How to Start a Podcast: The Toast Becometh
I don’t consider myself an avid podcast listener, though, I do enjoy Welcome to Nightvale and practically anything produced by NPR. Starting The Toast podcast for UAB Digital Media came as a personal challenge in a way. Coming into the idea, I knew two things:
- I wanted to do something new for us.
- I’ve never produced a podcast.
During my internship, one of our fearless leaders, Anna, mentioned she already had a name if we so wished to make one. It didn’t happen then, but luckily they chose to keep me around as a fellow the following year and I was able to bring the project to life.
The first thing I did was write up a proposal with the project name, rationale, an outline of an episode, production schedule, and how it would benefit us. After it was reviewed, I got the go ahead to make a pilot.
I assembled a team and set up a meeting. I initially came into the meeting with a few ideas for segments, but my beautiful team members decided on most of the ones that actually became regular segments each episode.
It wasn’t perfect and I had no idea what I was doing but luckily, it was well-received and 4 episodes later we have a series.
Most of your work will be done in pre-production followed by post-production. If you set everything up for success in pre-production then production and post will be a breeze.
My main tip is — do your research. I spent almost a week just looking at articles on podcasts, audio settings in Audition (or whatever you decide to use to record it on), and RSS links.
Here are the most helpful articles I found:
If you’re using Adobe Audition
If you want to avoid common mistakes
And as mentioned before, I use Adobe Audition as our software of choice. It was really mostly out of convenience since we have Adobe software loaded on all the computers in the media commons. Fortunately, we have a really neat soundlab we use to record all of our episodes.
Here’s the equipment we use:
The space:
Microphones:
Audio interface:
Speakers:
And a Mac Mini to host Audition during the recording process (we don’t edit on it, though).
My main tip is: trust your team.
The same thing can be said for any kind of creative work, but with all the different segments and the limited time we have to produce/publish you really need to be able to divide tasks and responsibilities. You can’t divide up the work if you don’t trust the people on your team.
Miscellaneous things you have to think about:
Theme song (I composed ours in Logic Pro)
2. Intro/tagline
3. Outro
4. Formatting the descriptions under the episodes
For the theme song, I tried not to overthink it. It’s arpeggios up and down with a beat and some auxiliary percussion. The tagline I put more thought into because I wanted it to tie in what the podcast was about and that’s hard to do in a single line.
Our tagline is: Welcome to The Toast! A semi-nutritional part of your digital day. And we usually say that after we specify the production which is something along the lines of “this was produced by…at the… “
When we were considering what to do for the outro, we noticed that the only part of digital media that we didn’t directly cover was music. So, Casey and I thought it’d be cool if we recommended a song through an app we both use called Cymbal and viola!
If you’re planning on using iTunes and Google Play to host your podcast, you’ll need to think about how you’re going to format the descriptions under each episode. This is usually where you give a brief description of your podcast as a whole and what to expect in each episode.
We have announcements within our podcast about events we’re hosting or that will be coming up so we list those after we summarize the episode. Then we restate the production specific intro and link the UAB Digital Media website for more information.
This is the template we use:
Welcome to The Toast, a monthly digital media and technology podcast. In it, we discuss apps, software, and new tech as well as highlight people in the digital media world. In this episode, [summarize episode segments here].
Upcoming Events: [change as needed]
Step-It Up
Date — Name of workshopYoPro
Date — Name of guestWe’re on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Medium @uabdigitalmedia
The Toast Podcast is produced by Digital Media Fellows at UAB Digital Media on the campus of the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
Tags: #Tech #Humor #UAB #Digital #Media #podcast #knowledge jam
Tags are important. Similarly to YouTube, they’re keywords and categories that people can use to find your work.
I hope this helps. If you have your own podcast, a favorite, or plan to start one let me know in the comments below. Now, go forth and podcast away!
