Think about the word podcast. What associations come to mind? What sort of words or sounds are playing in your head?
It might be a familiar voice, talking week after week to a new guest. Or it might be two voices, the same two each week, going back and forth about the news or sports or whatever else. Or it could be one person talking you through current events or history, or their own lives. Or…well, there are a ton of different formats for a podcast, as with any media or art form.
‘Podcast’ by definition is just a means for sounds to get to people’s devices. Broadcasting goes out via an antenna, and podcasting goes out via our phones, and iPods before then, hence the name. It’s most common for podcasts to be distributed via RSS feeds that plug into podcast apps like Apple Podcasts, Spotify, PocketCasts, Google Play, Stitcher, or others.
Which is to say that what a podcast can be varies widely. In the mid ’00s, a music website I wrote for released a monthly podcast which was essentially a mixtape that people could download as an mp3. Spotify playlists and similar have replaced that format, but plenty of other podcast formats have blossomed.
If you want to start a podcast, you need to know what the common formats for a podcast are. The medium is still new and open to experimentation, but it’s worth knowing what the existing standards are so you can set out on the path. Here are seven of the most common podcast formats, including examples of successful podcasts in each area and personal examples I was involved with during my time at Seeking Alpha:
The Conversational Podcast
I’d put my money on this being the most familiar podcast to most listeners. In it, two or more hosts talk each episode about a given theme or topic. Their charisma and chemistry is what catches the listeners’ attention. Having two people going back and forth allows room for hosts to complement (and compliment) one another, and to shed more light on their views and on who they are than a solo podcast would. That, along with the intimacy that comes from podcasting, allows the listeners to feel like they’re hanging out with friends.
One of the first podcasts I listened to regularly was Men in Blazers, which focuses on soccer around the world though especially in England. But the soccer is sort of a sideshow. The two hosts – Roger Bennett and Michael Davies – will often take 10-15 minutes just to get to their recap of the week that was in the English Premier League, and they will digress over and over again. Because of their chemistry and how they work listener input into their shows, though, it totally works and their profile has skyrocketed over the past 6 or so years.
Another example of this is the podcast Call Your Girlfriend, a podcast “for long distance besties everywhere.” The show is explicitly built around the idea of two friends – Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman – talking, which then allows other people into both their friendship and into the broader topic of friendship. As Friedman said in a recent article, when they launched the podcast, “we would just call each other and talk.”
In my time at Seeking Alpha, we launched two podcasts that I’d place in the conversational category – Behind the Idea and The Razor’s Edge, the latter of which is now a Shortman Studios podcast. While the content itself is very important, the dynamic between the hosts was a key component of listeners’ feedback, and by exploring investing ideas as a duo, we were able to get further into them than we would have otherwise.
Interview Podcasts
Following on conversational podcasts in popularity are interview podcasts. This may be the format you are thinking of for your own podcast. It lends itself to the networking benefits we talked about here, and it’s a great way to explore a topic by bringing on other practitioners or experts as guests. A host can focus on a given theme over a series of episodes, while still keeping it fresh with the new guests.
For example, Guy Raz hosts the popular How I Built This series, where he interviews entrepreneurs, business people, and other builders about their back story. Stay in the NPR universe and we can of course cite Terry Gross’s Fresh Air, which while being a radio show provides a great template for interview podcasts (and has influenced many of them).
It’s worth pointing out here that these categories are not mutually exclusive, and indeed interview podcasts work when they drift towards the conversational, when they are back and forths rather than just one person talking. To cite another obvious example, the Joe Rogan Experience uses interviews as a starting point, but they are very conversational interviews.
At Seeking Alpha we had three interview oriented podcasts – The Cannabis Investing Podcast, Let’s Talk ETFs, and Marketplace Roundtable Podcast – as well as one that straddles the line between interview and conversational, Alpha Trader. Interviewing guests, especially remotely, brings some variables into the process for good – they can increase your audience, bring new insights, and introduce you to new people – and for bad – less control over recording quality, need to spend more time booking them. But they are all manageable.
News Podcasts
News podcasts are fairly straightforward to understand, and are similar to their radio antecedents. The point of the podcast – often daily though they can also be weekly – is to deliver information rather than share a discussion. It’s no surprise that the most popular news podcasts come from major publications – the New York Times’ The Daily is the most obvious example. Bloomberg has converted a ton of its radio shows into podcasts, and the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Vox, and other major outlets have gotten into the daily podcast game.
These are also good examples to point out that again, the news podcasts can have range. The Daily features interviews with other NYT reporters as well as some reporting on specific episodes. Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway have a conversational podcast about the news, Pivot, that only comes out twice a week but also falls into this category. At Seeking Alpha, we had Wall Street Breakfast, a 7-days a week podcast, with the company recently turning the Saturday edition into a conversational one – that podcast has over 1M downloads a month, as the daily habit is really easy to build.
The news podcast would seem least relevant to individuals looking to start their own podcast, but it’s worth keeping in mind for a couple quick reasons: using news topics as a peg to explore your passions is a way to join wider conversations; and if you really care about a field, reporting or sharing the news on a regular basis is a way to establish yourself as a source of information, even if you’re just aggregating to start. This of course works better the less crowded your field is.
Essay Podcasts (or, less controlled, Rants)
Conversational and interview podcasts by definition are a two or more person affair. News podcasts can either be one person reading the news or something more dynamic.
Essay podcasts are more explicitly focused on one person’s perspective. They may work in guests, or even quasi-regular co-hosts. But the podcast is defined by the host’s starting point and usually their voice.
To draw on a last Seeking Alpha example, we had a podcast called SA for FAs, that focused on the needs of financial advisors. It is hosted by my former colleague Gil Weinreich, and the standard episodes are 5-7 minute pieces that he writes and records, giving his take on key themes in the financial advisor space. It is very polished and clean, and the focused approach makes sure to not waste the listener’s time.
In researching this category a little bit, I came across Bill Burr’s podcast, which many people like for its rambling nature. I can believe that he pulls it off well, but I also point it out for a note of caution. The Essay podcast can veer into a rant, and while this podcast format may be the easiest to do, it’s among the harder to do well. If you want to explore podcasting and starting with your own essays is your approach, you’ll want to think about how to focus that so that it hooks listeners, or how to open up the approach to incorporate other people.
Reporting or Documentary Podcasts
The last three categories have some overlap to them as well. I’d argue they display the best of podcasting’s strengths, but are also the hardest to pull off.
Start off with a deeply reported podcast, or as Apple categorizes them, documentary podcasts. These are podcasts that feature a host or two but also a multitude of voices to give primary insight on a given story.
Some of my favorite podcasts from the last year or so have been in this genre. It can be a shorter series like the 3-parter from The Stakes on Miami’s gentrification, or a longer one like Pineapple Street Studios/Crooked Media/Spotify’s Wind of Change. Slow Burn is of course great. I’m currently listening to Boomtown by Texas Monthly and Imperative Entertainment and really enjoying it.
To be frank, you’re probably not interested in making this sort of podcast if you’re reading this blog post. This is not where beginners would go, I mean. But, there’s a lot to learn from the story-telling, the pacing, and the ways that these shows keep the listener hooked and listening for more.
Story Telling Podcasts
I mentioned story telling above, and good story telling is part of just about any podcast format, one way or another. But some podcasts are explicitly devoted to telling a story. They could be the popular true crime podcast formats, or oral histories like the 30 for 30 series, or fiction podcasts, with Welcome to Night Vale being the most popular.
Again, I would expect this to be less of interest to readers of this blog. But the audio format gives stories an added dimension, and podcasts as a field are more open to newcomers than traditional publishing industries, at least as far as I can tell. And perhaps of more relevance, these story telling podcasts can offer a lot of insight on how to convey your story, even if it is more focused on your business, hobby, or passion.
Deep Dive Podcasts
I broke out a last category to cover podcasts that are deeply researched, but that are still generally from one or two hosts. They can be conversational in approach or essayistic. They may or may not tell a story, and the reporting that happens is more off mic.
On the lighter end of this is something like the Ringer’s Rewatchables podcasts, which are really conversational podcasts, but do a deep dive into a given movie or show week after week. You Must Remember This is a weightier version of this, with Karina Longworth diving into lost stories of Hollywood. The show features guests, but it’s mostly her telling the stories and sharing her research. You’re Wrong About features two hosts – Sarah Marshall and Mike Hobbes – diving into specific historical events. Hardcore History sees Dan Carlin going at length – this could slot into the essay/rant podcast format as well – about history.
What I like about this format is that the podcasts are tailored to people who share the host’s/hosts’ passion, or at least who are curious about it. The oral format is perfect for getting into this passion. And weirdly enough, this is more ‘accessible’ if you’re looking into diving into a topic, since you can decide how far you want to go in your research and in what you want to share.
***
These categories are not all inclusive by any means. And as I mentioned above, they’re not rigid or mutually exclusive – many great podcasts bounce between two, three, or even more categories listed above. In presenting them to you, I wanted to share a few formats that will help you think through what you might want to do with your podcast.
At Shortman Studios, we’ve had experience working with the first four formats, and are looking into the other formats as well. Of our current podcasts, The Razor’s Edge is a conversational podcast that features some interviews, while A Positive Jam will be a conversational deep dive podcast.
If you’re interested in working with us on your own podcast in any of these formats, you can get in touch here. And if you think there are categories I’ve missed, feel free to comment below or contact us above, I’m sure there’s more that could be touched upon. I hope, for those of you newer to this world, this post will help you narrow down your focus and give you a better understanding of what podcasts sound like, so you can figure out how you want to deliver your podcast.