How Not to Podcast
This crazy thing happened a few weeks ago on murmur: I was invited to partake in the podcasting portion of the site. Well, that’s not quite true. Every couple of weeks one of the staff members sends an email to the rest of us and asks who might be interested in joining the call for that episode (the podcasts are taped from a skype-delivered conversation). What made Episode 6 special was that they finally hit a topic that allowed me to overcome my innate fear of the medium. Everyone on the call agreed that I did a good job for my first time out and the feedback from the site’s regulars was also quite supportive.
High off the ego trip and full of “I did it and survived” endorphins, I signed up for the next one, this time about the new Fall TV season. This one went …less well for me, although thankfully the finished product doesn’t reflect too many of my sophomoric mistakes.
What happened?
Well, for starters, the podcast was recorded a few hours after I learned that Patrick Swayzee had died. How is this relevant? I’ve previously documented how Patrick Swayzee’s cancer causes violent emotional swings in me. I recognized a few months ago when he was hospitalized with pneumonia that his struggle was almost over, and the media silence since then all but confirmed it. Still, the announcement was a kind of shock, and brought all sorts of memories and sadness to the surface of me and I was still in a sort of fog. There was gin involved, i confess, but it was mostly out of my system by the time the recording session started. I wasn’t feeling it, or much of anything at the time, which lead to some general distractedness and dampening of my enthusiasm.
The second minor issue was my teammates. There’s a very, *very* real difference between chatting with someone you’ve been friend with for over a decade and a couple of other people, and chatting with 3 relative strangers. By no means do I mean to suggest that Ron, Conor, and Paul weren’t friendly and supportive (the tape would make me liar if I did), but having Jim “in the room” the first time allowed me to forget that the conversation was being recorded and just chat with some people about the things i liked. On the first podcast, everyone was considerate of my newbie status, almost to a patronizing extent. In their collective defense, I did make myself out to be rather helpless, so as not to set any expectation too high. On the second call, I was treated like a seasoned vet. “Just intro the day in a natural way” made a lot of sense before the recording started, but once we got to Wednesday, I drew a ridiculously awkward blank and nothing came out the way I expected.
In fact, nothing came out of my mouth the way i expected the entire podcast, and that was entirely my doing. Besides the Swayzee factor and being treated like I’d proven that I knew what I was doing, I was suffering from a twisted, self-inflicted concoction over-confidence and denial. Like any good sophomore, I thought I had it made. I overlooked the fact that in advance of the previous podcast, I’d spent hours pouring over relevant articles, crafting and recrafting things to say about the known topics. I’d put the devices i knew we were going to talk about in arms reach. I pulled up relevant web pages so i could quickly refer to them when we switched topics. For the second podcast, I did little more than make a list of the shows I was planning on watching and pulling it up alongside the skype chat window.
I should have done a bit more research on each show. I should have spent some time coming up with concrete reasons why each show was on the list other than “because it looks relatively interesting.” I’m so borderline Asperger that I rehearse what I’m going to say when I call to make an appointment at the hair salon. Sometimes i write it down. But did I do any of that for this podcast? Nah. Why should I? It’s not like i can’t just talk off the top my head like everyone else does. I did it last time, right? Oh, right. That’s not even what I did last time.
By the time the podcast got underway and I’d already had my lack-of-preparedness slap me in the face a couple of times, there was nothing I could really do about it, and it wasn’t until the next day, when my self-esteem recovered well enough to look back objectively, that I realized how much better the entire experience would have been if I’d just prepared a bit more. Fortunately, the podcast was well-edited and I didn’t do as crappy of a job on the outside as I feel like I did on the inside.
Next time I get invited and make the cut, though, I’m going to be better. I’ll do my research, or only sign up when I’m so knowledgeable about the topic that I don’t have to pre-write an essay.
Assuming there is a next time, natch. If not, I can just start my own. :)
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