Making Journo remotely (without losing our minds)
You don’t need to be in the room to be on the same page, writes Rachel Fountain, Executive Producer
JNI commissioning Editor Andrea Ho, Deadset Studios director Kellie Riordan, Journo’s host Nick Bryant (holding Journo’s New York Festivals Award), and producer Britta Jorgensen.
1. Get (in) a room
Audio folk, you know that feeling you get in a studio. When it’s you and the talent, or you and the producers and writers, and you’re recording, and you can just hear something’s off? Someone hits a syllable weirdly, or an edit is too tight. Or you suddenly realise you’ve left a huge double entendre in the middle of a serious interview? When you’re physically together, you make eye contact through the glass, or someone laughs, you lean over the sound designer’s shoulder and point at the waveform, or you hit the in-ear button and pronounce it correctly... and you fix it then and there. You’re in sync.
On the podcast Journo, we've never had the whole team in one place at the same time. Ever. For the entire first season, at least half the team was in one lockdown or another for the duration. Host Nick Bryant was on the other side of the globe for pre-production! So, we were strict about getting together online. Even though it’s punishing to spend hours in virtual meetings, that’s what we did. Our editorial meetings were video meetings, ditto for our production meetings. Our producers would live-produce interviews using virtual studios, same for the ‘pick-up’ recordings and narration. Nick and the audio producers even did online editing sessions together – it’s about being in the same moment and hearing things the same way.
Ditto for feedback sessions. We also always assembled the team for a virtual ‘listening party’... we turned up with headphones and open minds and listened to the entire rough cut of an episode for editorial flow, story, audio quality, tone, tweaks we could make to tighten up the narrative, or darlings to kill. Then we listened to each other. There’s something special about sharing a moment, conversing, debating and deciding together, instead of entering the tone minefield vortex of endless email threads. Plus, it’s been a minute since most of us have been in the studio/office every day. Sometimes you forget how much you need people to help you lighten up and enjoy the work. As the world opened back up, we met up IRL whenever we could, but as we’re still geographically diverse, we kept up the virtual rooms as a discipline.
2. My kingdom for good systems and tech
Maintaining version control and good file management hygiene is a love letter to those you work with, and those who come after. We learned this the hard way – as Journo is a co-production with the Judith Neilson Institute, we spent many hours trying to coax our twin Microsoft suites (Deadset Studios’ and JNI’s) to build a bridge and talk to one another. It took plenty of trial and error but we cracked the code and went on to happily edit live documents together in harmonious real time, in our clear and intuitive folder structure. (I do have a few questions for Bill Gates though, if anybody knows the guy...)
In terms of tech, this was trial and error as well. Virtual recording studios have come a long way since March 2020, and none of them are perfect. But we found Riverside.fm to be adequate to our needs most of the time. The big downside still, is you can’t monitor the real local copy of the guest’s recordings in real time. Journo’s an Australian-based podcast with an international outlook. Often at short notice and across multiple time zones, we would record Nick in Sydney, a producer working in the virtual studio remotely, and communicating with both the host and our guest, who could be in Mumbai or Geneva, in New York or Kabul.
The reality of that was, we had to deal with a fair few audio quality issues in post-production. But for every interview, our producers would test the audio, and try like blazes to get the best input available, even if that was coming through dodgy Wi-Fi on a borrowed laptop and earbuds. Then it was systems again, working to paper edits and transcripts in shared documents and rendering those stems to send to the sound designer. A huge and eternal thanks to the incredible sound designers we worked with, who made those episodes sing.
And that brings me to my final point, which is...
3. Nothing in this world is as valuable as great people
When the right talent is only available at 5.30am on a Saturday. When your expert is (rightly) sweating over whether their comms are under surveillance by a hostile government. When you’re pushing up against deadline while trying to be a good parent or partner or just be present at playgroup. When the sound’s out of sync, the video jitters, or the connection drops out mid-sentence during the quote of a lifetime. When you have different views and you need to find a solution. Having a team who were calm, who were kind, who were problem solvers, who had a sense of humour – that’s what it’s all about. You can handle anything when you have a team like that.
This team was all of that in spades and on top of that, every single person believed in the project. From managing editor Kellie Riordan and commissioning editor Andrea Ho, who both championed the podcast from the beginning, to our determined, solutions-focused and talented journalist producers Margie Smithurst, Nicole Curby (season 1), Grace Pashley and Britta Jorgensen (season 2), to our lateral thinking (and late working) digital editor Andrew Griffits, the bevy of wonderful sound designers (hats off to Bryce Halliday, Krissy Miltiadou, and Melissa May among others) and our always impressive, funny, kind host Nick Bryant, who has more finely honed abilities to distil a yarn to its real meaning than other journo I’ve ever met – bravo!