"Sheila for Malden" Case Study (Pt. 1) 

With our audience more clearly in view, we needed to address the content: what should those people come away knowing? This moved the conversation to the browser-based concept-mapping platform, Miro, where we asked ourselves these questions and populated our answers onto the board before sorting them into different groups and chains. We wanted listeners to be informed of Sheila's campaign and platform, naturally. We wanted to learn about the surprisingly strong undercurrent of volunteerism and citizen power coursing through the city. And we wanted them to come away with a more empowered sense of their own ability to get involved.  

Eventually, we landed on the following breakdown: one episode would be to catch us up to speed on Sheila's path to this moment; another would help us understand what it takes to go from "I'm doing this" to actually building something. And once that thing exists, the third installment would get into the strategy shift from sowing to growing it--whether it's a local campaign or any other grassroots initiative. Finally, just ahead of the election and with over nine months' worth of experience in the rear view, we'd have an opportunity to reflect on it all. After looking at the calendar, then our themes, then back at the calendar, there was a natural distribution of all of our topics in a 4-part arc mapped to each month beginning in July and concluding in October before the election. It was a slow-burn schedule that we could leave at a simmer for the summer while we unpacked the campaign in real time. 

Once the conversation had been mapped out and our content checklist ticked, we convened at my house for our first full recording session in mid-June ahead of an early July launch for our series trailer and E1. We opted to stay simple for our first episode and kept things to just our hosts for that first stage of production. Despite all being in the same location, we used the remote studio platform, Riverside (which creates a recording environment much like a standard Zoom call) for the sake of tech exposure and conducting future recordings remotely.  

I won't sugarcoat the process: it was a 5 hour slough of a recording that day that cost us all a bit of sanity. Our overwrought episode script kept us on the rails for a while, but it was only about 80% complete, tapering off towards the end in the spirit of better assessing our estimated total run time. On-the-spot rewrites often meant that only our latest takes contained our mutually-approved content, drastically reducing the take selection available to us in post versus how much we'd captured overall. 

For equipment, we used my bob-standard Blue Yeti digital mic and a fancier Shure SM57 mic borrowed from Sheila's father which I put in a boom pole/C-stand setup. Blanket drapes and other earnestly DIY dampening kept ambient noise and echo to a minimum. The conversational element of our host talk, however, was somewhat difficult to capture while also keeping the two recordings--happening maybe 15 feet apart--from bleeding into one another.

Yes! 

One might think ProTools or even Adobe Audition would be the program of choice for a project like this. I, however, come from the world of video. Premiere contains a few advantages for long-form content that I think can go overlooked in the podcast space. For one thing: captions. When you’re sifting through hours of audio content, unless you can read the waveforms by sight, Premiere’s auto-transcription and captioning features offer a marvelous way to scrub through your audio content intelligently by reading instead of listening around for the needle in the proverbial haystack. That workflow performs even harder if it’s a project with multiple editors or a substantial multimedia element. Premiere allows you to assemble all of your media in one place, even down to the compositions created in After Effects. 

With the takes selected and the fat trimmed, I plugged in some licensed stock music sourced from Premiumbeat for our show theme and backing tracks. For $65 (for a 3 month minimum), we can get 5 songs a month, which should carry us nicely though the show’s run with more options as the season goes on. We had originally planned to cut this cost and record original acoustic guitar music played by Sheila’s brother, but we weren’t able to before production ramped up. A few rounds of review and revision later, we had hit our 40 minute mark (~6000 words in the final transcript) and were ready for the final logistical stage: hosting. 

I had used Zencastr, Squadcast, and Buzzsprout in the past with clients, but Buzzsprout felt like it fit our needs most snugly for this show. Just $12/month would keep our show available on all the major podcast apps and directories–and for the first 90 days, episodes can live there for free. Be warned that the route onto Apple Podcasts was unpleasantly convoluted, but after a day and a half of hoop jumping, we found our way onto “wherever you get your podcasts.”

We finished our series trailer and first episode about 2.5 weeks ahead of our July 7 tentative launch date. With the extra lead time (and the episodes technically live), we decided to share the show with a small group of close friends, family, and future guests first to hopefully seed the show page with listens, ratings, and reviews before opening it to a larger and potentially less sympathetic audience. I’ll be quite eager to follow the growth of the show’s reach in this totally unpaid, organic fashion, but all in good time!

For now, there’s nothing like searching your show name on Spotify when everything’s done and dusted. Seeing it pop up in the results is quite the feeling. As first-timers, I hope Sheila and Jacqueline get to relish the achievement, too. The start to this project has been such a great exercise in editing, and it’s been wonderful to shake off the show-running rust with friends! I’m looking forward to the rest of the summer’s promise of new episodes, new guest interviews, and new misadventures in hyper-local podcasting!