Facebook is planning to change its company name next week to reflect its focus on building the metaverse, according to a source with direct knowledge of the matter.

Gruber, via The Verge

This is how you use the Chicago Manual of Style to elevate your writing. 📝

🎙The Waveform is a newsletter from Red Cup agency about the next edge in podcasting. In each issue, I’ll stay on top of things for you, writing about to look for next in The Lookahead. When we launch a new show or post an episode that stands out, I’ll drop that into the newsletter.

I’m Lee Schneider, founder and lead producer at Red Cup Agency. Did someone forward this to you, or are you reading it on the web? You can subscribe for free.

Defenders of the Earth

Global Witness is releasing a new episode of the Defenders of the Earth podcast every week. This week, we’re posting an episode about activists fighting coal plant development in the Philippines. Last week, we covered climate activists in Russia who are inspired by Greta Thunberg. Next week, we go to Honduras to cover a mining project that is destroying a river that people depend on for water.

The stories are powerful. I’ve been rolling out the marketing plan and making audiograms for each episode. I’ll post a few on my Instagram and Vimeo.

Listen to Defenders of the Earth on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, on the Global Witness website, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts.

The Lookahead: Is Clubhouse Dead Yet?

Back in the summer, Clubhouse claimed that 700,000 new sessions (known as rooms in Clubhouse-speak) were added to the platform each day. Since, it has added “spatial audio” — for iOS users initially — to make speakers sound as if they’re spaced throughout the room. You can also record your room or capture 30-second shareable clips from your speakers. The Verge has a good explainer about how to record in Clubhouse.

Is Clubhouse dead yet? Doesn’t look like it. But what does the continued popularity of Clubhouse mean for podcasting?

Media essayist Ed Zitrone wrote that he didn’t think Clubhouse would steal podcasting’s thunder. The platforms have different audiences and different purposes. Sometimes people don’t want to talk — they want to listen and immerse themselves in an audio world. And, he reminded us, sometimes you’re doing the dishes, and you can’t talk. (Exactly what happened to me the other day when I was invited to speak in a Clubhouse room.)

But Clubhouse does pose a threat to traditional radio, the medium it most resembles. Here I must quote the brilliant Nick Quah, who wrote the paragraphs below when he was still writing his Hot Pod newsletter. (I miss his insights, but hope that his new newsletter for Vulture will make him the signature critic of podcasting as Andrew Sarris or Pauline Kael were signature critics for indie movies.)

Here’s what Quah said about live audio apps like Clubhouse:

It’s been my sense that there continues to be a lot of faith that traditional radio will persist in current reach, strength, and form over the long term. After all, broadcast radio still reaches the vast majority of Americans – 83% of people over 12 in 2020, though that’s down from 89% in 2019, per numbers collected by Pew Research. (But as Fischer points out, radio revenues dropped by 25% over the pandemic, so cracks are already clearly evident in this particular narrative.) Podcasting may not have ended up being the thing that tips traditional radio off the ledge, but I’m getting more of a sense these days that this whole live audio thing could very well be just that.

Expect live audio to stay alive and continue to find its audience. Clubhouse might not define the medium, but people are using Twitter’s app called Spaces. LinkedIn is in on the game, as is Facebook.

Red Cup Agency. Podcast Production and Marketing.

Working with teams large and small, I take podcasts from the glimmer of an idea into production and distribution. We make trailers, ad spots and promos for your podcast, and we find new audiences for you work with cross promotion.

RED CUP SERVICES

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Clackty clack. One of the ancient joys of writing on typewriters was that everyone knew when you were working, even through some may not have appreciated it. The typewriter would become the only conversation in the room. Input

Clackty clack. One of the ancient joys of writing on typewriters was that everyone knew when you were working, even through some may not have appreciated it. The typewriter would become the only conversation in the room.

I’ve always been motivated by the sound of typewriters. There was a time, when I wanted to motivate myself to write, that I would put on a recording of manual and electric typewriters clacking along. It reminded me of newsrooms I’d worked in, or maybe newsrooms that I’d only imagined. I’ve missed that sound, but only recently have I realized how much.

After nine years (maybe more) of pounding away on several Apple Magic Keyboards, (I tend to wear them out), I’ve switched to a mechanical split keyboard, an ErgoDoz-EZ. It’s louder than the Apple keyboard so again, people know when I’m working. It takes up more room. Not only are the two halves of the split keyboard spread across the width of my desk, but the individual keys are spaced farther apart. My back doesn’t hurt as much because my typing stance is wider and more open. And my hands don’t hurt as much because the keystroke distance and force are closer to the typewriters I learned on. And there is that wonderful clackty-clack. People know when I’m working. Sometimes I keep typing just to hear it.

The Ergo-Dox has ruined me for the Magic Keyboard and for the puny keyboard I have attached to my iPad. Now I’m ready to go fully mechanical on all devices, even my iPad. My hands need the room and my stance needs to be open.

But … not so fast.

I’ve noticed that the Apple Magic Keyboard is a forgiving piece of technology. I could miss keys or scramble letters, and my sentences would come out okay anyway. Not so with the mechanical keyboard.

When using it, I have to say what I mean and mean what I say. It is a lot closer in this way to using a typewriter. A mis-struck key on a typewriter meant you had to start the page over or xxxxx it out. (Usually the latter.) But when computers are our writing partners, they fix our spelling and typing mistakes as they happen. They remember phrases we typed earlier. They think for us, picking up our slack.

I’ve been reading Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing, a fascinating book that describes novelists like Stephen King sorting through their first word processor experiences. They describe using word-processing software as an experience more like writing by hand than using a typewriter.

I get it. When writing on screens, you’re more likely to write fluidly, begin in the middle and go toward the end, pick off things to fix at the top of the page or at the bottom. There is a freedom you get that a typewriter can’t offer.

Typing is linear. You put in the paper and you type till you run out of page. I’m glad I don’t have to do that anymore because during revisions, I realize that the middle should be at the beginning, and the end wasn’t really the end. The early users of word processors marveled at how they were able to move blocks of text around, and of course there’s that. We take it for granted now. But there’s a deeper change in being able to jump around in your editing, as though you had a pencil hovering over a page, making a notation here, scribbling a word tweak there, lobbing in a new section somewhere else. It’s fluid and not like typing at all.

Another input device I’m using a lot is my Apple Pencil. I can open just about any writing app and start scrawling ideas with my illegible scrawl, and it turns out not to be so illegible. Most of the time, the scrawl becomes perfectly useful text. It brings back the feeling of grabbing a notebook and simply beginning to write. I still do that — I use notebooks every day — but I’m appreciating the merging of the digital and paper worlds.

An old trick: When revising your work, put it in a different font and print it out for markups. Since it looks different, you see it anew. A new trick: Do the same thing, but render the draft as a PDF and mark it up with your Apple Pencil.

Our relationship with writing tools runs deep. It all starts with input.

Currently reading: Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley 📚

⌨️⌨️Got a ErgoDox split keyboard and liking it. More room to type - more open feeling. So —- can anyone recommend a Bluetooth mechanical keyboard? I’d like to use it with my iPad.

The Waveform is a newsletter from Red Cup agency about the next edge in podcasting. In each issue, I’ll stay on top of things for you. When we launch a new show or post an episode that stands out, I’ll drop that into the newsletter.

I’m Lee Schneider, founder and lead producer at Red Cup Agency. Did someone forward this to you, or are you reading it on the web? You can subscribe for free.

Global Witness

Global Witness, an NGO, just released their annual report about people who paid with their lives for defending their land and the environment. Global Witness calls them Defenders of the Earth. Last year, repressive governments and environmental extraction companies murdered 227 Defenders of the Earth who tried to stand in their path as they cut down forests, built mines on seized lands, and stole water from indigenous communities.

When the folks from Global Witness got in touch and asked if I would set up a marketing plan for their new podcast, Defenders of the Earth, of course I said yes. With Global Witness, I believe that activist Defenders of the Earth are our last line of defense against climate disaster. The Global Witness report (worth a read), says that the industrialized countries of the Northern Hemisphere are responsible for most of the carbon emissions causing climate change. The countries in the Southern Hemisphere are bearing the brunt of the damage. Their forests are being wiped out, their water polluted, their land seized.

I’m rolling out the overall marketing plan for the podcast launch, writing and producing a trailer, and producing audiograms for all of their episodes.

Listen to the trailer on Apple Podcasts or Spotify,

Marketing a Podcast

I read many, many stats on podcasts. Here’s one that surprised me: Most people, about 40% of listeners, discover a new podcast by poking around in their podcast app of choice. That means that your podcast title, cover art, and show descriptions better deliver. Once a potential listener clicks through on them, they should be presented with a trailer that makes them want to listen and subscribe.

Okay, you’re saying, that’s pretty obvious.

Yeah, but. (As we say in New York.) Think of a podcast trailer as a first date. You get a sense — in just a few seconds — of whether you want to be seen at the same café table with this person. That same sense of urgent timing is what makes audio trailers challenging. To support a podcast, an audio trailer must get at the essence of the show, do it in seconds, and then hold our interest with an idea, emotion, or social movement that we want to be part of.

What Kind of Trailer Are You?

With the Global Witness project, we were lucky enough to have four completed episodes to work with. I am pulling quotes and clips as needed. Since the Global Witness report came out a few weeks ago, the trailer is the perfect way to hold interest until the first episode launches. (That episode, about activists in Russia, comes out on Wednesday, September 29th.) We will post a new episode every week.

On an earlier project, for Glassdoor, we had some but not all of our episodes recorded before we launched. So, as I wrote that trailer copy at our kitchen table one afternoon, I was able to include our most compelling interview clips.

Other trailer projects started with … nothing. No interviews. No music. We hadn’t started production, but we needed to start promotion. The trailer for Rightbrainers was host-driven, with no interview clips.

For Same Same but Tech’s season two trailer, we referenced season one, of course, and could have some fun with it along the way. Season two trailers are their own special kind of project.

And finally, trailers for audio dramas are the closest thing to movie trailers as you can imagine. For my audio drama Mission of the Lunar Sparrow, I was thinking visually, as though we were watching it on Netflix.

All trailers serve a common purpose to introduce a new listener to a podcast, but each one is a unique creative project.

The Lookahead ¹

A debate looming in podcasting’s future is whether the advertising revenue model (based on radio’s model) will live forever, or will it die, to be replaced by a subscription model.

Platforms like Simplecast, Transistor, Megaphone, and others are using dynamic audio insertion to breathe new life into ads. The dynamic part means that producers can roll in (or delete) ads anytime, even after their episode has been published. You could run seasonal ads, temporary ads, or campaign-based ads that update when your client wants something different.

Platforms like Audry are making it easier for producers to find friendly podcasts to cross-promote. They run an ad spot about you. You run one about them. Chartable just launched a similar service called SmartPromos. Advertisecast matches sponsors with podcasts.

On the other side of the audio spectrum, we have the venerable Patreon, a subscription service that has funded many a podcast. Apple, the biggest platform, has launched its subscription service recently.

Where is all this going?

Larger, more established podcasts will benefit from the traditional ad model, and they will more easily be able to scale using the tech testosterone offered by dynamic audio insertion. Smaller or emerging podcasts will benefit more from a community-building approach: working with the subscription model. Ossa, a new podcast network for women, might start raising more money using the subscription model. It will likely grow the fastest by focusing on community.

A key element in the subscription model is accessibility. Any successful subscription service has to have some free podcasts to bring in new people, and to attract people like me, who like free RSS distribution.

Turning listeners into subscribers also has its challenges. Spotify bet big that The Joe Rogan Show, the most popular podcast in the world, wouldn’t lose listeners or influence when it went exclusive to Spotify. But, according to The Verge, that’s just what happened. Putting Rogan behind a paywall may have cost him some of his audience.

Red Cup Agency. Podcast Production and Marketing.

Working with teams large and small, I take podcasts from the glimmer of an idea into production and distribution. We make trailers, ad spots and promos for your podcast, and we find new audiences for you work with cross promotion.

RED CUP SERVICES

Read Freely.

You can read freely at The Waveform. I’m not tracking opens, clicks, or forwards. I’m not analyzing your IP address location. It’s just you and me, writing and reading. This is a small part of the vast Web focused on people and dialog, not marketing data collection.

Can recommend: The Morning Show on Apple+. Having worked for Good Morning America (writer), KCAL (writer), E! (producer, line producer),Fox News (producer), and Dateline (producer) I can confirm that news shows can be a den of vipers. There are some wonderful folks with whom I formed lasting friendships … and then there are the other kind.

Hello Micro-Blog friends. I have one invite left to the book tracking club Literal.club. Anyone? literal.club/invite/M9…

In the final episode of Mission of the Lunar Sparrow, Commander Field is on her way home against her will. Mission Control has taken over the ship.

Listen on FutureX

In Episode 9 of this short-flight audio drama, Mission Control is flying the Lunar Sparrow on autopilot, returning Commander Field to Earth. A mysterious decision has been made, at a high level, to end the mission. Commander Field, as is often the case in situations like this, is the last to know what has happened. But before the fade out, she takes one last act of defiance.

It’s been rare if not impossible, in our complicated times, to see live theater. As a writer, it can be a long walk to come up with an idea, pursue it in notebooks and pixels, commit to a script, hand it off to an actor, and hear it come to life. Audio drama, as a format, allows that creation, and pretty fast, even in our complicated times.

That’s why posting this last episode is bittersweet. The adventure is over.

I am working on a sequel, or followup, I’m not sure what to call it. Mission Control and Commander Field will return to try to resolve the conflicts between them. There will be other characters who get involved with no clue about what role they play in the drama until it is too late for them.

Thank you all for listening and commenting. Your support means a lot to me. This newsletter will go dark for a little while as I spin up the next podcast or consider whether to bring you sections of the novel I’m almost done with and getting ready to let out of the box.

Lee

Find Episode 9 at FutureX, or subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Stitcher.

Mission of the Lunar Sparrow was produced for the FutureX network. Production by Red Cup Agency.

The Waveform is a newsletter from Red Cup Agency about the next edge in podcasting. In each issue, I’ll stay on top of things for you. When we launch a new show or post an episode that stands out, I’ll drop that into the newsletter.

I’m Lee Schneider, founder and lead producer at Red Cup Agency. Did someone forward this to you, or are you reading it on the web? You can subscribe for free.

Andia Winslow Wins Voiceover Artist of the Year

Andia Winslow is the star of our audio drama Mission of the Lunar Sparrow. At the OneVoice Awards a few weeks ago, she took home the hardware for Voiceover Artist of the Year 2021 and also Best Performance in the Gaming category. Not only is she the lead voice in Mission of the Lunar Sparrow, but she’s also host of a 10-episode podcast we’re producing for a global consultancy firm. (I signed an NDA on that one, so the name has to stay confidential.) Andia is super-talented. I hope you’ve enjoyed her work in Mission of the Lunar Sparrow.

The Glo Podcast Passes 20 Episodes

We’ve been in production on The Glo Podcast since earlier in the year, and it’s remarkable that we’ve already posted more than 20 episodes. I’m working closely with the (large) Glo team on this podcast. We have another 20 episodes in the pipeline.

Our most recent episode features an interview with Jo Tastula, a mystical thinker, mother, and yoga teacher of the first order. As in every conversation on this podcast, we go deep into life, how people become better humans, and we tell fascinating stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Just last week, we recorded stories about good and bad anxiety, the chatter in your mind, and spirit world experiences. I’ve been the recording engineer on most of the episodes. It’s been illuminating and fun to listen in on the conversations as we record each episode.

Jo Tastula is not only an extraordinary thinker and teacher, she was also a pioneer — one of the first to teach yoga online with Glo. Listen to Jo’s story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen to podcasts.

Why Are We Still Podcasting like Radio?

If you look at the list of Top 50 Podcasts for the past year, you see patterns that scream tradition. At the top, we have Joe Rogan, a shock jock in the tradition of Howard Stern. We have daily-deadline-news from The Daily and true crime from Crime Junkie. If you keep going further down the list, you’ll get to the NPR stalwarts This American Life, Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me, and Planet Money. Each one of those shows have their own kind of traditions. A little ways down the list is Stuff You Should Know from iHeartRadio, which also comes out in a television version. It would be right at home on the Discovery Network and reminds me of some of the shows I used to produce for Discovery, History, and A&E.

You have to get out of the top-ten category types to discover shows that are less like radio and define what podcasting is all about. Shows like Code Switch, Reply All, and Everything is Alive bring what’s best about airing diverse views, giving voice to marginalized people, unrolling long-form essays in audio form, and launching experimental audio dramas that render imaginary worlds. Move further down the list and you get to break things. My Favorite Murder is a popular genre-breaking comedy about … murder. It works as a podcast. Good luck pitching that idea to a television network.

Nick Quah has been writing about the podcast industry in a newsletter called Hot Pod since 2014. He can open up this thought better than I can.

I haven’t fully formed this thought yet, so allow me the indulgence of thinking out loud here: It’s been my impression that, based on the events of the last five years, the rise of podcasting didn’t end up necessarily challenging linear radio in any fundamental way but it did unlock greater untapped value by introducing more efficiency to audio consumption and creation. Say what you want about “peak podcasts,” but today, there’s a whole galaxy and generation of shows — from narrative stuff to extremely long chatcasts to shows hosted by people who would otherwise be denied access to airtime by traditional gatekeepers — that simply wasn’t well-served by the technical structure and dominant incentives of traditional radio. And so, instead of directly interrupting linear radio, podcasting ended up creating new markets, businesses, and systems around linear radio, at times funneling value back into it.

– Nick Quah

Nick announced in early September that he’s shutting down Hot Pod. I’ll miss his way of coming to insights in a ruminative way that seems casual, but not really. He’s started up a new newsletter for Vulture called 1.5x Speed, so I’ll be reading him there and hoping it’s as good.

Podcast Subscriptions Will Win Out Over Advertising Revenue

Advertising is another way podcasting currently resembles radio. Hosts pitch whatever they’re paid to pitch. Commercials can interrupt your favorite shows multiple times, messing with your listening experience. This format is great for drive time radio. It’s super for morning shows. It’s not so great for podcasting, especially podcasts that intend to hold your attention. The whole point of a podcast, for me, is that it makes you want to listen all the way through. The best of them draw you in and don’t let you go until the last music fade out.

This is why subscriptions will soon be the dominant way to fund an indie podcast. Most independent producers already work hard to build their audiences and communities. They activate their social media feeds, hawk merch, celebrate art their fans make, appear at events, do Clubhouse, kiss babies (not really), and some have Patreon accounts to support their show.

In a new development, you can offer a subscription to your podcast on Apple, or you can use a service like the aforementioned Patreon or a service like Memberful to build support for your work. In my next post on The Waveform, I’ll write about how podcasts are building audiences and funding themselves through memberships.

Marketing Services at Red Cup

At Red Cup, we’ve been crafting marketing plans for clients for a while, but I haven’t made a big deal about it. It’s just something that I offer when I produce your podcast. That’s changing because more people are coming to me asking for standalone podcast marketing services. For example, this month, we are doing the marketing plan for a new podcast called Defenders of the Earth launched by Global Witness. We’re making audio trailers and promos. More details on an upcoming issue of The Waveform.

Red Cup Agency. Podcast Production and Marketing.

Working with teams large and small, I take podcasts from the glimmer of an idea into production and distribution. We make trailers, ad spots and promos for your podcast, and we find new audiences for you work with cross promotion.

RED CUP SERVICES

Read Freely.

You can read freely at The Waveform. I’m not tracking opens, clicks, or forwards. I’m not analyzing your IP address location. It’s just you and me, writing and reading. This is a small part of the vast Web focused on people and dialog, not marketing data collection.

Black t-shirts are great, but not when you live with a cat.

In Episode 8 of Mission of the Lunar Sparrow, Commander Field speaks from the heart about how the mission has changed her and what she wants to do about it.

Listen on FutureX

In this episode, Commander Field has sent Mission Control off on a computational errand, keeping the machine busy and giving her a chance to record a secret diary entry. She takes the opportunity to speak from her heart about what she has seen on the lunar surface and how it has changed her. There is no other episode like this one. It’s a solo performance from Andia Winslow. The finale episode is next week.

Thank you all for listening and commenting. Your support means a lot to me.

Lee

Find Episode 8 at FutureX, or subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Stitcher.

Mission of the Lunar Sparrow was produced for the FutureX network. Production by Red Cup Agency.``

Not Tracking

Here at 500 Words you won’t be tracked. I’m not tracking opens, clicks, or forwards. I’m not analyzing your IP address location. It’s just you and me, reading and writing. I’m trying to create a small part of the Internet that is focused on people and dialog, not marketing data collection.

Visit the design-minimal but information-maximal archive of all 500 Words posts and podcasts.

The Verge reports that Joe Rogan’s exclusivity on Spotify is hurting his influence, and that his social numbers have halved. Ashley Carman reports that searches for Joe Rogan also dropped after moving to Spotify, and YouTube data have also fallen.

Not a fan of shock jocks like Rogan, Howard Stern, or Don Imus, so I am enjoying a little schadenfreude with this announcement.

Shock jocks give themselves permission to say what they want by claiming to “say what is on everyone’s mind.” This is somehow seen as liberating, or even worse for the rest of us, a right.

After dinner tonight, my nine-year-old son was complaining that he had a lot of throughs in his mind that he wanted to say but we, his parents, didn’t want him to say them. He made the point that if he said whatever was in his mind, he would get in trouble. This wasn’t fair.

I said, Just because you have something in your mind, doesn’t mean that you have to say it out loud. People could get hurt. You might not mean what’s in your head. It might be rude. He considered this and clearly thought it to be advice of dubious value.

I considered bringing up Freud, the ego, id, and superego, and all the rest of the moral ball of spaghetti. Yet it didn’t seem necessary. It’s enough to consider that speaking whatever comes to mind will hurt people, and, as a person over the age of five, you have a responsibility to other people about that.

Bodhi at 9.

Of all ridiculous things the most ridiculous seems to me, to be busy — to be a man who is brisk about his food and his work,” Kierkegaard admonished in 1843

I'm going to turn the universe off and then back on again and see if that works.

— God (@TheTweetOfGod) August 27, 2021

Episode 6 of Mission of the Lunar Sparrow is ready for your listening pleasure. After this, there are just three more episodes.

In this episode …

 Commander Field returns to the Lunar Sparrow after a mysterious excursion. 

Click to listen on Apple Podcasts

Here’s the synopsis: Mission Control saves Commander Field’s life after she blacks out on the lunar surface. When Commander Field insists that she has felt and experienced signs of life on the Moon, Mission Control believes that she is losing her mind. The mission hangs in jeopardy as Commander Field goes public with the evidence she has gathered.

Find Episode 6 at FutureX, or subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Stitcher.

Mission of the Lunar Sparrow was produced for the FutureX network. Production by Red Cup Agency.

Not Tracking

Here at 500 Words you won’t be tracked. I’m not tracking opens, clicks, or forwards. I’m not analyzing your IP address location. It’s just you and me, reading and writing. I’m trying to create a small part of the Internet that is focused on people and dialog, not marketing data collection.

Visit the design-minimal but information-maximal archive of all 500 Words posts and podcasts.

The Waveform is a newsletter from Red Cup Agency about the next edge in podcasting. In each issue, I’ll stay on top of things for you. When we launch a new show or post an episode that stands out, I’ll drop that into the newsletter.

I’m Lee Schneider, founder and lead producer at Red Cup Agency. Did someone forward this email to you? You can subscribe.

What We’ve Learned After a Year and a Half of Recording Remotely (and in Closets)

You may be considering being a guest on a podcast or doing a podcast for yourself or your company. Maybe you’re worried that you have the right recording facilities. Hey, you can stop worrying. While waiting for recording studios to get back into full swing, we’re recorded more than a few tracks with the voiceover talent speaking from a closet. We’ve used plenty of spare rooms, offices, basements, and downstairs dens. Not only that, but we’ve used every kind of weird sound dampener you can imagine, including one called a Kaotica Eyeball. (It wins the award for best name)

If you’re thinking about recording a podcast, as a guest or as a host, let’s start with a couple of tech tips:

• a good mic doesn’t have to be expensive, so get one
• the room you pick to record in matters as much as the mic
• life is easier if you have a strong internet signal

Once you have a lock on those three things, everything else falls into place like magic. We send guests and hosts microphones, and we coach them through recordings. We’ve worked hard at Red Cup to perfect a system to remove the distracting sounds of the room and make recordings made in different places sound like they happened in the same place.

The Glo Podcast, Same Same but Tech, and How the River Flows are examples of podcasts we recorded remotely over the past few months.

Mission of the Lunar Sparrow

There are two actors in Mission of the Lunar Sparrow and only one of them is human. This audio drama is a proof of concept to show how to make a podcast that falls between a radio play and an audiobook. Andia Winslow plays the lead and does a wonderful job.

The show is getting write-ups and climbing in the Apple rankings for science fiction podcasts. Have a listen to the first six episodes. There will be three more for a total of nine.

Web Clips

Last week, NPR launched a subscription service. It allows listeners to opt out of ads for NPR podcasts. The price of the “sponsor-free feed” matches Spotify’s $2.99 per month subscription and offers ad-free versions of its shows. Look for a shakeout of subscription services vs. “free” distribution of podcasts via RSS. Soon, producers will have to take sides, deciding whether to be free or offer subscriptions.

This from The Daily Beast: MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow “is seriously considering leaving the network when her contract ends early next year.” Media wags say she is considering opportunities in streaming and podcasting, a nod to how powerful the podcast medium has become.

This quote from Katherine Wilkerson made me think somebody should make a podcast about it:

“The climate crisis is not gender-equal or gender-neutral,” said Wilkerson, author of All We Can Save and The Drawdown Review.

Men have a larger carbon footprint than women, by 16 percent, according to one study. And the top 1 percent of income earners globally, who are overwhelmingly male, are responsible for more carbon emissions than the bottom 50 percent of earners. According to the U.N., that’s roughly 70 million at the top, compared with 3.5 billion at the bottom. Yet it is women and girls who bear the burdens in the wake of more frequent climate disasters. Those burdens include displacement — 80 percent of people displaced by climate change are women — as well as increased homelessness, poverty, sexual violence and disease.

One Last Thing

A podcast I produce, The Glo Podcast, is a series of conversations about yoga and life. Its vibe is sincere, biographical, and rooted in discussing how we might become better humans. In complete contrast, there’s the podcast we just wrapped on after two seasons, Same Same but Tech. It’s a clever jokester of a show, and between the laughs it went deep on how tech transforms culture.

They are dramatically different podcasts. It follows that the audio trailers we made for them were also dramatically different. For The Glo Podcast trailer, we needed the music to wrap around itself and tell its story in a spiral, much like the way the podcast tells its story. The trailer for Same Same but Tech is straight like an arrow with its snappy lines and oddball sound effects, just like the show.

Working with the creative teams for both groups, I wrote both trailers in the same week, switching back and forth from one to the other in the same hour. You’d think I’d get myself terribly confused during this process, but there was something that made it simple. The host of each of those podcasts has a strong identity. 

You may have heard people say, “podcasting is all about the host.” This is true. The hosts of the best podcasts record their shows as though the two of you are the only people in the room. This is sometimes called podcasting’s intimacy. You can’t dial it down to just one word. That would be misleading. Success no doubt starts with the distinctive voice of the host. They are usually born with it, though it can be coached and made stronger. But week to week, episode by episode, the host depends on a supporting cast of writers, editors, mixers, and composers. We producers build a house for the host to inhabit. It’s a house made of audio design.

Here is the Same Same but Tech Season Two trailer and the trailer for The Glo Podcast.

Red Cup Agency. Podcast Production and Marketing.

Working with teams large and small, I take podcasts from the glimmer of an idea into production and distribution. We make trailers, ad spots and promos for your podcast, and we find new audiences for you work with cross promotion.

RED CUP SERVICES

Read Freely.

You can read freely at The Waveform. I’m not tracking opens, clicks, or forwards. I’m not analyzing your IP address location. It’s just you and me, writing and reading. This is a small part of the vast Web focused on people and dialog, not marketing data collection.

lithub.com

A close reading of the new name for the Pfizer vaccine.

docuguy I’ve been reading the lively debate here about Ulysses and Scrivener (and other writing apps). It convinced me to try Ulysses again after leaving in a huff a few years ago, when they went to the subscription model. Here are the results

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I was a Ulysses user for a couple of years, until they went to a subscription plan, and that pissed me off, so I left for Scrivener. After reading some posts here on micro.blog about the superiority of Ulysses, I decided to give it a try again. (Perhaps because of the influence of @jack, I am becoming a software and platform tester?) I’m not ready to leave Scrivener, but I am going to use Ulysses for much of my everyday writing tasks and stop using IA Writer.

This post might not help you decide which of these two platforms is best for your work. Both are designed by people who clearly care about writing and who have given the writing process much thought. For long form, they both do something marvelous: You can write in small pieces and glue those pieces together. You can also write in large rivers and split up the river into tributaries. Your research lives in the same digital space and is searchable. And you can reorder scenes and chapters easily. If you ever wrote scenes on index cards and tacked them up to the wall, then moved them around until your story came together, you’ll be right at home with Scrivener or Ulysses.

I’ll try to give you a working perspective of each.

The Big Picture

Since I am a visual thinker when I write, Scrivener has an edge for me there. I like displaying my outlines as virtual index cards, as Scrivener can do. I like color coding characters and stages of drafts. With Scrivener, you can write in colors for specific revisions. In long-form work like novels, you can trace story and characters by color coding them.

Organization

Aside from the visual advantages mentioned above, both platforms help you organize long form material. It’s just a matter of taste and preference. Ulysses has introduced something they call a Material Sheet for background, character studies, and notes. That was new to me and useful. Scrivener has a sidebar you can open up for any document, passage, or chapter to put in notes. I use it every day and it works equally well on the Mac as on the iPad. Global search (and replace) is powerful on both Ulysses and Scrivener, so when you decide to change a character name from Kate to Kat, it’s no problem. Reordering scenes and chapters in an outline form is the secret weapon for any long form writer. Both Scrivener and Ulysses do it well.

I use Scrivener’s inline comments and footnotes often to remind myself something about a scene or to make notes that should make it into the next chapter. Ulysses’ inline comments are easy to use, but I find the footnotes less so.

Fake Markdown

With Scrivener, you have to write in good ol’ formatted text. I prefer Markdown, and Ulysses allows it, but their version of it, which is a kind of fake Markdown or Markdown Lite. I’ve had to learn new commands and workarounds. Real Markdown works everywhere, including in iA Writer, Bear, and other writing software. A few folks here on micro.blog have mounted impassioned screeds against Ulysses’ version of Markdown — and communicated their disaffection to the folks at Ulysses. The ire is well-deserved. Markdown is one of the few things in life that cannot be improved upon. Ulysses’ fake Markdown is maddening.

Elegance

Ulysses is the more beautiful software. It is easier on the eye. The themes are better. In Ulysses, the sync between devices is flawless. I’ve never lost anything in Scrivener, but I have worried about it. Scrivener requires Dropbox to sync, and it feels a little kluge-y. I’ve had “conflicted files” more than once when popping back and forth between the iPad and my MacBook Pro. With Scrivener, I have to remember to close and backup my work on one device before opening it on another. That’s never necessary in Ulysses.

Ulysses has vastly improved its style/grammar checker. There’s no need to export a document into another else. (I’ve used it for this doc, so let me know if I missed anything!)

With Scrivener, I use ProWriter Aid, a terrific software and platform that sucks in Scrivener-formatted documents, Word docs, and Google Docs, and makes short work of corrections and mistakes. It’s an ad-on, though, and makes for another step. Scrivener does have a final-read writer’s helper that removes extra spaces between words and sentences. It also has a name generator for characters. I’ve used the name generator a few times, but I always use the routine that removes extra spaces after sentences. My hands still have typewriter habits. This is written in Ulysses, so if you see some extra spaces after a period or two, you’ll know why.

Outputs

Eventually, you have to get the work out of the magic box. Ulysses (and IA Writer for that matter) have seamless publishing to Ghost, micro.blog, Medium and WordPress. Scrivener requires some wrangling. I’ve written three long-form book projects in Scrivener and have never quite mastered the output process (called Compile in Scrivener). As part of my editing process, I create PDF page proofs to mark up in iPad/Pencil apps like Goodnotes and Nebo. It took me weeks to get an output from Scrivener that I liked. Using Scrivener to create a Word doc to send to Kindle, Lulu, or Blurb — is, to quote Snoopy, blech. I’ve never gotten it right the first time and had to burn hours of my life in Word, my least favorite program of all time, to tweak it.

With Ulysses, you can export your work into DOCX and continue formatting in Word, but if you want to save time, Ulysses offers some slick templates that may serve your needs. Scrivener also has templates, but I find them overly complicated and, as I wrote above, hard to get right.

The Wrap Up

As you’ve probably guessed, I can’t decide for you between Scrivener and Ulysses because I can’t decide myself. I’m drawn to Ulysses’ elegant ease of use, but I need Scrivener’s down-in-the-dirt granularity and control. Ulysses has pretty templates, but I can view my work in fresh ways in Scrivener. I’m going to finish the novel I’m writing now in Scrivener, and then we’ll see what happens when I export it for printing (probably to Lulu, but I have used Blurb, Smashwords, and Kindle as well). Vellum has been my go-to for formatting. But if Ulysses can deliver a print-ready DOCX or PDF, I might try it.

A taste for lab-grown meat: In an online poll, 19 percent of American adults responded “Yes, I am eager to try” cell-cultured meat when it becomes available, while 78 percent of meat eaters said they would prefer “real meat” in the long run. (Piplsay)

When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

Martin Luther King Jr. (1967) Source