I spent the last two weeks teaching podcasting to a group of high school students. I was a very last minute replacement for an instructor who had to drop out, and I had very little time to plan and prep.

I’d love to tell you that it was a magical experience. But then… I promised not to lie to you.

The students were great. But they were also smack-dab in the middle of their summer vacations, and I was asking them to sit through lectures on “fair use.”

(To be fair, I wrote a lecture about “fair use.” But I decided not to actually deliver it – mostly because I know how to pick my battles.)

We spent the first week preparing for our podcast recording sessions. Learning about storytelling. Interviewing. A tiny bit about story structure.

The students were DYING to get into the studio and record.

But I didn’t let them get behind a microphone until they could prove to me that they were prepared.

Why?

Because preparation is a non-negotiable.

After I posted my last newsletter to LinkedIn, my friend Elaine Grant of Podcast Allies, reminded me of this point.

Where I would not skimp and I know you wouldn't either, is in being prepared enough going into any interview (celebrity chatcast included) that you know the facts and can challenge falsehoods and omissions. Especially these days!

Preach, Elaine. Preach.

And that brings me to what I want to talk about today. Because I got a lot of feedback from my last newsletter.

Check it out if you haven’t already. But I’ll give you the TLDR version: Money is tiiiight. Our time is worth money. So we gotta figure out how to make less for less.

The financial realities of our industry aren’t changing any time soon. And if we can’t skip the prep — if prep is the one thing that we absolutely must hold on to — where can we save time/money?

What can we let go of instead?

Let Go of Perfection

I recently had a call with a brand new client. She’s making a self funded interview show about a niche subject. She has a built-in audience, and she has found lots of really interesting people who are excited to be guests on her pod.

But her built-in audience is relatively small. And she’s unlikely to bring in a lot of money, especially at first.

Now, normally, I would tell someone like this that she needs a producer/editor/sound engineer who will spend at least 10-12 hours perfecting every episode.

But there’s no way she can afford that.

And here’s the thing: Her very small, very niche audience doesn’t give a damn about production elements.

They’re not going to be put off by an interview that rambles a bit.

They don’t need impressive sound design.

They exist in a world that talks very little about the issues and stories that directly represent their lives. And they just want to be seen and heard.

So yeah, I helped her figure out a way to make this podcast on the cheap. It’s not going to be perfect, but her audience is gonna love it.

Let Go of Ego

Look, I get it. You want to make that big, beautiful project and you want to make it bigger and more beautiful than any project that has ever come before.

But despite what they say in Texas, bigger is not necessarily better.

And if we’re really being honest with ourselves, a lot of the things that we do to “pretty up” our storytelling really just make it harder for our listeners to follow the plot.

I love puzzling through story structure. I think we all know this about me.

But I can’t tell you how many times I’ve listened back to a project and thought, “Wow. Why did I spend so much time perfecting an e-structure / dueling narrative / reporter’s journey / etc / etc when a simple chronological structure would have been more compelling and easier to follow?”

Over-complicated structure. Fussy sound design. Spending hours writing that perfect sentence.

All of these things have one thing in common: they very rarely serve the story.

We do these things because our egos tell us that we need to do them to impress others in our industry.

We do them because WE love them, and WE think they’re cool.

But far too often, we do them for free. Because the budgets available right now do not cover the cost of making art.

Our time is worth money. So until we find a pot of gold to fund our artistic vision — those time-intensive bells and whistles have gotta go.

Let Go of Format

This is a big one for me.

Somewhere along the line, we got it in our heads that format is one of the factors that defines the unique voice of our podcasts.

Think of classic Radiolab, for example. Every episode has a different topic, but you can pretty much guarantee that it’s gonna have at least one host chatting with another host or a reporter. There are gonna be super quick cuts. Lots of back and forth between voices. Sound effects. Music. All the bells and whistles.

We came to expect that from every episode. We think that’s what defines the show.

But if we consider what truly defines that program, it’s topic choice, tone, and an unabashed curiosity about the world around us.

Now if we take that “unique voice” and apply it to different (a.k.a. cheaper) formats, we suddenly have a lot more time and money to spread around.

Because a lightly narrated story is a heck of a lot quicker (and cheaper) to produce than a Radiolab-style production. And a really great narrative interview can be just as immersive (and a heck of a lot quicker/cheaper) than a scripted narrative.

And sometimes, when you have a really fabulous speaker and they have a great story to tell, removing all the questions and going non-narrated takes no time at all.

When we lock ourselves into any one format, we spend unnecessary time/money trying to make every story fit the format.

So let’s stop doing that!

Let Go of One-at-a-Time

As has already been established, it takes about a year to make a serialized narrative.

But if we’re being honest, a bunch of that year is actually spent waiting.

You’ve gotta send out FOIA requests. And document requests. And court transcript requests.

You’ve gotta find your sources. Contact them. Build rapport. Convince them to talk to you.

Then you have to twiddle your thumbs for a while because it’s your source's birthday month and they don’t want to do an interview during their birthday month.

Yeah, that actually happened once.

There’s a TON of time spent waiting.

And reporters and producers don’t enjoy sitting on their hands. So while we’re waiting, we reach out to more sources. Put out more FOIA requests. Take field trips. Schedule interviews with people who are not having a birthday that month.

And suddenly, our story grows…and grows…and grows.

But does it actually get better? Do we actually learn anything new?

Or does our project just get more expensive?

I think we need to practice a little restraint. And the best way to practice restraint is to have something else keeping us busy. Another deadline. Another project that needs our attention. (And another budget to buoy up our salaries.)

The days of spending a year, or longer, entirely focused on one project are over. We need to be working on multiple projects at once.

Let Go of Artifice

Okay, yeah. Artifice is — by definition — not a good thing.

But there is so much artifice built into our production cycles.

Sometimes it’s something as simple as re-recording an interview question because I don’t like the way I asked it.

So then I rewrite the question, sometimes multiple times.

Then I go into a studio (or a closet) and I record.

Then I drop the new question into the mix. But my tone doesn’t match. So back into the studio (or closet) to try again.

And suddenly I’ve spent an hour, just so listeners don’t hear that I slightly stumbled over that word.

But you know what? Stumbles are real. They happen to everyone every day.

Sure, sometimes we need to re-record due to a factual error or some detail that needs to be explained.

I get it. Do what you gotta do.

But fixing minor stumbles costs money. And it makes our podcasts sound LESS real.

On a bigger scale, we spend countless hours trying to write narration that sounds conversational.

But you know what already sounds conversational?

Actual conversations.

I’ve been working on ways to use more conversations in my scripted podcasts. To make them sound less scripted. Less artificial.

I love the way it sounds. And it also costs way less time/money.

Look — all of these ideas come down to the same thing.

We need to stop defining the quality of our work by the amount of time and money we spend on it.

That’s not what makes listeners love your show. That’s not what keeps them coming back.

After my last newsletter, I had folks write to me and say that when employers underfund their projects, they make up the difference by putting in a bunch of unpaid labor.

Please, please, please stop doing that!

But what you can do — and what you should do — is think creatively about how best to use the budget you have.

What do your listeners really want? What actually defines your point of view? How can you do this project cheaper — while also, maybe, making it better?

There is so much that we can do to shake up the norms that have defined our production cycles.

And there’s freedom in letting go.

Many thanks to everyone who's supported the Narrative Beat community over the past few weeks. You help keep this little newsletter chugging along through some otherwise discouraging times.

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