Quick Insight: David Edmunds on Podcasting for Academe

A little over 20 years ago, some 8,000 podcasts joined the iTunes platform, according to Beamly. While not all podcasts, that figure gives a sense of the scale of the podcast world, especially compared to the present, with its at least 5 million podcasts. David Edmonds, a former BBS correspondent was there, hosting (with Nigel Warburton) the popular Philosophy Bites podcast since 2007 and the Social Science Bites podcast (housed here on Social Science Space) sine 2012. Here, Edmonds offers some hard-won tips for prospective academic podcasters and makes a case for more editing in the production of existing podcasts.

The transcript of his Quick Insight appears below the video.

Hi, so I’m David Edmonds. I am the host of a podcast called Social Science Bites and I co-host another podcast called Philosophy Bites. My background is in both philosophy — academic philosophy, I write philosophy books — but also I worked for several decades for the BBC in radio, so both for domestic radio and for the BBC World Service.

But yes, I’ve got experience of podcasting, interviewing academics now going back about 20 years. There’s just so many thousands of academics out there with interesting things to say. Our focus has always been on identifying a single topic, rather than having a very discursive conversation and focusing it on that single topic. Most podcasts these days tend not to be edited and they just go on and on for hours and hours. I have no idea how people have the time to listen to them.

That again, has never been my approach. Again, from the BBC background, I’ve always known how to edit. I try and take out any extraneous material. So our podcasts are about 20 minutes, 25 minutes. They’re much shorter than the average podcast.

I’ve noticed as the years have gone by, two things have happened. The fist is that as we built up an archive, in some ways it’s become easier to get people to agree to be interviewed. Because if you look at Social Science Bites now, we’ve got multiple Nobel Prize winners. And if I approach an economist and they think, “Oh, I want to be associated with that podcast, look at the people they’ve got, look at the people they’ve got in their archives.”

So on the one hand it’s become easier, but over the last five years or so there’s been this incredible proliferation of podcasts, which means that particularly when I approach very well-known people now, they’ve undoubtedly been approached by another 10 or 15 people who also want to interview them on the podcast. So depending on the fame of the person I’m trying to interview, it has in some ways become trickier to get them to agree.

But most academics are delighted to be on. In Britain at least, we have the impact agenda, which means that people get kind of brownie points for appearing on media of some kind. But over and above that, I think people are very happy when somebody outside their discipline actually shows an interest in what they have to what they were searching.

A side effect of there being now so many podcasts is that if you’re going to set up your own podcast, lots of people approach me now and they say, “We’re thinking of having a podcast on X or Y.” So if you’re going to do it, you’ve really got to do it properly because it’s such a crowded market now that you can’t do it in a half-baked way. You’ve got to use professional equipment. I recommend editing most podcasts. As I say, many don’t do that. But really, you’ve got to. It’s got to be a commitment to it

With Social Science Bites, we post an interview every single month and I think the regularity of that is very helpful so that listeners know that at a certain time of the month they’re going to get a new interview. So I think regularity, I think if you leave it fallow for a few months, I think the evidence is that your audience can very rapidly dip.

So we’ve done that with Philosophy Bites now. We have such a big archive now that we still, even when we’re not posting regularly, get a lot of downloads every month.

One of the interesting things about podcasts as well is that they have a long life. So broadcasting in the past, there was a program, the program would go out and that would be the end of it. Particularly with academic podcasting, most of the topics which I’m addressing, which I’m talking to academics about, have a kind of immutable quality.

I mean, they, they eventually go out of date, but for a few years at least, most of them are still relevant. And so we tend to get a big hit, I think when they first come out.

And then there’s a very long tail. We have a very popular podcast about the sociology of space, how we sort of navigate space, which is about 15 years old now. And still every month we get quite a lot of downloads on that. So that’s very gratifying about the whole podcast world that they’re up there forever, so long as you, you know, pay your website fees and the numbers keep clicking through.

My recommendation if somebody’s going to give it a go is do it properly, partly because it’s so crowded. Also have a niche. You know, if you have a very general podcast, you’re never going to find a market. So find a niche where you’re doing something that nobody else is doing in the in the podcast world. And good luck to you.