To summarize her advice, I’d say she mostly talks about patience. First, you need patience to stake out a place in pursuit of a story, or patience in finding leads on something interesting to report. Second, you need patience to get a good interview or conversation with a person. This can involve several meetings so they can get more comfortable with you, or just lots of interview time so if there’s anything there that might be good for a story, you catch it. Third, if something goes very badly, have the patience to try to work around it, as not everything will always go right.

In terms of how I can apply her advice to my own podcasts, I’d say an issue I’ve had in the past is the interviews are too structured. We’ll have questions prepared, and we’ll go down the list to try to get what we want. Then, when we edit, we’ll edit pretty much in the order of the questions. This kind of editing and storytelling is not necessarily conducive to a good story. Something to improve from here would be our patience in interviewing. We should just have them talk about the general topic we’re trying to get at, rather than try to put them inside a box. Something else I noticed in her sound clips I liked was how she caught some people in their natural environment, whether it be answering 8 phone calls or organizing video equipment. Her voiceovers felt less invasive than if we just completely cut the clip off, and that’s something we can add the podcast if we can capture any subjects in a natural environment.

Character drives a podcast by giving a listener something fun to listen to, and a reason to keep listening. Without character, few people would listen and there wouldn’t really be a point in creating the podcast if no one will listen.