Introduction:

It all started with one fateful fall day… Our friend, Rohit, asked a bunch of us together, those friends brought other friends who brought other friends, and all of a sudden, we were a whole cohort of science communication-loving nerds on a zoom call. We spent our first few meetings deciding on our purpose: Who did we want to reach? How do we want to reach them? What is the primary mission of our team? After much deliberation, we decided on our audience (casually disinterested, aged 20-40), our medium (podcasting + social media), and most importantly, our mission: understanding the research and lives of the young scientists doing amazing things around us. We wanted to highlight the diverse experiences of early-stage scientists (mostly graduate level) and explore what led them to where they are in life. There was one small issue: none of us had ever tried to podcast, let alone create anything in the “audio” sphere before. So, we figured it all out from the ground up, and are still improving continually, but wanted to share all the things we’ve learned from the most basic understanding of the process.

Tangible Tips:

This article will walk you through our process, from how we recruit our wonderful interviewees to how we make messy recordings into a publishable podcast.

Funding: Some of these components below required funding for equipment. We have used the funding available within Canada, including:
NSERC Student Ambassador Grant ($1000 for a science communication event). Used for a launch event.
NSERC Science Communication Grant (Pilot), in collaboration with Advice to a Scientist and SciCATs. This has funded equipment for the podcast alongside a series of workshops that train interviewees on science communication skills.

Recruitment: Finding the interviewees.
Friends are the best: Use your network initially, especially for the practice runs. First, we recruited interviewees from our list of talented friends. A caveat to this: We struggled with expanding our podcast topics from biomed and physics, since our members were mainly from this group.
Find the community: Expand your involvement with the community you want to interview: As we started sci-comm workshops, we were able to interact with some really passionate grad students that were mainly already involved or interested in communication.

Pre-interview: Getting to know the interviewees.
Structure it: We have a set of general questions that are asked to all of our guests, and this helps sort out what industry- and research-specific questions to ask as follow-up.
Be flexible: The conversation usually turns into an open back-and-forth as the guest talks about their research and we ask more about it. Most questions come up when we find a part of their research that is really interesting or when clarification or context is needed.
Record: Record all of these conversations to make sure not to forget anything during the story writing phase.

Story-writing: Making the content engaging.
Revisit: Listen to the recording of it. While listening, we take notes on the main points that are discussed to try to create a cohesive story/structure.
Find the jargon: Listen for where there are gaps in your understanding of the content. This can be anything from specific words and jargon to whole concepts that need clarification. We write these down so that when the host records the interview, they can ask.
Have someone representing the audience: Our story-writer doesn’t come from a science background and so is more closely aligned with our target listeners than with the scientists we interview. This is an advantage in the pre-interview and story writing phases as we more easily identify where our listeners might need extra context.
Story-writing: There are tons of ways to structure a story that we won’t cover in this article. Check out the other ATAS articles for resources.

Interview preparation: This part seems simple, but if we don’t prioritize this, we are often left with a last-minute fumble which is not what we want immediately before the interview.
Coordinate: Coordinate with your interviewee early so they have time to prepare. Our host has a pre-crafted email for this which covers logistics and general questions to be asked.
Book the space you need: Reserve the studio well in advance.
*A note on the studio: if you are at a university, check out their studio facilities. Students can use them for free with the support of a faculty member.
Equipment: Hand over the equipment. Our interviews are connected remotely so we provide the interviewee with an ‘easy-to-hook-up mike’, vocal booth and pop-filter.
The microphone we use is the Shure MV7. It comes with a stand, and a USB cable connector, enabling a stress-free mike to set up for our interviewees. It can also be integrated with an audio mixer if we want to try more complex audio engineering in the future.
Content preparation: Watch the pre-interview and read the story from the storytellers. Figure out what those transition questions will look like in the context of each conversation and have those in your back pocket.

Interview: Having a fun conversation.
Recording: Record a separate vocal track for each participant. We initially used Zoom for this purpose but that was a rookie mistake: the audio files are not of high enough quality. We are in the process of moving to Zencaster (high quality mp4 and WAV files are recorded), as recommended by SciCATS.
Positioning: Talk 2 fist lengths away from the microphone and avoid too much turning so the volume of your voice remains consistent. Ideally, this happens in a padded room or with a portable vocal booth to minimize ambient noise.
Settling in: Take a few minutes to make the interviewee feel comfortable with general conversation. Remind them that editing exists so if they want to restart a question or have any fumbles, we can fix that!
Introduce: Have your intro and outro written out in casual language, at least for the first couple podcasts. Within that, make sure that you have the pronunciation of names and schools right before hitting record.
Know the host: Talk about yourself a little bit - the listeners want to know who they’re listening to!
Timing: Set approximate timing goals for each content section of the podcast based on the story-writing. Don’t force the time constraint, as that often makes the interview less cohesive. That said, it’s a trade-off between more/better content to the amount of time spent editing, so make sure to collaborate with your editors on this.
Being concise: My vocal crutches: ‘um’, ‘so’, and lots of repeating myself. What has helped is to slow down. The editors can take out pauses, so it’s worth allowing time for your brain to catch up. Be patient! You will get more comfortable with interviewing the more you do it.
Play around: Try a few different hosting techniques to see what feels right. This can be having multiple hosts, starting with a story, changing the interview style, etc…

Audio editing: Making it sound good.
Include a first pass: Have someone who is not the main editor nor the host do a first listen to record any major breaks or sections that can be cut. It is a huge time-saver for the editors and is good to have another opinion on the content.
Editing software: Adobe Audition. Like the students we are, we found the cheapest way to do the best kind of audio editing. As the University of British Columbia provides a full Adobe suite, we went with Adobe Audition!
What to take out: Choosing what to keep/remove was easy for the basic stuff such as long pauses, incomplete sentences, and whatever the interviewee wanted cut. What’s more challenging is if the interview goes longer than our desired length. At that point, it takes some re-listening and re-reading of the story outlined by our storytellers to figure out what to remove.
Quality: It’s said that you try to keep post-processing to a minimum if you can help it, i.e. get better hardware to avoid needing excessive sound editing, and keep interviews close to the desired podcast length to avoid needing to cut a lot out!
Recruit the experts: As we became a bit more established, we were able to publicize our site and display our few episodes that helped us become more credible. So, when some of our members reached out to media departments at UBC or on the graduate student forums for volunteer editors, we had a number of people respond and were interested in taking part in our project!

Publishing: Getting the content out there.
Podcast hosting sites: Podbean is a cheaper and capable podcast hosting website with future possibilities of monetizing through advertisements without needing to further upgrade. As for free options, there were limitations to how long your episodes could be and if the episode would be taken down after a couple months. So, in general, it’s necessary to pay for a podcast hosting site, so that you can publish your episodes on well-known listening platforms. PodBeans’s cost is $108/year and gives you full access to easily publish/integrate on various podcasting platforms!
Platforms: Get on every platform possible! We’ve integrated with Spotify, Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, and iHeartRadio and it’s possible to connect with more.
Advertise: It’s really key to have an online presence, posting regularly, to publish and share your work.
Along with the podcast host, we have our website https://theunscientificmethod.ca and social media: Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. With our website, we purchased a domain name and developed our website on WordPress, to keep costs low and have customizability.
We hired an artist to create a custom logo so we could foster brand recognition.
We’ve also got into some science-based newsletters! It helps to be kind to the outreach coordinators in various departments ;)
Feedback: Get as much feedback as possible. We have gotten feedback from our target audience, SciCATs and really anyone who we can get to listen.
Publish regularly: Try to publish on a regular schedule so your listeners can expect when your podcasts are released. We explored the idea of having a podcast season, but on the advice of others, have decided that we do not have enough established listenership for this strategy.

Thank you! Huge thanks to SciCATS, ATAS, our current listeners, and our whole team for getting to this point and helping to continue our growth! Please feel free to reach out with any questions or comments :)

Resources:

Sci-comm funding:

NSERC Student Ambassador Grant: https://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/students-etudiants/ug-pc/ambassadors-ambassadeurs_eng.asp

NSERC Science Communication Grant:

https://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/promoter-promotion/sciencecomm_eng.asp

Story-telling:

SciCATs: https://www.scicats.net/

Recording platform:

Zencastr: https://zencastr.com/

Publishing platform:

Podbean: https://www.podbean.com/

Additional Resources:

Discussion about podcast seasons: https://www.thepodcasthost.com/planning/podcasting-in-seasons/

Statistics of podcast platforms:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/943537/podcast-listening-apps-us/#:~:text=In%202020%2C%20the%20most%20commonly,percent%20in%20the%20previous%20year.

Acknowledgments:

Thanks to The (Un)Scientific Method podcast and SciCATS for hosting this workshop series, with funding from NSERC Science Communications Skills Grant.

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