Formats: The shape of your podcast

You should be thinking of inventing something completely new; after all, we're talking about your show, not Jay Leno's, not Anthony Robbins' infomercials, not Howard Stern's morning schtick. There are, however, familiar formats that you can use to give your audience a clear indication of what you intend to deliver each time they press the Play button.

Formats, like genres in literature, convey lots of information. A short story promises to provide some conflict or quandary and its resolution in a given number of pages, while a novel is more contemplative, or at least longer, and usually involves more characters. A podcast is not a radio program or a newspaper read aloud. It can draw from any of the following formats:

- News: The newsreader is one of the most familiar sounds and sights in our lives. They take news stories reduced for the time available and read them. If you can get a script from a local news radio or television station, you'll find they aren't written like news stories you read in the newspaper. The scripts are telegraphic. Short sentences summarize rather than explain events. Stories have "hooks," a lead sentence that catches the attention, such as "Fear strikes a local neighborhood!" Then a brief explanation of what happened follows, and if a reporter is in the field, a "throw" introduces him and segues to the reporter's air-time. The problem here is that this format has become so truncated on many networks that you never get anything but the lead; the summary is good enough to startle the audience and nothing more. You can exploit this format, providing much more than the audience expects with additional detail and information. It's also very easy to make the mistake of editorializing, or adding your own opinion, which changes your news into something else. Keep your audience's trust. If you promise them news, give them news.

- Opinion (Open Crossfire!): After facts, opinion took over television and radio news. Most news programs today include a heavy dose of opinion. In the worst form, it's intended to activate responses in different parts of the audience by appealing to and confirming their assumptions and prejudices, all the while offering that pandering as "opinion." Nevertheless, opinion can be offered respectfully and constructively by broadcasters and podcasters who build arguments based on solid information and make a rational case for the position they advocate. Hearing lots of people arguing intelligently and with respect for other opinions would be great, but because people tend to mimic success, you will certainly see plenty of ideological ranting that looks like "opinion" programs on CNN or Fox Network News. We hope you do the right thing.

- Magazine: A magazine show combines news, opinion, and "feature" reports that are like the longer stories you hear on National Public Radio or read in a national magazine. These types of shows depend on your ability to act as an editor, picking and choosing the parts that make a great listening or watching experience. Magazine shows are typically longer, presenting more opportunities for ad or sponsor messages. They are also much more expensive to produce, because having many voices requires lots of coordination. That said, this is a very attractive format for the kind of community-building show that organizes and blends the voices of members.

- Essay/Short story: Stories have full arcs of action, with beginnings and ends. So, too, do essays. Either format will be familiar to you, though both require some experience and training in composing the text you'll read. Reading the words of others is more straightforward, but be sure to clear the rights to the text or you may hear from lawyers. Environmental sound can play an important role in these programs, filling in audio gaps that would have to be described in text. These programs can be as short as a minute or as long as an hour, delivering a complete thought or narrative and nothing more. They can also be excellent parts of a magazine show.

- Audioblog: Audioblogging developed as an interim step between webcasting and podcasting. It still retains an essential element that you won't find in most professionally produced programs: an absolutely riveting immediacy. Sound can be collected by telephone or grabbed from other sources and mixed to make a brief, compelling point. The different between the audioblog and the essay is similar to what distinguishes the blog from a news story; it takes a compelling slice and puts it out there for the audience to judge itself. Again, this format is a good component of the magazine format.

- Roundtable: Conversations can be interesting. Realistically, not all conversations are compelling. Your job as the producer is to pick the participants and moderate the discussion to get the best from all involved. That doesn't mean you're trying to let everyone win the argument, but that you make sure the discussion is complete and everybody gets their say. Now, in some situations, not giving someone a fair say will work with your audience, who may enjoy, say, hearing a neo-Nazi shut down. Setup for these recordings can be complicated, because you'll need multiple mics and a multi-channel mixer to do the conversation in person or a way of taking several calls simultaneously and mixing them.

- Event Coverage: Plenty of live events in the world go completely uncovered. From industry events to professional training, the world is full of free information being talked through every day. Getting permission to record is your first challenge, because many conference producers are greedy enough to think that they should be paid for your coverage. In reality, being in the audience at these events is much more about the networking opportunity, and recordings can be powerful recruiting tools for future versions of the physical meeting. Besides professional events, lots of news and debate is left unreported, lots that is easily identified in advance so that you can do a recording setup and capture the sound or video. Editing these events can be difficult if you don't have control of the audio setup, because sound can be garbled or fail completely. Getting the sound is only the first step, because you can use your coverage to win listeners. Amazingly, many people will listen to an event just because they were there.

- Serialized Programs (Back to the cliffhanger): We haven't seen much drama in podcast programming, but the format is ripe for this medium. People subscribe, so you need to catch their attention only with a single episode to get them to subscribe. If you can write a script and capture performances that convince listeners that Indy and Marion are about to take the wheels off their airplane as the episode concludes, they are likely to subscribe to hear the rest of the story. Episodic drama is actually a proven format for young media; it worked for radio, film, and television, so there's every reason to suspect it will work for podcasting.

- Readings and Theatrical Performance: You may have a favorite poet or author. Have you ever considered calling him to see if he has some work he'd like to record? How about local theater groups whose work you appreciate? Besides dealing with egos, you have to be attentive to the challenge of capturing sound performed by someone who doesn't understand how a microphone works, but with a little patience you can get something really special. The program can be serialized and be part of a magazine program, as well. For theatrical work, be ready with multi-microphone recording and the ability to mix creatively. Consider supplementing spoken performances with environmental sound. Get creative.

- SoundSeeing Guides: Museums, historical sites, and many other significant locations are "unrecorded" events. The SoundSeeing guide is a spoken tour of a place or event that requires explanation. An excellent professional services business for a budding podcaster could be providing walk-through tours of a trade show; all you need to know is the location of booths and descriptions of the products the companies are spotlighting. You can charge the conference producer, but it would be much better to charge the companies themselves, who are already paying for their appearance at the event. Museums have permanent and temporary collections that can be the subject of an audio tour. In the future, we may experience guidance as a constant service; this is a significant opportunity for a producer.

- DJ Reborn: This book's authors have been involved in music, as a producer and as a DJ.It's fun, and you can add your creativity with simple things like the juxtaposition of songs to emphasize a unique beat or the irony of one song following another. Once, during college, Mitch fell down on the ground from the shock of mixing the end of Pink Floyd's Comfortably Numb with Alice Cooper's Clones. It required slowing one down and speeding the other up slightly to generate a resonant tone that melded the songs. He never forgot it. Picking the music people hear is gratifying and a kind of art.

- Short Form or Bites: Many of today's existing formats were born out of broadcast time slots. Don't limit your thinking to that clock-based topand bottom-of-the-hour schedule that makes all news shows or sitcoms 20 or 22 minutes long. Podcasting enables short form content that doesn't necessarily fit the previous categories. Think differently: Joke a Day, Daily Haiku, Trivia Question of the Day, Horoscope, or Top 10 lists. In addition to listeners subscribing to the short form feed, other podcasters can use them in their programs.

- Video: Podcasting isn't just about audio. Moving pictures, or "talkies," took hold of the podcast world within months of its invention. Every format we have described in this section can be translated to video, though you need to address another dimension of perception (reading poetry in video can be artful if you focus on the poet's face or by juxtaposing images with the words, for example).