I love to listen to podcasts and audio books when I drive. When I had a very long commute into Vancouver I went through a lot of them, when I moved to Calgary I had a very short commute so it was mostly when I was driving to other cities for work. Now that I have a 20 minute commute it’s the perfect length to listen and I’ve been catching up on podcasts that I was well behind in.
I’m, for the first time, almost caught up on my podcast que, so I’ll probably be adding some more podcasts to my list next month. This week I listened to:
Eh Sayers, the Statistics Canada podcast, which is a host with heavily edited interviews (to fit in the time slot) with several experts on the topic in question that week, it occasionally re-uses old interviews Stats Can has access to as part of the narrative. This week was about measuring poverty and ways to decrease it.
The British History Podcast, a non-fiction storytelling podcast that’s been walking through the history of brittan starting in the neolithic, he just got to the reign of William I.
The Christian Humanist Podcast, is a conversational podcast about literature and history and humanistic subjects. This week was about Updike’s poem Americana.
Asians Represent is the podcast I’m listening to this week. It’s a panel podcast that talks about table top RPGs and Asian representation within the field/industry.
I now realize that that’s a really broad spectrum of podcasts. Something I like about all of them is that they have some similar structure to them. They all use a musical cue to start that helps prep you for what podcast is about to start and when it’s over. There’s also a very brief into, no more than a paragraph long, to prep you for what the content is about.
I don’t like how many sections Eh Sayers had this week in their interview, it jumped too much between the interviews and they weren’t tied together tight enough. I think that’s what I like most about the BHP and CHP is that the topic is held to very tightly. AR is sort of in the middle, they have their topic but they bring in some outside topics as well, but it feels more cohesive because it’s not interviews with separate people at separate times like ES is.
Ok, I did not know about Eh Sayers and now I’m going to listen.
I really appreciated your observation about how segments hang together and the idea of a coherent episode narrative. This is something I struggle with on You Got This when my intro essay and interviewee diverge, but I’m usually too time-crunched to attend to it. I will pay more attention now!