podcaster, you don't have the same kinds of time constraints that radio personalities have. You don't have to break for news and traffic at the bottom of the hour and you don't have to end your show at a particular time.

Even so, it's a good idea to keep an eye on the clock as you record your show. For one thing, you'll probably want to keep each show within a certain time limit to keep the show's file size manageable. More important, though, is the fact that keeping an eye on the clock will help you manage your podcast's tempo. Your audience will appreciate the brisker pace that results. Just because you have all the time in the world doesn't mean you have to take it.


Don't Forget the Funny Stuff

If there's a podcast topic out there that wouldn't benefit from regular doses of levity, we have yet to find it.

Regardless of the topics you cover or the audience you're targeting, there's an important fact that many podcasters forgetand their shows suffer for it: Your audience wants to be entertained.

There is no information you can convey that's so unique that your audience can't find it somewhere else. And it's probably available somewhere in a format that's easier to get to than your podcast. Of course, you can add some value to the information as an aggregator, for example by collecting information from disparate sources and putting it together in a convenient format. Increasingly, though, technology continues to make it easier for your listener to perform that function without you.

The real value you add as a podcaster comes from your perspective and from the degree to which you're able to package content in a way your audience finds entertaining. There are a number of ways to be entertaining, of course, but none is as reliable as humor. This doesn't mean that your show needs to be funny all the time or that you need to be a comedian. It simply means that humor has proven to be a valuable tool for all sorts of broadcasters and it can work for you in your podcast, too.

You say you're not a natural humorist? That's why we're dealing with this subject in a chapter about show preparation. If you're no Rodney Dangerfieldand most of us aren'tyou can still be funny enough to make a difference with a small amount of planning and preparation.

For starters, the same process that we discussed for general show prep also applies to using humor in your podcast. Keep your eyes and ears open for items that are amusing. When you come across something that makes you smile, giggle, or laugh out loud, make sure you clip it, record it, jot it down, or otherwise capture it. Beyond that, the show prep sites we've already mentioned all have links to humor pages and/or humor sites. These are the same resources that broadcast professionals use to interject humor into their shows.

Believe It or Not, You Can Learn to Be Funny

Granted, if you're not comfortable with humor, it's unlikely that you'll turn into a great comic like Jerry Seinfeld or Lewis Black. Even so, humor is not an entirely innate skill. With a little bit of effort, you can learn to be funnier than you think you are today.

A great place to start is a book titled Great Comedians Talk About Comedy by Larry Wilde. (You can find it on Amazon or Barnes & Noble.) This crash course in the art of being funny features contributions from comedians such as Woody Allen, Milton Berle, Johnny Carson, and Jerry Seinfeld. If these guys can't show you how to be funnier then nobody can.

By the way, did you hear the one about the priest, the rabbi, and the podcaster…?




Absolute Beginner's Guide to Podcasting
Absolute Beginners Guide to Podcasting.
ISBN: B001U8C03Q
EAN: N/A
Year: 2004
Pages: 167

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