The Admiral’s Log

Notes on podcasting from the Seaplane team.

Jessamine Molli Jessamine Molli

How Much Editing Does a Raw Interview Need Before It Becomes a Real Story?

There's no universal ratio here, whatever rule of thumb you've heard about hours of editing per minute of finished audio. The real answer depends on what job the piece is actually doing. A tightly structured documentary segment often needs heavy shaping to hold together. A conversational, hangout-style interview show usually wants a much lighter touch, because part of what people are there for is the unfiltered, unpolished feeling of two people actually talking. The amount of editing should follow the format's job, not a fixed formula applied the same way to everything.

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Jessamine Molli Jessamine Molli

How Many Interviews Does One Episode Actually Need?

Not a number. A question: does this next voice tell the listener something the episode doesn't already know? If the answer is no, adding it doesn't make the episode more thorough. It just makes it longer.

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Jessamine Molli Jessamine Molli

Should This Be a Documentary or an Interview Podcast?

A podcast is one of the only media formats that doesn't actually require a fixed length or shape. There's no twenty-two-minute rule, no broadcast hour to fill. That freedom is the whole advantage of the medium, and it's exactly why this particular choice matters more than people assume. Get it wrong, and you either force rigid structure onto material that wanted room to breathe, or let material ramble that actually needed a real shape.

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