Podcast studies

I make three podcasts each week – sometimes more.

This is part of my work as digital media coordinator at Woodend Barn, Banchory.

One of my tasks is to develop ways of working with social media which have as little impact as possible on time and money, so that when my contract is finished staff who remain will be able to continue podcasting, blogging, making video etc, with as little impact as possible on their own work activities.

And so I have been trying to carry out my podcasting activities as quickly as possible. This means trying to develop shortcuts in workflow which office staff will be able to copy.

A knock-on effect of this is that I have to try to find an acceptable balance between quality of production and time invested in that activity.

In the past, when I used to work at the BBC, the aim was to produce work which was of the highest quality possible. Now I have to think about how much time I spend carrying out certain activities, such as editing (which I really enjoy), and then finding ways to minimise the time spent.

For example, our regular podcasts are under 5 min in duration, but I often find myself recording interviews (using Skype) which run to 6, 7 or sometimes more, minutes in duration. I then have to edit out enough audio to bring the duration down below 5 min.

This relatively simple task adds sometimes 30 min, sometimes more, to my podcast tasks. So at the moment I’m trying to find a way of keeping interviews to below 5 min and ‘codifying’ that into practice which staff can follow. But it’ll have to be more sophisticated than simply saying, ‘Stop speaking after 4 and a half minutes’!