Anatomy of a Podcast

This is the story of a podcast. My podcast. It’s not a universal story, it’s a personal one. But I can’t pin your podcast to the lab table and dissect it like a frog; I can only do that to mine. In the years I’ve spent working professionally in the podcast industry, I’ve consistently wished that more people wrote/spoke on the behind-the-scenes grind that is making a podcast, so now that I have a discrete, finished case study, it’s time to gut that amphibian.

The Background

I am, predominantly, a current affairs podcast producer. I run a small company, Podot, and make a number of big(ish) British politics podcasts, like the New Statesman Podcast, A Podcast of One’s Own with Julia Gillard, and Polling Politics. I previously worked at the Spectator magazine. So that’s me.

What I hadn’t made was a documentary podcast. I love listening to them, anything from Serial to Wind of Change, but there were many challenges, professionally, to me transitioning into producing them. Primarily it’s a funding issue — Leon Neyfakh, host of Fiasco and, previously, Slow Burn, told the FT recently that he estimated the most recent season of Fiasco set Luminary back $350,000. And that’s in the US — here in the UK budgets are lower, funding opportunities are scarcer. There are basically three bodies that can fund documentary podcasts in the UK: the BBC, Spotify and…