I was looking for other science podcasts the other day and realized the Invasive Species Podcast hadn’t come across my feed reader in a long time. I header over to Jennifer Forman Orth’s Invasive Species Weblog and found that she’d stopped doing the podcast back in September. Which is too bad, because I liked her podcast.
She posted “The ISW Podcast is hereby suspended due to a general lack of interest. It was fun to try, but a fairly labor intensive process for not much return. Please do stop by the Invasive Species Weblog if you need an invasive species news fix.”
It is a lot more work to record speech with audio rather than writing, which is counterintuitive. Speaking is pretty undeniably less work than writing, so you’d think recording would be easier. Bt the thing is, with writing you enjoy a continual and familiar editing process. Recording audio is more performative, you have to prepare and get things right while you’re recording and pay attention to a host of different issues like mic placement. Even tone of voice, which is certainly a concern in writing, becomes a new challenge recording simple because the nuances are different.
One of the things we learned quickly when we started doing the podcast was that It took a lot more time to do any one episode than we had expected. Probably the biggest surprise was transcribing the interviews, which is a prerequisite for writing the script. Once we finished writing the script, if that’s all we’re doing, we’d be done. But instead there’s still recording and editing to do.
So I can understand why it might seem like its not worth it, but it’s too bad there’s no more Invasive Species Podcast.
