The Admiral’s Log
Notes on podcasting from the Seaplane team.
How Do You Know If Your Organization's Story Is Strong Enough for a Series?
Importance and narrative strength are different things, and it's easy to confuse them. A mission can matter enormously and still not have enough story in it to sustain more than one good episode. The real question isn't how important the work is. It's whether there's real narrative material underneath it.
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.
How Much Narration Is Too Much in a Documentary Podcast?
Narration should do the work tape can't do on its own: move time forward, supply context a listener has no other way of getting, connect one scene to the next. The moment it starts explaining what the tape just showed you, or telling you how to feel about something you already heard clearly, it's doing too much.
How Long Should a Documentary-Style Episode Run?
Forgive our bluntness: that’s the wrong question!!!! (mostly.) A better one would be: how long does this specific story take to earn its ending? A documentary episode should run exactly as long as the material supports real depth, and not a minute longer just to hit a number that sounds standard.
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.
How to Turn a Research Report or White Paper Into a Documentary Podcast
Most research reports get written, get funded, get a launch event, and then get read by a few dozen people who already worked on them. The findings are real, the stakes are real, and almost nobody outside the field will ever open the PDF. That gap is exactly what a podcast is good at closing.