Thread by @GeeDee215

Someone shared a Planet Money ep that starts with an anecdote: a veteran locksmith fixes a thing in two mins that would have taken an apprentice locksmith — or someone who wasn’t a locksmith — hours to do. But the customer is like, “I ain’t paying you $200 for this little job.”

https://twitter.com/nheilman/status/1454086241218088963

When i first got to NPR, i had to shadow the folx on All Things Considered. I watched w/ growing panic as Theo Balcomb calmly made cuts to a taped piece at 4:29 pm that was going out onto national radio at 4:35.

there’s a lot of work involved for this stuff to sound effortless

when we were reimagining CS a few years ago, we talked about the difference between low-touch production and high-touch production podcasts

a low-touch podcast is something like Joe Rogan’s show. Just people…talking. Not a lot of bells and whistles.

They do kinda rely a lot on their hosts and panelists being engaging and interesting to listen to, and hopefully some back-end production to cut all the sections of the convo that drag.

Even “low-touch” isn’t that simple!

PCHH, for example: its hosts have a planning document with scaffolding of the convo. The panelists all have notes. They do pickups — retaking comments with factual errors, etc — after the initial convo. They cut the draggy, irrelevant asides.

There’s all kinds of audio prep to make sure the sound leveling isn’t all over the place. Somebody has to grab the clips of the movie or TV show being referenced, etc.

And this on a show with people who have been IRL friends forever. You can’t just sit down and chop it up.

High-touch is stuff like Invisibilia and Radio Lab or Louder Than a Riot. Deeply reported, a lot of sound design and production. All the bells and whistles.

Every expert’s voice you hear few times in a 45-minute episode came from an hour-long interview that had its own prep.

They gotta figure out if the interview worked — was the subject clear and easy to follow? Did we ask the right questions?

They gotta write/edit a script for the hosts. They gotta pull news clips. And when everything is recorded they gotta layup all the audio components.

And all of that has to be fact-checked.

There are a million important things I’m leaving out but there’s a reason these shows have *seasons* and are not coming out daily or weekly like a sports-talk podcast or whatever.

Every episode is literally months of work.

(I truly don’t understand how show’s like Today Explained manage to be as sonically rich as they are on a daily schedule.)

We decided to have a mix on CS: an interview with an author like @iSmashFizzle? Low touch.

But Shereen produced an episode called “A Strange And Bitter Crop.” Very high touch — and so well-executed you might not notice the story is told with no host.

npr.org/2019/10/21/772…

Shereen was a powerhouse. I told my boy she was like Peak LeBron: one game you might need him to be a facilitator, the next, you might need him to be in the post, the next you need him to just clamp somebody up.

She reported and field-produced and wrote and hosted.

At some point, she had the exact job Theo Balcomb did as a producer on All Things Considered. It took her *years* to get to that point.

This isn’t abt credentials: Shereen talked all the time about how long it took her to get her degree and all the weird digressions in her career. (I don’t even *have* a college degree.)

But it is about chops. A lot of people can do this bc they have them. I hope they applied.