Deborah Pardes
@DBPardes · 2:41
What’s it take to be the Executive Producer of a podcast with Millions of listeners? Welcome Tara Boyle!
If you are listening to me right now, which I know you are, you're hearing my voice through this device. And the world of audio is dependent upon this exchange. And we're going to be speaking with someone who is an executive producer of an awardwinning podcast, and she understands the power of audio, the power of words, how we use our voices
Tara Boyle
@TaraBoyle · 4:04
So that's something I've been grappling with for many, many years, from my very first internship at a little newspaper called the Catskill Mountain News, where I grew up in upstate New York, which sadly no longer exists, to working as a reporter for the Boston Globe, where I was covering crime, covering education, state politics. And every day I didn't know what my assignment was going to be often until my editor gave it to me
Deborah Pardes
@DBPardes · 1:49
Hey, Tara. So good to hear your voice. Thank you for being here on Swell. And I love sort of looking at your life in terms of, like, dots on a map, and each dot represents a different role you played. And in that role, you had to kind of procure some more skill sets around decision making and output
Tara Boyle
@TaraBoyle · 2:13
Hi, Deborah, thanks so much for another great question. The short answer is that we think about our audience with everything that we do on Hidden Brain, from story selection to the way we write our episodes and the promise that we aim to tell listeners that they're going to receive when they listen to our show
Deborah Pardes
@DBPardes · 2:09
Do you ever recycle things as an executive producer, looking at the big picture, looking at what's going on and not wanting to do things twice, do you ever recycle things and then kind of bump them into a new conversation somehow? How do you leverage older content and how do you make sure it doesn't get lost? One of the things I feel is frustrating as a consumer is dates for me don't matter
Tara Boyle
@TaraBoyle · 2:43
I think we were interested in issues related to our relationships or related to how we think about ourselves, how we interact with our loved ones. Those were interesting in 2017 and they'll be interesting in 2025 and interesting for many years to come. There's never really an expiration date on a lot of the topics that we cover on the show, which is helpful. We do try to curate our archive for our listeners to help people find the content that we think will be most useful to them
Deborah Pardes
@DBPardes · 2:17
And what do you think about the trend of making things always visual? Does it contribute, do you think, to a podcast? Or does it detract or is it just a lateral move? And the second part of my question is in my podcast career did two series that were live, meaning not live tape. They were live in front of an audience. So I chose spaces where people can convene and I leverage those people to help build content and build questions to fortify the show itself
Swell Team
@Swell · 0:15
Tara Boyle
@TaraBoyle · 2:18
Schonker has done live events in different places around the country. He actually was scheduled to do one the weekend of March 15, 2020, which of course ended up getting canceled just a couple of days before it was scheduled to happen because of the Pandemic. So live events are something that I think we all enjoy and hope to do some more of in the future. I think right now our focus is a little bit for the coming months on putting out as many new episodes as we can for our listeners
Tara Boyle
@TaraBoyle · 1:21
That just means it'll be easier for big shows with existing arrangements with advertising companies to be able to work with their advertising providers and also use RSS to provide the show to audiences. So that's a very sort of long winded way of saying YouTube is something that we're looking at to see if it works for us as a show. And we will certainly let listeners know if it's a platform that we decide to be on in the future
Deborah Pardes
@DBPardes · 0:58
Hey, Tara, thanks so much for such a comprehensive answer. And I know when there's a will, there's a way. Anyway, people who love your show find it. Tops of mountains, bottom of oceans, they're just going to be able to plug in because it's so great. Thank you for this time that you spent with us and anyone who's intrigued by Tara's work