Adam Ragusea and Andrea Silenzi (Photos: Andrew Gill/WBEZ)
What are the best practices for recording a podcast or radio show in front of a live audience? We recorded a podcast in front of a live audience to find out.
“There should be an element of suspense,” said Andrea Silenzi, host of Panoply’s Why Oh Why and a veteran live show producer. “There should be a thing that’s kind of hanging that we’re hoping either succeeds or fails.”
What kind of suspense? Well, when Silenzi produced a live show for WFMU’s Seven Second Delay, the hosts played “pot brownie roulette” — one host ate a regular brownie while the other ate a spiked one, and everyone had to wait to see which was which as the evening unfolded.
Greene
Tyler Greene, events producer for WBEZ (where he’s helped produce Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me, The Moth and other live shows), said producers tend to focus on the final, edited product at the expense of ensuring a quality experience for the live audience.
“They get so caught up in the idea that they’re doing a live show that they forget that there’s gonna be people there,” he said.
This live episode of The Pub about how to do live episodes (a new height of meta-ness) was recorded at the Public Media Institute’s Co-Prosperity Sphere at the Public Media Millennials Facebook group Third Coast after-party in Chicago, organized by myself and Colorado Public Radio’s Stephanie Wolf.
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Adam Ragusea hosts Current’s weekly podcast The Pub and is a journalist in residence and visiting assistant professor at Mercer University’s Center for Collaborative Journalism.