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Breaking Format For A Very Special Podcast Episode
March 5, 2019
Have an opinion? Add your comment below. Of course, there are other ways for a podcast to break format for a special episode. Podcasters often do it for live shows. Or sometimes they take a benchmark feature segment from past episodes and compile several iterations into a "greatest hits" package. There's certainly more than one way to skin a podcast. However you chose to do it, I think shaking things up from time to time can liven up your show
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As a child, I remember whenever my favorite television shows would have "very special" episodes. Often they occurred when sitcoms decided to delve into serious topics, such as kidnapping on Diff'rent Strokes or homophobia on Roseanne. Others were more lighthearted, like the 1983 television movie, Don't Eat the Pictures, in which Big Bird is locked overnight in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, or when Friends headed to London for (one of) Ross' wedding(s).
Podcasters can also create special episodes, in which they break from their usual format to do something different. On The D Brief podcast, we did just that for our Thanksgiving episode last year. Our podcast features a collection of regular guests who are all experts in different aspects of Detroit culture: music, movies, food and drink, etc. In the months leading up to Thanksgiving, when we had each of them as guests on our podcast, we also recorded a separate segment for later use. In this segment, we asked them to recommend a great local place to purchase a holiday gift.
Our guests gave us a wide range of answers, and we cut them together into an episode that was not only perfectly timed for the biggest shopping weekend of the year, but also gave us time off from recording so that we could spend the holiday with our families.
I've always liked the technique of asking multiple people to answer the same question to see how their responses vary. We've used it at times on the Jacobs Media blog, and it always provides for fascinating reading. I think it can provide for a fun podcast episode as well.
Of course, there are other ways for a podcast to break format for a special episode. Podcasters often do it for live shows. Or sometimes they take a benchmark feature segment from past episodes and compile several iterations into a "greatest hits" package. There's certainly more than one way to skin a podcast. However you chose to do it, I think shaking things up from time to time can liven up your show.
LISTEN: Hear the latest episode of The D Brief podcast.
More Glimpses Behind the Scenes:
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