We spend a lot of time trying to define what a podcast is.
Is it audio delivered through RSS? Is video a podcast? Does it need to exist outside of a platform? What happens when streaming, YouTube, and traditional podcasting all begin to overlap?
But there’s another question we don’t spend nearly enough time asking: What is a podcaster?
Instead of only explaining the technical boundaries of the medium, maybe we should spend more time helping podcasters understand the role they want to play within it. What kind of journey are they trying to embark on? What does success look like for them? What skills, responsibilities, and expectations come with the kind of podcast they want to create?
There may not be one permanent definition of a podcaster—and that might be the point. The role continues to evolve as the medium changes.
Maybe understanding what a podcast can become starts with better understanding who the podcaster wants to become.
Important links
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Where We've Come From: The History Of Podcasting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XylFtbI3BHw
Welcome back to another episode of Matt Has a Podcast about Podcasting, brought to you by thepodcastsetup.com, where you can sign up for my newsletter completely for free, where you can be educated, informed, entertained about podcasting every couple of weeks. Also brought to you by Completely Covered in Sweat because I just got back from a run and I was thinking about all these things, and I said, I just gotta get this podcast episode out. What if I told you we spend too much time trying to def what a podcast is, and not enough time trying to define who or what makes up a podcaster? Who is a podcaster? What is a podcaster? What defines maybe you, definitely me, in the space that we find ourselves in? Now, I was supposed to go to podcast movement a couple weeks ago. I actually did a whole episode about what I was excited for, and I had to cancel the trip last minute, slight uh family emergency, but all is well right now. Uh, so I didn't get to make it. So I've been going through the videos that were posted on the podcast movement YouTube channel, which I'll link up in the description uh below, or in your podcast notes wherever you're listening to this. I was going through a bunch and there was a lot of folks, uh, like Ariel and Listenblatt, and talking about what is a podcast, defining what that is, and the conversation is usually for a lot of us, it's you know, it's just it is what it is these days. Is it video? Is it audio? Is it download? Is it a play? Is it a stream? Is it a short? What is it? So I had all those thoughts in my mind, and then I listened to James Kridlin's uh The History of a Podcast. And you know, the different voice clips from people who have defined the word podcast, who have helped usher in the technology to celebrities who did it first, like Robin Williams. And it wasn't until like the last segment of his presentation where he highlights Aleister Cook, where he sort of tongue in cheek says, Well, the first podcast was made back in 1946, and he played a clip um from Alistair Cook's podcast with air quotes or radio show, audio show. It was a podcast, right? It had that flair of podcasting. And that's when it dawned on me that listening to all the different voices in his history of podcast podcasting, listening to the voices of folks in our audio and video industry trying to define what a podcast is, especially those who are trying to define what an open podcast is. There's a level of I'm gonna use the throwaway word, passion, commitment, dedication to the craft. And I think that's what has to be talked about more. Let me try to like smooth out those edges a little bit. I consult with a few clients uh locally who probably would never listen to this podcast, but know that I do podcasting and hired me to help them make a podcast. To them, the podcast is a nice-to-have thing. It's a nice-to-have thing. It's something that I've either sold them on or convinced them that good longer form personal quality content will help their either business, their political ambitions, uh, sell their goods or their services or help the nonprofit organization that they're a part of. But they're not in love with creating the podcast. And to them, there's it's just motions that they have to go through, which sometimes they don't go through because they don't have time, and they're not like super committed to it. And then I think of me personally and a lot of the fellow podcasters that I talk to, like we create this content because there is something inside of us that says, I've got this thing I need to get out. And not only do I just want to get this out, but I want to connect with somebody. I want to connect with one person, I want to connect with 10,000 people. There's this connection to I have my what I'll call art, I have my idea, I have my message, I have my movement, and I want to get this out into the world so that other people can experience it. And then we can have a two-way, I'll call it relationship, but we can have this two-way dialogue, right? I'm putting out content, people are emailing me about the content, people are leaving comments on say something like a YouTube or on social media, or they're joining my newsletter, or they're buying my product and my service to support the show. And I'm getting all of these feedback points as a podcaster. And then it's just this um, I almost said vicious cycle. I guess those of you who have been doing podcasting long enough know that it feels like a vicious cycle. Um, but there's this feedback loop and there's this continuation of I like what I'm doing, I'm gonna keep doing this, regardless if regardless of the numbers, regardless of the stats, regardless of the sales of my merch, and and actually regardless of the platform. So, like when I think back to what could have been going on in Alistair Cook's head when he was 1946 recording things, social media, media in general, uh wasn't even like in the 60s when you had television and more radio and advertising and magazines and print, and New York was, you know, on the rise, and LA was on the rise for the media industry. I don't think people were even thinking about how do I get my message in front of all of these people. It was definitely a thing of I got this idea and I want it to be published and I want it to be out there so that one to 10,000 people can listen to it. And I'm wondering, this is just an open question to the podcast industry at large is how do we define what the podcaster is? Should we define the podcaster? When somebody says, should I start a podcast and how do I start a podcast? Are we focusing more on their intent with the art and the creative or the storytelling or the comedy show or the drama that they want to put out? Me personally, you know, I have my I have this podcast uh and I have multiple podcasts in what I'll call the software space, but it's primarily about WordPress and, of course, now AI and the greater world of software development. I work for a software company, gravity.com, where I publish a podcast for them. And I also executive produce a podcast uh that's going out into season two right now, Crew Collective Podcast. You can find it at Crew Collective Podcast.com. The new trailer is up. And to me, that's another, I guess, branch in my podcasting tree. It's me doing podcasts personally because I love it, and because I've made you know a little side business of it. It's me doing podcasting professionally because I love it, and it's me helping produce another show that I don't host, but I get to have my creative input and I get to have my experiences and I get to enjoy building another piece of art that goes out into the world that I hope people, you know, really enjoy. I've talked about this before too, with my same producer where we create Crew Collective. We also created Our Beloved Medium, which is still out there, our BelovedMedium.com, which is about radio and storytelling. So it goes pretty deep for me. What is a podcaster? What defines me and what my ambitions are for a podcaster. And I think maybe we should talk about that more, right? Oftentimes the what I'll call blue-collar podcaster, which is a phrase that I say in the software world, a blue-collar developer or blue-collar agency owner, oftentimes we can just get overlooked because it's not big money, it's not a big celebrity, it's not from a big studio. So you just kind of get lost out there. And I think when we try to define podcasting and push a new would-be podcaster in the direction of, well, you have to define a podcast by where you publish it. Uh, YouTube only, Spotify only, RSS only, a mix of the two. And I think that just that doesn't help with what makes a podcast successful and for the podcaster. YouTube on the video side, like running a YouTube channel, is a fantastic use case for this or example, case study, I guess is a better phrase. So I do YouTube for my WP Minute WordPress podcast. It's largely like tutorials showing people cool stuff that comes out and all this other thing. I don't optimize that. I spend no time, no effort, no brain cells on title research, hook at the beginning of the video, artwork, thumbnails. I'm not outlining anything, I'm not scripting anything. I do it and I publish it, and I don't look at stats. And I do it because I like doing it. I like doing it, I like getting the message out there, and I like sharing my knowledge and my perspective with other people who might share in that same perspective and appreciate some of the knowledge I put out. But then there are people that I know that I've worked with, that I'm friends with, who look at YouTube as I gotta get more views. I have to optimize the hook. I go to Chat GPT and I say, give me 15 titles, 15 hooks, 15 variations. YouTube is now going to introduce potentially a way that you can swap out an A B test intros to your video. That's when I'm just like, what are we doing? We're you're we're just making content to feed the machine. And this is what I'm this is where I'm going with we have to not stop, but lessen the importance of what makes a podcast, not being audio, RSS, video, and focus more and emphasize more on what defines the podcaster and what their goals and ambitions are for running a show. Because if it is just, well, I gotta grow an audience, I gotta get more clicks, I gotta get more, you know, likes to my page, I gotta sell more goods, that could be one whole path, which still includes the debate of audio versus video and which platform and do you need RSS? But it's gonna maybe need a whole lot more. And it comes with its own set of priorities. If somebody says, I just need to get this message out, I want to feel compelled with connecting with others. Okay, so let's change your technical priorities, which is still publish everywhere, but don't have to worry about optimizing for thumbnails if that's not what you need to do. So slight reflection point, a little anecdotal, but how do we define what a podcaster is? Who you are, how you see yourself in this industry. So that's what I got for you today. Thepodcastsetup.com, thepodcastsetup.com. That's where you can find this podcast. You can leave me a voice memo. Go to thepodcastsetup.com, click on the podcast link. That'll bring you to my Buzzsprout page where you can click on the voice memo. I would love to hear from you if you've got something to say. Thanks for listening. If you know somebody who listens to podcasts, share this podcast with them. See you in the next episode.
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