Podcast Show Prep: How To Check 200 Websites In 2 Hours

I've teamed up with Detroit comedian Mike Geeter to launch a new podcast about the Detroit arts and entertainment scene called The D Brief. In this column, I am sharing the lessons I learn from it for other radio broadcasters who want to do the same.

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This fall, comedian Mike Geeter and I were setting out to create a weekly podcast about the Detroit arts and entertainment scene. Our goal from the beginning was to create a podcast that emulates commercial radio broadcasting -- all show prep in advance, and as little post-production as possible. The show would feature 16 segments, many of them focused around a list of events of a certain type. For example, we'd have a concert calendar, a sports report, a list of upcoming stageplays, and a list of movies opening in theaters.

To do this, we'd need to be aware of what's going on at every arts and entertainment venue in metro Detroit. And we'd somehow need to access that information, whittle it down to the most important events, and organize it into a show outline -- all in just a few hours time. How do you do that?

The Spreadsheet

I created a master spreadsheet containing all of the key venues in the metro Detroit area -- nearly 200 in all. I used a GoogleDoc so Mike and other folks working on the show could log in to use it at the same time. The columns in the spreadsheet include:

1. Venue Name
2. Website
3. Contact Name
4. Contact Email Address
5. Facebook Page
6. Twitter Page
7. Instagram Page
8. YouTube Page

Most importantly, I created a column for the venues' Event Listings Webpages, and another column with a dropdown menu for the Type of venue (music, comedy, sports, theater, etc.). This allowed me to filter the venues for each segment of the podcast.

I also installed an extension on my Chrome browser called Bulk URL Opener. This allows me to open a large number of URLs quickly.

The process for preparing, for example, the stand-up comedy segment, looks like this:

1. Filter the spreadsheet to only show venues of the "Comedy" type.
2. Highlight and copy all of the URLs in the Event Listings Webpage column.
3. Open the Bulk URL Opener extension and paste the URLs in. Click the 'Open All' button.
4. Go get a cup of coffee while I wait for my browser to open up 30 different tabs.
5. Repeat the above steps for each segment (concerts, sports, theater, movies, etc.)

Show Prep Sheets

Using this method, I could quickly access the Event Listings pages of all of the appropriate local venues. However, we quickly discovered that you verbalize different types of event listings in different ways, so you have to write them out accordingly. For example, concerts are usually one-day affairs, while stage plays have multiple showings on a weekend. Stand-up comedy shows can be both -- a big national act like Jerry Seinfeld will play one night at the Fox Theatre, while a club like Mark Ridley's Comedy Castle will feature the same comedian all weekend long. Meanwhile, sports has its own nomenclature.

I decided to create pre-formatted "Show Prep Sheets" -- printed sheets that would allow us to enter the information from all of the webpages we opened from the master spreadsheet. Now, in a relatively short amount of time, we could check dozens of websites and copy the information into a listing that was ready to read during the podcast recording.

To prevent our segments from sounding too "listy," we also added a space for a "Discussion Topic" onto each segment's prep sheet. Mike and I would pick something on the list to talk about ahead of time to make the segment sound more conversational.

We spent several weeks practicing our show prep process before we recorded our first podcast episode, knowing that as we became more familiar with the process, we'd get faster at it. We also tweaked our spreadsheet and show prep sheets along the way. Over time, this technique enabled us to keep our fingers on the pulse of the city.

To hear how we take this information and turn it into our podcast segments, listen to our latest episode here.

More Glimpses Behind the Scenes:

1. Can Podcasts Be Live and Local?
2. A Show Structure for Podcasts and Radio?
3. Why Podcasts Need Structure
4. Hard Podcasting Lessons for Radio Broadcasters