Helen Zaltzman does it all with The Allusionist, Answer Me This, and Podcasters’ Support Group
The Allusionist, her podcast under the Radiotopia network, was originally (and fittingly) billed as the “99% Invisible, but for language.” Though a concise and effective pitch, The Allusionist morphed into something else entirely. Sure, it’ll cover the origin of specific words (word of the day: etymology; the study of the origin of words and the way in which their meanings have changed throughout history.), deep dive on crossword puzzles, and explore some of your favorite literature but if you listen to both The Allusionist and 99% Invisible, you’ll quickly realize that’s where many of their similarities end. The Allusionist is witty and quick. Where Roman Mars’ smooth voice often transports you to another location, Helen Zaltzman’s British accent and up-tempo pace plays similar to a podcast brain game and I mean this in the kindest regards. I’m not alone with my positive sentiment, Zaltzman is a multiple award-winning podcast and The Allusionist was named the best new podcast on iTunes in 2015.
As a longtime fan (proof: she was one of my four Rushmore nominees), it was great to have the opportunity to speak with Helen about her podcasts, the Podcasters’ Support Group, and the changes to the medium as the popularity of podcasts grow. See below for our Q&A, lightly edited for clarity.
The Allusionist
Answer Me This
***
Kevin: Can you tell us a little bit about your background and how you got started with The Allusionist and Answer Me This?
Helen: I didn’t have any relevant audio experience when I started. We started Answer Me This eleven years ago, because we wanted to get jobs in radio and no one would employ us, so we said, “Let’s do our own show and within about ten episodes, they’ll probably give us a radio show,” which obviously didn’t happen.
The Allusionist began eight years after Answer Me This, but I still didn’t know what I was doing, because it’s a very different kind of show. Answer Me This is conversational, it’s comedy, it’s basically the same format every episode. Whereas The Allusionist is approaching different subjects in a different way each time.
Roman Mars was a fan of Answer Me This, and when he was beginning Radiotopia, he was interested in getting Answer Me This involved. He was staying with me in the summer of 2014 and I took him for a walk around the local park and I said, “I have this idea for a show. It’s kind of like your show, but about language,” and he said, “Okay, let me see.” PRX later agreed they could take the gamble on it.
Then, I actually had to figure out what it was going to be because I don’t know how to make 99% Invisible for language. (I would love to know how to make 99% Invisible for language!) It evolved into something else. I think it took a couple of years of making the show for me to know what it is.
Kevin: As a longtime podcaster, what are the biggest changes you’ve seen specifically in the last few years as the medium grows at such a rapid pace?
Helen: Massive changes. One is: now, if you say you’re a podcaster, you might not have to explain what that means! There’s also quite a high chance if you tell someone you’re a podcaster, they’ll say, “Oh, I’ve been thinking of starting a podcast.”
For the first many years of doing Answer Me This, it wasn’t just trying to get people to listen to our show: it was trying to get people to know about podcasts in the first place. You still have to do that quite a bit even now, but it was a lot worse before Serial. It’s also possible to make a living out of podcasting now. That took quite a few years to be the case. I’d say those are two of the main ones: awareness and money.
Some things are the same. You can be somebody like I was, with no relevant audio experience, making a show from home and reaching a lot of people. You just need to make a decent product – whatever your interpretation of that is – and I like that. I like that you don’t have to be a radio person or a celebrity to do well as a podcaster.
Kevin: Where do you think podcasts still need to go to fully enter the mainstream?
Helen: I’m quite happy with them being still a little bit outlying, because the audience tends to be nicer. You don’t listen to a podcast passively. You have to opt in, and why would you hate-listen to a podcast when you could be doing anything else? Generally, the listeners tend to be pleasant and positive. I imagine as podcasts get bigger, then the listener will feel more distant from the creator and therefore it’s easier for them to be venomous towards someone who they don’t really know.
I think what will happen is the lines will become very blurred as to where things originated so if someone is enjoying what they’re listening to, they won’t care whether it was a podcast first or radio or a stripped down video.
Kevin: As the founder of Podcasters’ Support Group, how has that community coalesced and what are your goals?
Helen: The first few years I was a podcaster, there was no one to ask about podcasting. We ended up forging our path ourselves and creating our own method of doing things with Answer Me This. We had no examples for the way we marketed it and the way we built a relationship with our listeners. So whenever I did meet podcasters, it felt like we had this kinship because there were so few of us and we were mostly working alone, and we’d quickly become friends because we needed each other. Podcasting can be a lonely thing to do and you need some other people who understand and will tell you it’s okay.
There was one month in particular in early 2014 when several of my podcaster friends in Britain met up with me to ask for advice, even if they had been podcasting for longer than I had. I thought, “Gosh, if these people I admire need some support because they’re all alone pursuing this thing, then there are probably a bunch of strangers thinking, ‘What the hell do I do?'”
Then, I heard about this organisation that was charging people for podcaster meetups in London and I thought that was bullshit, so decided to do it for free, and I started doing these meetups – like Roman Mars was doing with Office Hours then, I nicked the idea from him. Anyone could come and ask me questions about dealing with their format or tech stuff or just making podcasting fit in with their life, and very quickly, the meetups evolved into more social occasions. The best thing was attendees meeting each other and bouncing off each other and starting to work together.
Now, we hold regular-ish meetups in London. There’s the online community, which has spread beyond the British core. There are currently 4,000+ members of the group, around two and a half thousand more people than it was a year ago, because so many more people are interested in podcasting.
I’m always trying to demystify podcasting. If you were new and thought, “I’d like to do this,” you’d look for advice online and be so daunted, you might never start. There’s all this stuff saying you need to invest a lot of money into equipment, you need staff, and you need eight months to develop the show. Most people can’t do that, and I don’t think you need to do that. I want the medium to stay free and to stay scrappy a bit around the edges because I think that keeps it interesting. I don’t want every show to be slick, or derivative of public radio. I think there could be so many interesting ways to work in audio that we don’t know about yet: people who have very different experiences and styles of expressing themselves could make audio that sounds like nothing we’ve ever heard before. I would really welcome that.
Kevin: You’ve done a lot of work at advancing women’s equality in broadcasting. Where do you think this area still has the most work to go and what are the efforts being done to further that?
Helen: For a few years I was part of a lobby group called Sound Women, who did research into British radio’s representation of the genders. They found that 19 percent of on-air voices were female. That embarrassed some stations into making some effort, but often those efforts were just to get a secondary host to a male host, so she didn’t really get to lead the show and might only be allowed to giggle at whatever the male host says.
Behind the scenes, it’s not equal either and that impacts what’s on air. Representation matters. I grew up hearing all men on radio – and, to be honest, I didn’t notice. Then, when I was aged ten, I heard a female radio host and immediately thought, “This sounds wrong.” Because it was so unfamiliar.
There’s a piece of research quoted all the time in Britain that says people, including women, don’t like listening to women on radio. This is the excuse used to not allow women on radio. It’s obvious bullshit and also, may not even be a real piece of research – nobody has actually seen a copy.
I found this a really dispiriting industry to try to work in. You can’t do your best work in a system that doesn’t want you working in it.
Hopefully, representation is better in podcasting. Serial is a female-fronted and -produced show and when it landed, it meant you no longer read lists of the best podcasts that were 100 percent men’s podcasts. Another Round showcases two super smart, charismatic women, and that opened the door to more podcasts hosted by women, particularly women of colour. Mainstream TV wouldn’t have taken a chance and launched something like Another Round. The success of podcasts like that proves how unadventurous a lot of other media has been.
Kevin: Why do you hate puns so much?
Helen: I grew up in a very pun-heavy household and my dad will often use the same jokes he was using 20 years ago. I feel like puns are too easy. You can do one and you get over-rewarded for a bad joke. That said, I do like shops that have puns in their name.
Kevin: How drastically has your life changed since being inducted to The Discover Pod’s Mount Rushmore of Podcasting?
Helen: Yeah, I have a lot more tourists walking around on my face. [Laughs]
Kevin: What are other podcasts out there that you admire, that you regularly listen to?
Helen: There’s a really beautiful show made in Britain called Imaginary Advice. It’s fiction monologues and I don’t tend to listen to fiction or monologues, but this show is magical. Start with the Six House Parties episode.
A friend of mine, Eleanor McDowall, is an incredible producer of radio documentaries in Britain and the BBC show Short Cuts. She also does Radio Atlas, where she subtitles foreign-language radio documentaries. She subtitles them in English, so you still get the atmosphere of the documentary and all these people’s voices, but if you don’t speak Finnish or Icelandic or Spanish, you can still understand the story.
There’s a bunch of BBC ones I would recommend. One of them is Witness, a world service show. It’s nine minutes of oral histories about historical events. There’ll be an episode every weekday and one might be about Nelson Mandela being freed from prison and the next one might be about The Spice Girls’ first album being launched.
Another one is Desert Island Discs, which has been running for seven decades on Radio 4. It’s just someone notable choosing eight songs to take to a deserted island. The format still worked all this time later. You can’t listen to it and not think, “Okay, what would I take?”
A few of the podcasts that were on my regular listenership have recently ceased operations. The Heart, Why Oh Why and Dinner Party Download, I’m going to miss those a lot.
Kevin: As a podcaster who clearly spends a lot of time editing and making sure the final product is quality, what are your thoughts on speed listeners?
Helen: Whenever you create something for anyone’s consumption except your own, you have to accept once you’ve done it, you don’t have control over what the recipient does with it. I don’t like it, but I get it. I will listen to some shows on 1.2x, maximum 1.5x speed, but only shows that don’t have any audio texture in. So, for example, if it’s three people discussing a film, I might speed it up because it feels like I can still absorb the information at 1.5x. My brain can’t process information faster than that!
It’s a bit of a problem because when you’re making things, they’re not made to be consumed in that way. In audio, it’s not as easy to pick up on something that you might have missed; you can’t flip back to the previous page like when you’re reading. You can lose people quickly if they don’t take in the things you said. In my shows, I try not to repeat myself. I don’t like holding the listeners’ hands that much, or steering their thought processes too strongly, so I tend to under-explain things a bit so nobody feels condescended to; when writing and producing, I have failed to consider the sped-up listener.
That said, it’s probably still preferable that someone listens fast than doesn’t listen at all.
Comments
Comments are closed.