With the help of a Researcher-Led Initiative award, PhD students Fran Harkness and Jo Blodgett, and Research Fellow Aradhna Kaushal organised a day of podcast training for early career researchers to learn how to beam their findings straight into the ears of the general public. Here they explain what a podcast is and how you can get started making your own.

Why podcast?

Do you want to learn how to share your research discoveries beyond academic community (and pay-) walls? It would be unusual for a non-academic to read a journal, and as researchers, it’s not possible control how findings make headlines. But 6 million people in the UK listen to a podcast every week. And with people almost entirely listening to episodes as a lone activity- often on their phones whilst driving or travelling- the podcast has their full attention. Podcasts such as ‘All in the Mind’, ‘The Infinite Monkey Cage’, and our own Institute’s ‘The Lifecourse Podcast’ are easy to access (freely available online), and able to build a relationship with audiences through regular episodes. They disseminate new research in an informal style, often by chatting about new research with a fellow host, or interviewing academics.

Researcher-led initiative

We knew we wanted to make a podcast, but we didn’t know how. That’s where the Researcher-Led Initiative awards came in. We successfully applied for £1000 from the UCL Organisational Development to invite an experienced podcast trainer, Chris Garrington, and fellow academic and journalist Jen Allan to teach us everything we needed to make our own episodes.

Along with 13 other early career researchers, we learnt about the practical aspects of making a podcast such as how to conduct an interview, choosing recording equipment, incorporating jingles, editing audio files and disseminating podcasts online. We practiced recording and editing our recordings. It was such a buzz hearing our voices “introducing” our own podcast after the jingle. Of course 10, 000 more practice hours are needed before any Poddies are won but it was much easier than we thought it would be.

Recording a podcast series

We learnt that before you make your podcast, it’s important to consider the ideal format for the topic. For example, will a monologue or interview work best? Is the role of the presenter to ask questions on behalf of the audience or to offer their own opinions and thoughts? We also considered how many episodes are feasible to make, how often and how long should they be. Who are the audience and what kind of tone and style will appeal to them?

We experimented with sound quality between recording straight onto our laptops or enhancing it with different microphones, and received sage advice such as not to record in a coffee shop and to record some background sound separately when on you are on location in case you need to loop it in behind new recordings back in your studio (ahem bedroom). Jen then gave us a session of how to get the information you need from your interviewees, including to learn to soundlessly agree with them so to not cut them off (as qualitative researchers probably already know), and how to get around difficult questions.

What kit do you need?

You don’t need highly specialised equipment to make a podcast. An investment in a good microphone will ensure the quality of the audio recording. You may also consider different types of microphones (such as lapel microphones or hand-held) for different needs. You can also record interviews via Skype or Zoom using an Ecamm Call Recorder. Once you have your audio file, you can edit this using freely available software such as GarageBand (Mac) or Audacity (Windows). When you are ready to share your podcast with the world, you can share this using a podcast hosting website such as Libsyn: A podcast host simplifies and automates both the RSS feed and file hosting and delivery to your subscribers. But a good host does more than that by providing useful stats, tutorials, and support.

Thanks to Chris and Jen, we somehow finished the day with a mini episode and many big plans for the future! Watch this space.