A minute was offered to Diane Wyzga, a storyteller, as the easy version of a podcast. It asked more, not less. The more you compress, she says, the more you have to pay attention, and over time the minute became a bit of Diane. A minute has room for the point and for whoever is… more →

When this conversation was recorded, songwriter Gabrielle Pitman had burned out on a podcast and stopped for about a year between seasons. By Pitman’s account, the audience stayed. Only the algorithm, Pitman says, tracks which day an episode came out. The schedule is not free: it is paid for in the emptiness ideas need. A… more →

Pressing publish is the step most of us treat as the finish line. Mark Tweddle, who works with storytelling in coaching and team building, wanted to reach the people a season would make a difference to, and had no idea how. Publishing addresses everyone; reaching has a recipient. The finish line was never the publish… more →

Jason Tieri, who edits podcasts for clients, does not play the finished copy after cutting an episode. A third pass, Tieri says, catches what a co-host will not mention and fans will not either, since they love you. But the faults that survive are not the ones anybody is protecting you from. They are the… more →

Emeric McCleary, who hosts a podcast for widowed people, calls every guest a guest co-host to give them authority to argue. Many never use it. A title is words, and the imbalance is in the room: the host’s ease comes from every past spill, and the guest walks into something finished. What a host can… more →

Kato McNickle, a playwright who teaches how stories are put together, splits what you love about a show into two halves. The structure, the engine, can be learned. The content is simply what draws you. But McNickle’s own advice on cutting what listeners have already heard is a decision about content, and it is learnable… more →

Jam Mayer trains people in conference rooms and on video calls, where one generation believes you owe the room your face and the digital natives listen with the camera off. The rule was never about manners. It is an inference: visible attention standing in as evidence of the real thing. The proxy can be faked… more →

Luke Harris plans each interview he records, then feels his guests pulling him away from the plan. The obvious advice is that the plan should lose. His own experience says otherwise: you cannot be pulled off course without a course. The plan’s job is not to be executed but to be the thing you notice… more →

Robbie Swale is a coach, and his twelve-minute method beat his starting problem every week for three years. Then he sat on the finished manuscript for two years. Two kinds of stuck feel identical from the inside, and one tool does not touch both. If you know the next episode and cannot make it, twelve… more →

Adam Greenberg finishes episodes of a multilingual health podcast for rural Zambian communities in an afternoon. Years of his own travel footage sit unedited. He is an editor by trade, so the obstacle is not skill or a missing why. On one project he is the conduit; on the other he is the subject. Position… more →