‘Welcome to Nightvale’ got started as minimally edited audio drama recorded on a cheap USB mike. Despite this, it’s always sounded great, and it became very successful very quickly. Would its creator have benefitted from reading your comments, or the one in the article that we’re both commenting on? Do we accuse him of being a lazy, excuse-making waste of time just because he didn’t start out knowing everything about Audacity?

‘My Brother, My Brother, And Me’ started out being recorded over Skype using a variety of low-quality microphones, including one that came with a game of Rock Band. The podcast has been able to gain an impressive audience and improve its equipment and sound, and its success has led to the creation of a bunch of other podcasts that people love (The Adventure Zone being a personal favorite). One of the brothers, Travis McElroy, now works in podcasting as his full-time job. The McElroys had a chance to develop their skills and learn their craft over time. Do your comments encourage the development of future podcasters in their mold?

These are a couple of examples just off the top of my head, but they hopefully demonstrate why I think this type of article is not helpful to beginning podcasters. This sort of argument seems to me to be simply elitist — it implies, when it doesn’t outright say, that only the people in the know, who have the resources and skills to do things “right” from the beginning, should be allowed into the inner sanctum of podcasting. I think that podcasting benefits from the relatively low barrier to entry, and from the resulting diversity of approaches.