What Do Podcasters Do When It's Time For Vacation?

Everybody needs so time off now and then. Podcasters are no different. But when you establish your podcast as a weekly show driven by current events, what do you do when it's time to take a vacation?

In the year since we've launched The D Brief podcast, which focuses on upcoming events in the metro Detroit area, we've borrowed a number of different approaches from different sources at different times.

We record the show on Monday evenings. Stand-up comedian Mike Geeter and I launched the show in October of 2017, so the first time we took a vacation was around Christmas and New Year's Day of that year, both of which happened to fall on Mondays. For one of those shows, we could cobble together excerpts from the few interviews we had done to create a "greatest hits" episode. This is a technique that syndicated radio shows, such as Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! often use when they are off for a week. But at that point, we had barely published enough episodes for one "greatest hits" episode (and we're using the word "greatest" very loosely here), but we had two weeks to cover. What would we do to cover the second week?

We felt that it was important to publish an episode every Tuesday morning despite the holidays in order to build listening habits with our audience, so on Christmas we published a very short episode that told people that we were off for the week and wishing them a happy holiday. We followed that with a greatest hits episode on New Year's Day, which allowed us to bill it as a year-end retrospective.

As the show expanded to three co-hosts (Becky Scarcello joined the lineup; Mike would depart, to be replaced by Jag) and time went on, we found that we had more choices during weeks off. Because I run the audio equipment during our recording sessions, if I can't be there, we are forced to run a greatest hits show. We'll also run a compilation of past interviews if two of us are indisposed. However, if I am available and only one of my co-hosts is on vacation, we will often ask a guest host to fill in. This is a concept we borrowed from Slate's Political Gabfest.

When a guest co-host subs in, it requires a little more preparation on the part of the two regular hosts. We split up the show prep normally done by our missing compatriot. We leave our substitute to serve as what talent coach Valerie Geller calls a "reactor," rather than a "generator" who drives the show forward. In other words, we lead the segments and allow the substitute to offer color commentary.

The first time Becky and I invited a co-host to fill in for Jag, we were not sure how it would go. (We briefly considered doing the show with just the two of us, but I like the energy that a third person brings to the show.) Our guest co-host was Steve Johnson, the founder of Motor City Brew Tours. To our surprise, the show went much smoother than we expected. We discovered that after months of doing the show, we had developed the ability to carry it with a third person who is unfamiliar with the underlying mechanics of the podcast.

Moving forward, we will probably use a combination of these show formats - "greatest hit" compilations, substitute guests, and (when absolutely necessary) short episodes explaining our absence - rather than relying on any one exclusively. Most importantly, to date, we have published an episode of some kind every single week.

LISTEN: Hear the latest episode of The D Brief podcast.

More Glimpses Behind the Scenes:

1. Using Recurring Guests in Podcasts
2. The Ideal Length for a Podcast
3. Promoting Your Podcast by Tapping into a Pre-Existing Audience
4. Can Segments Make Podcasts Smart Speaker Friendly?
5. Covering Timely Events with an On-Demand Medium