The Mechanics

Warning! This is a boring technical document outlining how we go about creating the podcast every week – it almost reads like a “specification”. It’s here for anyone interested in contributing who’d like more information on how it actually works.

The Pod Delusion Guide

EDITORIAL SCHEDULE

At the start of the episode cycle (Saturday/Sunday), the editor will send out an e-mail asking for people to pitch stories they’d like to cover for the following Friday’s episode. The editor may also make suggestions for things that would be good topics to cover. These can be ignored. Contributors can then e-mail back with a brief synopsis of what they’d like to cover. This is to avoid duplication.

As the week goes on, contributors reports will be gathered up (the sooner they can be sent in, the better). The podcast will then be produced on Thursday evening.

It will be uploaded upon completion (usually around midnight), so that people who sync in the morning before work will have the podcast to listen to. A formal release announcement will be made on Twitter at around 10am Friday. Contributors then will promote the podcast as much as they can. Retweet it, blog it, link it, etc.

Episodes will be around half an hour in length – if more reports are received than there is “airtime”, they may be held back for other weeks, to make sure the podcast is of consistent length, rather than 15 minutes one week, an hour the next, etc.

The ordering of the reports is largely arbitary, though like most news programmes I’ll try to go from the most serious story to the most fun. Though I’ll often try to balance them in other, spurious ways.

Reports that are hyper-topical will inevitably stand a greater chance of being included on any given week. For example, Will’s report on the LibDem conference was guarenteed to be in episode 2 as it fell on the same week as the conference and had a “live from the scene” feel. This should not discourage contributors from doing reflective/analytical/less-timely stories – some topics by their nature do not create “news” in the same way but are equally important and interesting.

REPORTS

Reports should be somewhere between 3 and 7 minutes in length – this can be flexible though, if the report deserve to be longer – like Crispian’s amazing undercover homeopathy report. I don’t really want to have a massively unbalanced show with one 20 minute report and 5 one minute reports, though. The key thing is for it to be “interesting” – not to make reports go on too long to be boring, or too short as to be devoid of insight or whatever.

There are no stylistic guidelines for the actual content of the reports – tell your story how you like, though with two exceptions:
1) Refrain from name-checking yourself at the start of reports – I’ll do this in your introduction.
2) At the end of your report, end it with the line “This is [your name], reporting for The Pod Delusion”.

Reports shouldn’t be presented as part of a “series” of reports. ie: Don’t imply your report is the first in a series – everything should stand up on its own. This is to make each show more flexible in it’s line-up, and so it doesn’t seem silly if the contributor gives up after one report.

Similarly, we should refrain from “branding” individual segments in such a way that marks them out as being unique. Eg, branding all of my reports under the banner of “Talking Politics with James O’Malley” or whatever would be inappropriate. This is for two main reasons: It may make other contributors feel as though they are not allowed to tackle any topics in a segment like this as someone has “claimed” this topic for them-self, and secondly it adds a rigidity to the format – I like eclectic nature of the reports. Also, we’d look pretty silly if we started a “branded” segment only to never do it again.

No slandering people or saying anything that could get into legal trouble please. Copyright infringement is also something to worry about.

In terms of the sort of audience to pitch your reports at, it’s quite difficult to define. I don’t want it to be too dumb or too smart – not least because I have an arts degree. In terms of “assumed knowledge” of the listener, I’d say something like the listener…

…knows who Nick Clegg is but not Steve Webb
…knows who John McCain is but not Sonia Sotomayor
…knows who Richard Dawkins is but not Simon Singh

With regard to, say, science, I’ve only got science GCSEs (er, and an E in AS level physics), but I’m moderately intelligent.

You should be able to figure it out by listening to older episodes. Just don’t jump in assuming that everyone knows who Dan Hannan is or what the Drake equation is. If you see what I mean.

TONE

The real uniting factor around the podcast is not topic, but the rather pretentious sounding set of values. I’d roughly describe these as being Guardianista in nature – liberal, lefty, sceptical, rationalist, atheistic, that sort of thing. Obviously this doesn’t mean by any stretch of the imagination we’re going to be blind supporters of the Labour party, we’re still going to be critical and satirical where need be. This really means that we’re not going to have stories about how racism is excellent or about how gays are an abomination. Unless it’s about the sort of twats who say that sort of thing.

Feel free to be funny, satirical, serious, light hearted, and make your point in a simple “essay”, a sketch, by song, whatever.