Deez Interviews: Naomi Shavin on looking at podcasts through a magazine-y lens + the ideal daily show length
This week’s interview is with Axios podcast producer Naomi Shavin. We talked about what making a podcast has in common with making a magazine, how she got into podcasting, and the best way to warm up your interview subject while PFH (podcastin’ from home, duh). Enjoy!
What's your day-to-day like right now, and how does that compare to earlier this year when you were gearing up for the launch of both Axios Re:Cap and Axios Today?
My job has evolved a lot over this year. At one point, I was working on weekly coronavirus deep dives (like this one), putting out the Pro Rata podcast four times a week (the predecessor to Axios Re:Cap), and actively working towards the launches of both Axios Today and Axios Re:Cap.
In the midst of all of that, I was also on-boarding the Axios Today team and developing a totally new show with them — that felt like a dose of pure optimism and possibility in a dark time. I was also planning for the Re:Cap launch and relearning audio editing in my “spare time.” By the time both shows launched in June, I felt like I’d packed two years of work into just a few months, so my life is actually somehow calmer now that “all I do” is make a daily show.
In practice, my day-to-day involves a ton of reading/watching/listening to get a sense of what’s breaking and developing and how everyone else is covering a story so that we can differentiate our coverage. We pick one big story each day and bring our listeners an interesting interview on it with someone who is making news or driving the story or very close to it in some way. This means a lot of my morning is spent on booking and researching.
I’m usually fully signed on by 7:30 AM ET and Re:Cap comes out around 3/3:30 PM ET. Once we publish, there are post-production tasks and loose ends to tie up. Then it’s time to start attempting to plan ahead for the next day, knowing that if news breaks, everything could get scrambled.
What's something about launching a podcast (or two lol) that has surprised you?
I was really surprised by how similar podcasting feels to doing magazine work. Go with me on this.
Podcasts are very conceptual to me. I think they inhabit a really thoughtful space when you make them and when you listen to them. A show makes a promise to the listener and each episode has to fit into the premise and deliver on the promise. Podcasts are also incredibly personality-driven. This combination reminds me in a lot of ways of magazine journalism, which is where I started out.
I was working at the New Republic when it was still biweekly for a bit, and some things just feel similar to that working style: work that moves really slowly then suddenly moves very quickly, work with highly specialized production processes, the importance of flourishes and signature styles, the challenge of making something that feels fresh but also feels like an installment of a larger ongoing project with internal consistency, and the feeling that comes from making a whole thing from scratch that didn’t exist until you made it.
Both Axios Re:Cap and Axios Today are pretty short for a podcast; Re:Cap is usually under 15 minutes, and Today is typically ten minutes. Why so short? Is it a major editing challenge?
We could tape longer and cut down the interviews, but we prefer to tape them short and run them as close as possible to how they were taped.
A huge part of this is transparency. We were recently joined by Dr. Moncef Slaoui, the chief scientific advisor to the White House’s Operation Warp Speed. I think the audience should hear everything he had to say because what he’s doing and what he says about it is deeply important. Of course we smooth out cross-talk and noise disruptions, and other things that negatively impact the listening experience, but part of our promise to our listeners is a fascinating, very real conversation between an excellent reporter, Dan Primack, and a really important figure. That part of the promise is more important to me than the timestamp.
That said, and I can only speak for myself here: I don’t have time to listen to daily shows that are longer than 20 minutes with real day-after-day consistency. I wish I did, but I don’t. I want to make something I’d want to consume, but even more than that, I want to make something I can consume.
It has to be possible to build the habit before you can actually build it. I think more than 15 minutes every weekday for one show is a lot to ask of someone, especially during the pandemic. Maybe if we all go back to commuting someday, I’ll revisit my thinking on that.
Before your current role, you were editing the Expert Voices section at Axios, AKA not working with podcasts at all. What got you into the podcasting world?
I have loved podcasts for a really long time. I did a couple of independent studies on them in high school, including writing, hosting, and producing a narrative show that interviewed different members of my mother’s family to get the “real” story behind the famed, epic love story between my grandparents. I was very much sitting in my room, cutting tape and day-dreaming like, “I hope someday This American Life will notice me.” In college, I interned at WXPN in Philadelphia for a few years and I also had a radio show with friends. It was called “Radio Shmadio” and I still love that title so much.
But then I went to work for magazines and eventually for digital news outlets for a few years. When I made the jump to podcasting, I did expect a sharp learning curve. It certainly takes a lot of time and practice to get really good at production, and even more to become very fast. I think a lot about a quote from Ira Glass, which my colleague Carol Wu brilliantly reminded me of when I was early in my pivot and frustrated with myself, where he talks about the gap between your taste and what you’re making when you start out. The only way to get better at the work is by doing the work. I also want to shout out our executive editor Sara Goo, who encouraged me to make this pivot and empowered me to trust my instincts and pitch ideas from the jump.
In the end, the whole thing felt pretty natural. My jobs as a researcher and reporter and editor over the years shaped my editorial judgement and understanding of interview dynamics, and those were transferable skills. In my professional life, I’m extremely organized, with a strong sense of timing down to the millisecond. (This could not possibly be less true for my personal life, alas.)
I am a collaborator by nature, and I live for those mind-meld moments when it feels like everyone working together is sharing one super smart brain. I am also really empathetic, and I enjoy the challenge of trying to write for (and sound like!) someone else, or edit a script and still keep their voice intact.
Finally, for everyone who's been trying out creative ways to make both amateur and professional podcasts at home during quarantine, do you have any technical tips to make the process easier?
My best tip, honestly, is to use your work from home set up for warm-up banter and a sound-check. I guest-hosted Re:Cap for a week when I was working from my parents’ house in Atlanta. It was storming nonstop all week and we have a dog, and basically there was a ton of noise all the time, so I built a pillow fort with flannel blankets in my brother’s childhood bedroom closet and used it as my recording studio.
When guests joined the Zoom call, they saw me in a pillow fort and got permission to fully laugh at the absurdity of my situation. It immediately put them at ease, and it gave me a chance to explain what we needed from them in terms of small tweaks to improve sound quality. I interviewed a musician, Dave Bayley of Glass Animals, who told me he’d seen so many great pillow forts through quarantine, which I took as validation I was going with the audio industry standard for reducing background noise, and not just polite small talk.