I -had- a podcast and have meant to write up some notes, so here’s as good a place as any…
I mentioned in another thread that I went to law school at 40+ as a second career, graduating this spring (and now passed the bar, yay!). So that meant that I started in fall of 2020, which was pandemic season and lots of things were being done by zoom that otherwise would have been done in person. I had previously gotten an M.S., and one of my favorite things in my first run through grad school there was a group of us that met once a week at a wings place to hold an informal journal club. Each week, someone would ‘assign’ a paper they had read recently and had found interesting, and because we worked for different professors it was a good way to broaden exposure to topic and techniques that were in field but outside our narrow thesis projects. It also was an excuse to socialize, etc.
Law school is -much- different than fisheries biology grad school. But going in, I was aware of law reviews, and thought they were similar in concept to the peer-reviewed papers we had been reading at the wings place. I also knew I wanted a similar experience, so made a proposal in the class-year group chat, and collected a group of people interested in reading and discussing law review articles. Mostly other older students, but we had a few participants who went to law school immediately after college. Since it was pandemic times, we’d have to meet by zoom, and it was trivial to record the discussions. And the next obvious step was to produce a pod …
Ultimately we published 25 episodes over our 1L year and first part of 2L (and I have a ‘reunion’ episode I need to finish producing), getting about 1.2k downloads while actively releasing. It can be found here: Law Review Squared | a podcast by Lex Clava
Practice notes:
Time spent
I spent about 1.5hr in prep for each episode before recording (but given the subject matter, part of that is needing to read a law review article quickly but with enough attention to detail to be able to discuss it.) Recording took around an hour. As ‘producer’ I did a first edit which took about an hour, and then my sound guy said he spent about 30 minutes once I sent him the rough edit to finish. So each episode took me 3.5 hrs, there was .5 hrs of technical labor, and I assume 2 hrs of participant labor for the ppl not involved in the back end process. That’s a lot of time by several people going into a 45 minute show.
Some episodes we invited the author of the article to come talk to us, instead of just talking amongst ourselves. That required additional pre-production coordination. Also, picking an article for the weeks where I was the moderator, required figuring out a topic and finding a relevant law review article, which varied from a few minutes to hours. (This is one of the more fun episodes, where we had gotten the author, who is a practicing attorney to come talk to us: https://www.podbean.com/ew/pb-aqvqb-ff6edb)
Tool chain
I think our audio results were fine (especially on the later episodes), even though we recorded using zoom. I used Audacity to remove misspeaks and dead air before sending the file for sound edit. The important thing that happened in the last edit is Mo would adjust levels so that we didn’t have some people being quieter than others. I’m not sure what software he was using. We moved files around by dropbox, which worked without issue.
Dead air
Removing dead air turned out to be a challenge… one of our early participants had a very slow and deliberate way of speaking. So in some of the early episodes, I cut time out of between-word pauses. In retrospect, this actually changed the cadence of her speech, which was disrespectful (although she never complained). However, between-segment/between-answer pauses did need to be cut… In a natural conversation, there are pauses while people think of how to respond, what to say next, etc. In listening to podcasts myself, I can tell when these dead-spaces are not removed, and I feel like the podcast is wasting my time. Removing dead air and misspeaks usually took a 1hr recording down to 45 minutes or so.
Hosting
We hosted with podbean, and I registered a domain. I don’t think registering a domain is strictly necessary, and I don’t think it affected downloads- but for the context of our show, having a domain made it easier to say in an interview, “I participate in a podcast, it can be found at lawreviewsquared dot com” rather than giving some crazy url.
I was satisfied with podbean. I paid for hosting to prevent ads. Some listeners still get ads which are being injected by their podcast listening software. These people will not believe that you aren’t putting the ads in/getting paid for the ads. Such people are annoying.
Eventually I’ll stop paying for hosting and the domain, but it doesn’t cost much.
Distribution
The above is what podbean is showing as far as listener clients (some data is lost from when we had started). I submitted the RSS feed pretty widely, and we were getting listeners from all the major podcast clients. Some people just submit their RSS to itunes, which gets you in front of most people, not so much because everyone uses Apple Podcasts but because their directory has been widely availble. I’m not up on what current distribution looks like. The green bar on the right is ‘other’.
Long tail
Our pod seems to have a long tail, we got 107 downloads this year, despite not releasing an episode since 2021:
Theme music
We didn’t have theme music, although it was occasionally suggested. I don’t think this hurt or helped us. We didn’t have music because I absolutely detest the music used by one of the other legal scholarship pods. Also, in thinking about the pods I do listen to, the only one where I actually like the music is Ken White’s 1st amendment podcast. This is just my speculation, but I think that theme music/intro music arrived into the podcast space from radio shows. But in a radio show, the radio station needs to let the listener know what they’re about to listen to. In a podcast, the listener has selected what they’re listening to, so they already know. Especially if the moderator/host/presenter doesn’t immediately start talking over the intro, all the music is doing is wasting the listener’s time. (Part of this line of thought is influenced by how I listen to podcasts-- usually during what was a 20-25 minute commute. If you’re playing a minute of music at me during that, often crappy music at that, you’re wasting my time, and time is what I’ve had least of in recent years).
Last thought
There is a lot of advice available on producing podcasts, but much of it is aimed at people trying to monetize their podcasts. There are other reasons to want to produce a podcast, and reaching a small but invested audience can be a success as well. (The PA Bar Association’s Family Law podcast is a good example in my opinion: Law in the Family on Apple Podcasts It’s also ok to just get something out there and improve over time-- a lot of the bigger long running podcasts go through significant improvements in quality (both in audio and content terms) over time as well.
