Finding Ideas
What excites or confuses you? What might be obscured by mainstream stories?
Podcasts can take many forms.
Here, it makes sense to differentiate between the kinds of podcasts/audio pieces you might encounter:
An audio story
has a problem, characters, and a beginning, middle, and end. This format typically requires the most writing and production.
A conversation
between two or more people, with minimal narration and some contextualization, can also become an audio piece.
Poems with sound design, sound collages, and other experimental media
can also make use of creative technologies like Adobe Audition. These pieces can be hard to describe until you've actually gotten started.
Pro Tip: To see if your idea is a topic or a story, share your ideas with friends. Can they identify the characters? How about conflict? Where do their eyes light up?
So where do you find podcast ideas?
It depends on which of the above formats you want to work in. If you're interested in making an audio story, pay particular attention to the difference between an Story and a Topic below.
A topic
can be anything from "Intimacy and Ethics in Artistic Representation" to "Challenges to people experiencing homelessness in Providence."
A story
is a specific sequence of events inside that topic. Stories are about movement; they end differently than they began.
A story inside the first topic might be, "My ex-boyfriend made a movie about our break up and posted it on Facebook."
A story inside the second topic might be, "Ten years after Camp Runamuck, a community of people experiencing homelessness on the banks of the Providence River, was disbanded by the City of Providence, one of its founders remembers how the camp was formed and reflects on challenges to people facing homelessness in Providence today." (Both descriptions come from stories on Now Here This.)
Thoughts on community-based storytelling:
Lots of well known podcasts, like This American Life, S-Town, or 1619, have operating budgets for travel and equipment, or people whose whole job is to perfect each episode technically. Looking at these examples, it can be easy to think your own stories should be similar in scope.
Many of the best audio stories come from producers' own lives and communities. And, if your story concerns social issues impacting a community you're not part of, reflect on why and how you are telling it.
What relationships do you have?
How can you establish reciprocity?
Is there someone better positioned to tell the story that you can support with resources like time or institutional funding?