Jason Snell
Writer, editor & podcaster
Discussion
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Jason Snell
@jsnell · Six Colors
Hi! I’m Jason Snell, writer at Six Colors and podcaster for The Incomparable and Relay FM. I spent a decade as the lead editor of Macworld magazine and have been covering Apple since it was doomed. From Apple to other tech to TV, movies, comics, and books, I’m happy to talk about anything you’d like. Ask me anything!
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Blair Hanley Frank
@belril · U.S. Correspondent, IDG News Service
Where, ultimately, do you see the journalism ecosystem going in the future? Will large publications continue to thrive as hubs for news and feature writing, or will we see small blogs with lean staffs and low costs like Six Colors, MacStories and The Loop become the dominant home for publishing the same?
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Jason Snell
@jsnell · Six Colors
@belril Hi Blair, who was our lab intern for many years at Macworld!
Journalism's in tough times. I do think we're going to come through it eventually, but I'm not sure what's on the other side. Most likely huge traffic drivers like BuzzFeed are going to have to keep investing in original reporting to replace the stuff that vanishes as newspapers and magazines vanish. Also, I think a lot of the people working in the media right now are just not going to be able to keep doing it - I fear there is going to be a reckoning.
I do think there's a place for small sites on the Internet, obviously. My business has almost no overhead and is entirely digital. But at the same time, are people going to pay for sites like mine in the long term? If a few thousand do, I can keep doing what I'm doing. But you can only pay for so many $6/month subscriptions before it has a huge impact on your bank account.
Basically, it's a mess and I think it's going to be a while before it's cleared up and there's going to be pain and innovation in the meantime. I'd like to think that in the end, there is a market for good information, and you'll either pay for it or you get advertising to surround it or both, like in the old days. But the players will be very different.
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Jason Snell
@jsnell · Six Colors
I don't know, Terminator 2 Arnold Schwarzenegger. It's not something a robot could understand.
Alexandre Vallières
@vallieres · ½ of RGBA.fm | Web Developer | Blogger
For aspiring podcasters, name three tips you wished you were told when you started podcasting.
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Jason Snell
@jsnell · Six Colors
@vallieres 1. Expensive equipment isn't required (though it can help). 2. You've got to get over hating to listen to your own voice if you're going to get better. 3. Editing is important but don't over-edit or you'll never finish.
Kartik Parija
@kartikparija · Cofounder @AdoriLabs, Reimagining Audio
Dear Jason, we are a huge fan of your blog, especially the podcast related posts. Do you believe that podcast creation is till essentially difficult (Ferrite makes it easier, but still a significant learning curve), and there is need to simply the record, submission and discovery (perhaps all on one app) ? Also do you think the average podcast length will fall in the this resurgence of audio shows, and if so will it become closer to 10 to 15 mins, which may encourage both creation and consumption?
Alexandre Vallières
@vallieres · ½ of RGBA.fm | Web Developer | Blogger
@kartikparija if the subject discussed is interesting to you, I don't think the lenght matters. I enjoyed Clockwise as much as 3+ hours Hello Internet episodes! :)
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Jason Snell
@jsnell · Six Colors
@kartikparija Hi! I do think that audio production general is still really hard. We all have devices with microphones and editing software built in or available for free, but there's still a big learning curve. Services like Cast (tryca.st) and Zencastr make this much easier by doing it all in the browser, but they currently only work on Macs and PCs. I think it's all getting much easier much faster, though! But it's still pretty technical and that needs to become even easier.
On the "glut of podcasts" side, I do feel like everyone has too many podcasts to listen to these days. It makes it much easier to set a podcast on a every-other-week schedule, rather than weekly. And long podcasts are fine, but it's fun to make short podcasts too! Clockwise is always 30 minutes, Robot or Not is very small, and the new podcast we're doing about "Hamilton" is trying to be no longer than about 35 minutes per episode.
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Jason Snell
@jsnell · Six Colors
@vallieres @kartikparija Variety can be good, though! I hear from a lot of people who like to intersperse shorter shows rather than just have the big 2-hour marathons.
Taylor Olmstead
@tcolmstead · Marketing Coordinator, Atlanta Area BSA
Jason, how did you build The Incomparable once you were comfortable with it? I have a podcast that's getting pretty comfortable format-wise, but we're plateauing. What would you suggest we do as we enter our second year?
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Jason Snell
@jsnell · Six Colors
@tcolmstead If you mean plateauing in terms of listenership, that is a very hard question. What I tried to do was get in front of more people. Dan Benjamin invited us on to 5by5 and that really expanded our audience. Inviting on new people and exposing our show to their followings has also been helpful. And sticking with it and being consistent is way underrated--the bigger your catalog, the more consistent your release schedule, the better you will do over time. I really believe that. That said, after five years I feel like The Incomparable has found another plateau. I'm not sure how we get over it.
But the podcast itself is a quirky thing, it's really designed to be nothing but whatever amuses me. It definitely wasn't a targeted product that I built. If I wanted a bigger, more successful podcast with lots of room to grow I probably would have focused the subject matter more. But that's not the thing I wanted to make.
So I'd say be true to yourself, be consistent, and as you're doing that, also open yourself up to exploration. The Incomparable Network exists because we did things like game show episodes and Dungeons and Dragons episodes. It gave everyone who is involved a broader canvas, and more room to explore, and that's been great. You don't need to start a network, but exploring where you can take and break your format can be really fulfilling creatively and energize your podcast.
Taylor Olmstead
@tcolmstead · Marketing Coordinator, Atlanta Area BSA
@jsnell Thanks so much. Your work on The Incomparable Network has been a huge inspiration to us and I'm always excited to see what y'all will do next. Hopefully we'll both find our butter zone soon.
Alexandre Vallières
@vallieres · ½ of RGBA.fm | Web Developer | Blogger
How do you sync up double-ender audio tracks? The clapping method or something else?
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Jason Snell
@jsnell · Six Colors
@vallieres I've got to be honest, I've never used the clapping method. I used to do it by syncing the end of the tracks -- most people finish their recording at the same time, even though they start them at different times. I always record both my end and the group conversation on Skype, and use the Skype track as a reference. (It's also a great backup in case someone's recording fails, which often happens.)
These days I actually use an unreleased command-line tool that tries to automatically line up tracks based on the Skype reference track, and it works surprisingly well. Unfortunately, I can't give it to you because it's unreleased. Someday!
Jeff Needles
@jsneedles · BI @ Meerkat & Maker of Things
Hey Jason! Big fan of your work over the years. How do you compare podcasting and writing? Is one easier, more fun, etc... than the other?
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Jason Snell
@jsnell · Six Colors
@jsneedles Hi! Thanks! They are both very different. That's one of the things I love about podcasting is that it's not writing, and it uses a different part of my brain. John Siracusa has talked about how podcasting is often the audible working through of thoughts that ends up taking you to the place where you write about the subject, and there's something to that.
I started The Incomparable because back in the 90s we did a blog called TeeVee where we wrote articles about television and it was really fun and then as we got older and had more work (many of us are writers) the posts just stopped. I used up my writing brain on work, I couldn't use it for pop culture stuff too. But I could talk about it! I still had energy in that area, just not in the writing part of my brain.
Both of them are fun. Writing is much harder because you do have to be careful and considered at a level that you don't for podcasting. Podcasting is that rough draft, oftentimes. If you've heard me podcast you know I can talk a mile a minute. I can type fast, but let me tell you, it's a whole lot harder to squeeze the words out that way.
Matthew Shettler
@shettler · Designer
I feel like I spend more time hanging out with you and your friends on The Incomparable than I do with my real life friends. How do you deal with the dissonance when you meet fans in person who know you so well, but you don't know them from Adam?
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Jason Snell
@jsnell · Six Colors
@shettler That's sort of part of the life of being in the media. Podcasting does totally magnify it, though. Hearing someone's voice does a whole lot more to make you feel you know someone than reading their words on a page does. It's a little weird, but I appreciate that people like the stuff that we make and care enough to remember what we said. There is occasionally that moment when someone knows something totally random about your life that you didn't recall talking about in public, and you have to just accept that you did say that sometime on a podcast, and you forgot it but the person you're talking to remembers it well! That's weird, but not in a bad way.
Basically the short version of this answer is having an audience for anything I create is an incredible privilege and I am honored that people spend their time reading and listening, and even moreso that they remember and even sometimes make charts about us involving Skeletor.
Aaron Isaacs
@aaronisaacs · Aaron Isaacs
You can only have one movie to keep on your iPad at all times, what is it?
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Jason Snell
@jsnell · Six Colors
@aaronisaacs Real Genius is my comfort food. I have an HD iTunes copy now--I don't think it's out on Blu-Ray yet--and I generally keep that synced. Raiders of the Lost Ark is another good one that is often loaded, and the J.J. Abrams Star Trek, actually.