Editing podcasts for clarity, flow and focus

Have you ever wondered what makes an interview podcast or chat show sound polished and professional?

The answer is *editing* — and a lot more of it than you would guess. Many novice and amateur podcasters are hesitant to condense content or make changes to their recordings. But good editing can take your podcast interviews from rambly, meandering, and unfocused to crisp and compelling — without losing friendliness or engagement.

Genna Buck and Caleb Buys, host and producer of the literary podcast Pages Past, will demonstrate, with examples, how they take their raw interviews and distill them, and how you can too. We will show you how we use editing to cultivate a specific mood and stay on-message, improving our podcast’s brand identity and the listening experience.

We will also explore the ethics and industry best practices around changing people’s words without venturing into content that is manipulative or misleading.

This session will contain additional editing wisdom from the State University of New York Audio podcasting fellowship (which Genna graduated from in 2024), drawing on insights from radio greats like Kerry Donahue (WNYC, Columbia Journalism School), Zach McNees (Song Exploder, Here’s the Thing with Alec Baldwin, and many other podcasts), Mike Schubert (Potterless, The Newest Olympian) and more.