A special Pod the North announcement!
Vol. 26 - Plus, Katie Jensen talks Canada's missing middle of podcasters.
Hihi!! Happy Pod the North Tuesday!
The countdown is almost over, just 8 days until my long awaited vacation to Nova Scotia. Also, this is your friendly reminder that there’s just a month left until the last day of summer. If you haven’t already, take these days to enjoy the warm weather with your best pals and loved ones!
In this issue:
ANNOUNCEMENT: Pod the North LIVE is coming to Toronto!
Katie Jensen says the “missing middle” of podcast producers has created a weird class barrier between who's telling stories and who's not.
Canadian Indie: Simplest State
True North Podcast Feature: RAVEN (De)Briefs
By the way…
Our friends in and around Yellowknife, NWT and Kelowna, BC are at risk. Both Northwest Territories and British Columbia are under a state of emergency due too ongoing wildfires.
Many Indigenous peoples are especially vulnerable. With uninsurable homes and an ongoing housing crisis, finding shelter will be uniquely difficult.
If you’re not currently at risk:
- You can help evacuees of the Northwest Territories via the NWT Emergency Response Fund.
- You can donate to the BC Wildfire Recovery Fund here.
- You can start learning about wildfires and First Nations communities by watching and supporting Morgan Dawn on TikTok, or reading this article on The Globe and Mail.
Pod the North LIVE is coming to Toronto this October!
I am SO EXCITED to share this news with you.
Volume 27, which comes out September 5th, will officially mark the one year anniversary of Pod the North. I can’t believe I’ve been writing this thing for an entire year!
To celebrate, I’m throwing a party — a live podcast event and mixer!
Join me at the Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, in Toronto, on Thursday October 5th for an evening of incredible live podcasting, mixing, and mingling!
Catch lives shows and meet podcasters from all walks of Canadian podcasting, with collaborations from incredible podcasting talent including:
Butt Out Baby with 30 Going On 13
Toronto Comedians, Maddy Foley and Olivia Collict (30 Going on 13), are joined by Audio Producer, Ellie Gordon-Moershel (Butt Out Baby, 99% Invisible) to dissect an iconic scene from an even more iconic early 2000’s movie that will get you saying, Opa!
REDsurgence with You Made Me Queer!
Anishinaabe Scholar, Riley Yesno (REDsurgence), plus Writer and Radio Producer, Trevor Campbell (You Made Me Queer!), take the stage to have an “accusatory” conversation about queerness and Canadianism.
Elamin Abdelmahmoud and CBC’s Commotion
Pop culture aficionado, Elamin Abdelmahmoud, hits the stage along with some special guests to talk about the latest, most talked about pop culture moment in the country!
Doors at 6:30pm, show starts at 7:30pm. BE THERE OR BE SQUARE.
Ticket sales are available on the Buddies in Bad Times Theatre website here!
Special thanks to CBC Podcasts for supporting this event!
Thoughts from the ecosystem:
Katie Jensen says the “Missing Middle” of podcast producers has created a weird class barrier between who's telling stories and who's not.
Katie Jensen (KJ) is someone I’ve looked up to for a long time in the podcasting space. In fact, I credit a lot of my career as a podcast producer to her words of widsom and generosity. Katie Jensen an audio wizard, and the principal at Vocal Fry Studios. I rave about her a bunch in this episode of
.The Vocal Fry Studios team is a cozy little group. As a part of it myself (Building Good, Playing With Marbles), I often find myself in group chats with fellow “fries” talking about our pets and projects, being nerdy about audio and journalism, and dishing on freelance podcasting life. Those Slack groups are sacred spaces in an era where we all work from home, and a work-style where we often lose out on work-besties, collective lunch breaks, and Diet Coke walks.
One thing that we all often talk about is how burnt out we are, physically and emotionally. Despite how hard freelance podcast producers work, how experienced we are, and how far we stretch ourselves across the industry, it often feels like we’re constantly trying to prove ourselves — like we’re always trying to justify getting paid for our work.
“It’s the missing middle problem again,” said Katie one day, partly a call-back to one of our fellow fries, Jay Cockburn’s, piece on 99% Invisible this year, The Missing Middle, an episode all about Toronto’s lack of middle class housing.
I needed to know more about what KJ thought about this inner-ecosystem of the podcasting industry, so I talked to her about podcast producer representation and what it typically means to make a career of this medium in Canada.
This interview has been condensed and edited for brevity.
Kattie Laur: How would you describe a Middle Class podcaster or Middle Class podcast producer in Canada?
Katie Jensen: I would say that the Middle Class podcast producer is someone who makes anywhere between $30,000 to $55,000. Not enough to really do anything with, and certainly not enough to take an elaborate vacation if you're even allowed vacation time.
And I would say that a lot of middle class podcast producers are congregated in large urban centers like Toronto, Vancouver, Ottawa, and Calgary, but most are centralized in Toronto. That means that the majority of producers end up living in more affordable housing situations like roommate setups, or living with their parents, or living with a partner when they may or may not prefer to live alone.
KL: Would you say this is a freelancer problem?
KJ: I feel like it depends on what kind of freelancer we're talking about, because certainly it's a freelance journalist problem. But it's certainly not a freelance coder problem or a freelance developer problem. Maybe not even a freelance account or freelance graphic designer.
It's just that the earning potential of podcast production is such that it can be very hard to do more than just get by.
KL: Why would you say that is?
KJ: There's a couple reasons why.
The first is that it's really unpredictable as to the lifespan of any particular podcast. There are very few podcasts in this country that have a long enough runway where they've actually thought about how many seasons they want to make the show for, [and] they don't have a sustainable financing model, so even if you were to get a job at a show for one season, there's no guarantee that that season will be renewed.
Let's say that your season is not renewed, you still got great experience, you've networked with a bunch of cool people. The next job that you have might be in a completely different industry because podcasts are made in topics related to all sorts of industries. So maybe you've gone from making a news podcast for a Canadian media company, but the next job you find is in software as a service, all of the networking that you've done and the relationships you've built on that previous podcast are not necessarily transferable. You have to prove yourself all over again, though your skill set remains stronger than it was before.
KL: And then there’s the question of, how do you even prove your skills when you're going into an industry that doesn't know podcasting?
KJ: Exactly. So you have to do the process of integrating yourself to this new group of people, as well as proving your talent and educating them on the medium itself.
I would also say that there's a weird, non-standardization around training that people could receive before they enter this career. In the sense that some people exit from a master of journalism and then decide they want to produce podcasts. Some people have no experience in journalism and have a completely different undergraduate process.
You could foreseeably make podcasts with a high school education. You don't need any special training. You just need to have a really good sense of story and audio editing and pacing – all of these skills are easily acquired just from being a massive consumer of other content and adopting storytelling techniques that you read, and enjoy, and make an impact on you.
What that means is that the people who've received a lot of training or have chosen to make a large financial investment in their education, then have this massive debt load that they're carrying when they're making the same as their peers who have received no formal training and have not had to make a massive financial investment.
[And], I think that sometimes institutions can be quite predatory on aspiring journalists, and in the sense that the proportion of income you'll make right away when you enter the workforce, it's a lot harder to pay off your debt load that you've incurred getting this specialized training. To me, a Masters of Journalism is just not feasible from a financial standpoint.
It's probably creating a weird class barrier between who's telling stories and who's not. Anyone who can afford to incur an $80,000 to a hundred thousand dollar education is gonna come from a different class background than someone who can only afford a $20,000 or $30,000 education.
But also people who can afford to take unpaid internships versus those who can't, right? But let's say you're an amazing superhuman who can work a full-time job and take an unpaid internship, get your foot in the door and build it up that way. What it can do is make it so that you have chronic health problems from cumulative stress later on, or you're too afraid to take time off and that can cause chronic health problems later on.
KL: What are your thoughts on qualifications for podcast producers since they can vary so much?
KJ: This is not something I necessarily recommend, but what I did in order to upgrade my skills is I went above and beyond on projects where I had full creative control, so I expanded my ability and what I was able to do on those projects, and over-delivered and overperformed for an undermarket undervalue rate.
But it was simply so that I could develop my skills, showcase my talent, build my portfolio, and sometimes I think you have to do that. You have to flex your creative skills on projects where you're maybe not necessarily being paid to do so, and if so, certainly not fairly.
KL: How long did you do that before you decided, ‘these are billable hours?’
KJ: Up until Playing with Marbles [2021].
KL: Damn. You're so qualified though!
KJ: Yeah, but it's about who will pay for that kind of caliber. Who will pay for complex sound design, who will pay for creative narrative storytelling.
KL: How do you suss that out?
KJ: In my discovery calls, I will ask them pretty targeted questions about what kind of show they wanna make, whether they want a conversational show, something complex, and then I'll tell them the number of hours it takes to make a thing. And then they kind of look at that, they realize how long it actually takes to make something and what that means in terms of expenditure and also people.
CUE THIS SONG:
KL: What would you say is the average expectation versus reality ratio?
KJ: It's interesting to me because during the recession it's been a complete pivot. I've seen people who actually want the lowest common denominator of podcast, and then they actually get making it and their enthusiasm changes so that they wanna do more complicated things that are outside of the scope of what we talked about.
People are coming in and saying, I want something super easy, super short, super simplified and then they're like, well, actually I wanna go in the studio and I wanna interview somebody, and I want you to look at my question lines and help me with the guest sourcing and the briefs. In the past it was more so that people came in, they didn't even know what they wanted to do, but they referenced shows like This American Life and Serial.
KL: What are you insights on the representation of Missing Middle Class podcast producers at podcast conferences and festivals, because it doesn’t often feel like those spaces are geared towards us.
KJ: The thing is that the podcast festivals in Canada aren't necessarily generated or started by audio storytellers.
Hot Docs was started by filmmakers and film aficionados, so it's different than something like Third Coast where it has a long history of being interwoven with public broadcasting.
But I actually don't know if we need any more insights about the podcast community. We need money. I don't want to know how a show was made. I want money to make a show. I want podcast festivals to set me up and become deal makers with investors who are interested in financing audio storytelling.
I don't wanna talk to networks who primarily source all of their storytellers in-house and use grant money or government funding to tell those stories. I want the commercial ecosystem to be holistic and enabled by festivals who profit from the preview and celebration of that medium.
What Katie is loving:
Want some brand awareness at Pod the North LIVE?
Until September 30th, you can lock in ad-space on the Pod the North LIVE stage digital backdrop, plus special shout-outs at the show, for a pretty affordable price!
Check out this Canadian Indie: Simplest State
Our guests have searched for something more.
The Simplest State of human awareness is the state where consciousness is open to itself. Our guests describe the pursuit, development, and expression of consciousness and creativity in their lives. Unique guests, fascinating stories, wonderful revelations, and spiritual epiphanies, all brought to light in an entertaining and informative fashion.
True North Podcast Feature: RAVEN (De)Briefs
What we mean when we talk about “LAW” on Turtle Island.
Join host and RAVEN founder Susan Smitten for a courageous conversation with Indigenous folks about rights, responsibility, and redress.
What’s going on in Canada’s podcast ecosystem:
The Canadian Podcast Awards are at Fan Expo this week with a bunch of incredible podcasters including: 1923 Main Street, 30 Going On 13, A Year in Film, Deep into History, Doctor DC Podcast, F*ck Buddies, Opinionated Lushes, and so many more! Catch the line-up ahead of time here!
CoHost has announced Advanced Audience Demographics, a new tool that give you access to super specific date, like audience age, gender, household income, interests & hobbies, family members, and social media consumption & habits.
Podcast Movement has kicked off in Denver this week and you’ll find plenty of Canadian podcast people there, including folks from Pacific Content
Some one tattooed Canadian Politics Is Boring’s logo on their leg! If this ain’t a fan, I don’t know what is. The CPIB’s co-host, Rhys Waters, went on to say about their new campaign that pays listeners to tattoo the podcast’s artwork on their body, “you pay a fortune for 1 month of billboard space, but a tattoo lasts a lifetime.”
For your pod:
There’s a new integration between Patreon and Spotify! “You can connect your Spotify and Patreon accounts to access patron-exclusive podcasts right where you’re already listening to your favorite audio content,” said Spotify.
Are you a trans podcast creator? Send your podcast news to Podplane, the monthly newsletter spotlighting podcasts by trans, nonbinary, and non-cis creators. If you’re excited about it, Tal Minear will probably too!
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Just Joe (having a Sunday snooze)…
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Thanks for supporting Pod the North, I’ll be back in your inbox in two weeks!
Kattie | @Podkatt
(Find me on Twitter, Threads, Spotify, and Goodpods)
LET'S GO. I'm tryna get to Canada!
Thank you so much for the shout out!