Less Is More: The Benefits of A Brief Podcast

Two decades ago and millions of podcasts later, and it's likely what you want to talk about is already talked about. But if you're not afraid of doing things differently, you can still make a splash with your new show.

Hello, and welcome to another Podcast Pontifications with me, Evo Terra.

I'm a fan of doing not normal things with podcasting. I hadn't been podcasting for even a year before I decided to blend audiobooks and podcasting together. And that worked pretty well for me and the myriad authors I helped. But the podcasting landscape has shifted a lot since then. And while there's still obviously a place in podcasting to go long on a topic, there's an ever increasing need to go shorter.

On recent episodes, I've talked about depth as a way to counter breadth. Today, I want to talk about another way to counter breadth, which is rather the opposite of depth.

So look, we are flooded with content, spoiled for choice, as many say. More isn't always the answer. Not anymore. Hence my recent episode of the need for depth instead of breadth. But that's not the only way to fight the "more" problem. Another way is to curate and distill.

It's hard to keep up with all of the news about any given topic, whether it's Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine or all the news from the world of podcasting. It's difficult to keep up with everything about any one thing, unless, in fact, that's your full-time gig. And most people already have full-time gigs. But those people still want to know what's going on inside of any given topic they get to choose. And for those who've developed the habit and appreciate the "found time" nature of podcasting, podcasting is where they turn.

So, services like Podnews exist. James Cridland wades through a hundred and more articles, press releases, newsletters, emails, and other forms of inbound information every single day to create a  three- to five-minute-long daily podcast and newsletter that gives his readers and listeners the choice bits of podcasting news as they enjoy their breakfast. Assuming they're eating breakfast in North America, that is.

And then you have Brian McCullough, he does the same thing for the Techmeme Ride Home. Though, his is just a podcast only and his episodes stretch usually the 20-minute mark. It's longer, but that fits in the drive home slot for the tech news he gives out every single day. And I rarely miss an episode of either.

Now, you may have read the New York Times piece recently on the growth and expansion of Axios. It's a news publishing service that has taken the art of bite-sized content and turned it into a science, developing software now that cranks out their signature bullet-point style of communication.

If you couple that with last week's announcement of Spooler's podcasting software that lets you edit and republish a single episode multiple times a day so it's always current without waiting for some 24-hour window to expire or force you to listen to news that was fresh around breakfast time, but you couldn't get to it until dinner. Things will undoubtedly have changed since now and then, right?

But helping people make sense of an avalanche of news with short-form content isn't the only business case for podcasters. There's also the need, a growing need, I'd say, to distill long-form content down to just the main points, a CliffsNotes version, if you will. Or perhaps Reader's Digest if you, like me, are old enough to remember what Reader's Digest actually is.

Consider the two- to three-hour episode some of the more popular podcasts put out every single week or, for some, a couple of times a week and even daily. Now, many of those shows are loved, clearly loved, by their diehard listeners, listeners, who aren't at all put off by the length of time they have to commit to listen. It's the price of being in the club, right? And also listening to the banter, the opinion, the meanders of the conversation, that's integral to their listening enjoyment. Oftentimes the facts and the topics themselves are kind of boring to the hardcore listeners. It's the discussion of those topics that the true fans are listening for.

But what about the people who do care about the facts and just the facts? The people who also recognize the thought leadership and perhaps cutting-edge work that is discussed during those long, rambly episodes?

Could you take your podcasting know-how and then turn around a greatly-abbreviated version of those episodes, stripping away all the opinion and banter and just reporting on the gist of the conversation? Bulleting out the key points in an episode that lasts maybe ten minutes?

I mean, sure. It's a few hours of your life sat listening through and cutting out just the good stuff, and then all the work to create an episode. But, if a show's length is a barrier for some to listen, it's quite possible that a bulleted version that reports on just the facts could equal and perhaps even exceed the size of the audience of the source show.

Now, those are just a couple of examples of atypical podcast content that fight the "too much information" problem. There are many, many more. I mean, history is kind of long. Science is hard to understand and rather fast-moving. And honestly, just about anything that has its own nerd culture can be made more approachable to others if it were unpacked into bite-sized episodes of a podcast. Maybe your next podcast.

With that, I shall be back directly with yet another Podcast Pontifications.

Cheers!

Podcast Pontifications is written and narrated by Evo Terra. He's on a mission to make podcasting better. Links to everything mentioned in today's episode are in the notes section of your podcast listening app. A written-to-be-read article based on today's episode is available at podcastpontifications.com where you'll also find a video version and a corrected transcript, both created by Allie Press. Podcast Pontifications is a production of Simpler Media. Find out more at Simpler.Media.

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