I’m so podcast old I can remember having to explain what they were. While I have future posts about podcast making, always always the gate to the craft is by listening and learning from other podcasters.

My listening is nearly always while in the vehicle for doing errands in town (I cant remember te last time I listened to music in the truck), maybe enough to listen to one show there and back. I’ve noticed recently how often a guest on a podcast show mentions something- a book, an article, a web site, that I almost have to stop (pull off the road) and make a note to look it up later (or rely on my memory). It’s not always “linked in the show notes”, often it is mentioned almost in passing.

And this is how I am now deeply hooked on a new podcast, Phonogaph “a podcast about audio storyelling.” In such good ways do hosts Rob McGinley Myers and Britta Greene (weirdly most of the information on the podcast and its blog references other shows McGinley Myers did 10 years ago?).

But what they do is deeply analyze the craft of audio production, the storytelling, the editing. It’s like the podcast version of a sports talk show that nerds out on details only a fan would appreciate. This was really the essence of how we did it in ds106 long ago by starting with listening– it was not just the mechanics of audio editing, but trying to have students go deep into what the classics like This American Life, Radio Lab, and so many more if the GOAT audio shows accomplished. To go deep into the methods Ira Glass shared as audio storytelling or Jad Abumrad on How Radio Creates Empathy and How Sound (which seems to be a broken web site, sniff).

And add to that category to is one of my favorites 99% Invisible, which Phonograph covered as What a Wonderful Thing – 99% Invisible — but it was in the episode I am not even done is What Covid Did to Them – Nancy Updike’s “We Were Three” that I has shouting YES YES YES. If you listened to TAL in even a brief way, you would have heard Nancy Updike’s name many times as a producer, writer.

But it was this episode of Phonograph that shared her example behind the TAL episode I’m From the Private Sector and I’m Here to Help (about private contractors working in the green zone during the US war in Iraq) that stood out. It was how she was able to produce, through writing, top quality audio storytelling when her field recorded audio was so bad to almost be unusable.

You know they are the old school typer when they refer to recorded audio as “tape” (Glass always does). I am now cuing up Nancy Updikes talked shared in the Phonorgraph notes for Die Mediocrity Die! a 2006 talk at the Third Coast Conference.

(note, these days it takes deep diving in source HTML to find direct links to audio, but I will be a diver.)

Do your own radio scripts ever bore you? Or frustrate, confuse, and deflate you?

Nancy Updike, who has written stories ranging in length from 50 seconds to 59 minutes, presents easy approaches to making your writing sharper, more memorable, and more engaged with the tape. Also, learn how to make drab tape beautiful through writing, and along the way, enjoy some schadenfreude: instructive stories of mistakes and failure are shared for the benefit of all.

https://www.thirdcoastfestival.org/feature/die-mediocrity-die

I have not even listened to it but am betting it will be oh so worth it.

Now back to my vague title. I came across Phonograph, a podcast about podcasting when listening to an episde of Bonni Stachowiak’s Inside Higher Education podcast with podcaster Jeff Young, and it was Jeff who recommended Phonograph.

These, in many ways, to me are valuable hyperlinks, of the information kind. I hear something that makes me curious or just tickles the spidey sense that its worth looking into, and then I have to find it. Direct links are nice to get, but the ones you end up ferreting out of the big pile, now those are the flakes still left from the internet Bags of Gold.

Enough blogging, I got some podcasts to listen to.

Featured Image: “Ring and Spring” Microphones flickr photo by jschneid shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC 2.0) license

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