Organised by The Guardian
A comprehensive guide to creating your podcast with The Guardian’s award-winning audio team,
What makes you return to a podcast again and again? The warmth of the hosts, like visiting an old friend? The gripping content? The captivating sound effects? In this day and age, anyone can create a podcast – but the formula to producing and distributing one that has people talking is harder to crack. In this highly interactive and practical weekend boot camp, led by experts from The Guardian’s award-winning audio team, you will gain access to the alchemy behind successful podcast production, from concept to creation and beyond.
Over two afternoons, you will have unrivalled access to seminars, practical workshops and Q&As, which will unlock not only how you can hone your creative ideas, but how you can design a competitively sleek audio experience for your future listeners, and how you can monetise your creative output. You will also have the opportunity to produce an elevator pitch between sessions, which our expert panel will review to give immediate group feedback to the class.
This weekend boot camp is an essential for anyone who loves podcasts and wants to take their production skills to the next level. A rare opportunity to hear from the Guardian’s own audio team about their own processes and how their learnings can be applied to projects of all scales. You will complete the masterclass with a heightened understanding of the industry and its requirements for success, and with a hunger to get creative.
Course Content
- Introduction to podcasting: Courtney Yusuf will open our weekend boot camp with invaluable information on what makes a good podcast great, including best practices, a topical look at the industry, issues surround it, and a Q&A.
- Coming up with ideas: Esther Opoku Gyeni, audio producer for the Guardian’s Long Reads and Innermost, and Danielle Stephens, Guardian acting lead audio producer for Politics Weekly and Football Weekly, leads this session which will explore how to develop your ideas for your podcast and what makes a story right – or wrong – for audio. Interactive exercises will enable you to dig deeper into your well of creativity.
- Monetising your podcast: Robert Abel, The Guardian’s Head of Commercial Audio Strategy, will talk about how to maximise your chances of making a profit from your podcast, from how you shape your idea in the first place, through budgeting, to marketing and building an audience, and different approaches to monetisation.
- Hannah Moore, audio producer of Today in Focus, will be in conversation with Chris Michael, host of the Reverberate podcast, to share tips and tricks for presenting and producing your podcast, as well as the pitfalls to avoid and best in class examples. You will also have the opportunity to put your own questions to them.
- Basics of Sound Recording for Producers: Danielle Stephens will cover the essentials for recording audio as well as tips and tricks for getting started with editing for producers - plus Q&A
- Panel Q&A: Our panel of speakers will answer your pressing questions about anything further you want to know about audio creation and production.