If you’re not sure where to start, the easiest assets you can make right away are the text ones because you already have a complete audio story and it’s just a matter of converting some or all of that story into text form.

• Summary: a short description that can include the following:
  • What that specific story or episode is about including topics covered or guests featured.
  • What the show or series is about as well as maybe a bit about the hosts.
  • A bit about the platform, company or brand that encompasses that series or show.

Having this essential piece of text is the easiest and most helpful especially if you plan to host your show on different platforms since you can just re-use it. As a bonus, it includes all the key information you can share with people when you’re describing your story to them.

• Time Stamps: if you have notes and if your timeline markers are still accurate to your audio (after all the edits you’ve made), you can include these wherever you publish your story.
• Transcripts: transcripts are not just helpful to those who would prefer to read instead of listening, but it makes your story enjoyable by that many more people who otherwise can’t hear it due to hearing loss or where they are at the moment.
  • Styles: How you choose to style or format your transcripts is up to you, and comes down to how much of the original “flavor” of the spoken words you want to keep:
    • Clean Read: Transcribing for clean reading simply means removing most of the unnecessary repetitions, false starts, self-corrections and filler words. We generally aim to transcribe for a “clean read” with additional hints when necessary (such as laughter), but if there’s an emotive effect to a filler, for example, we’ll include it.
    • Verbatim: Verbatim sits at the opposite end of the spectrum and aims to transcribe as much accurate audio phenomena to text as possible including pauses and fillers. This is probably overkill, but you may consider writing peoples’ speech similar to how they really talk versus cleaning it up with formal English (gon‘ vs gonna vs going to etc.). To see a comparison of transcription styles, one transcription service offers some examples here.
    • Translations: This obviously goes one step further, but if you want to make your story accessible to diverse audiences, you may consider offering your transcript in a different language(s).
  • Services: For your first few stories, you probably will do the transcription yourself or divide up the workload between yourself and your team. But if you foresee yourself needing to transcribe a lot in the future and can afford it, there are a few automated services that you can use by purchasing credit:
    • Trint: Web-based transcription service (and the first one we ever used). Reliable for English and can detect multiple accents.
    • Descript: Supports video and has audio editing features built in. Has desktop app versions as well. This is currently the service we use.
    • Sonix: Also web-based, has support for over 36 languages and dialects. We’ve tested this before for client work with decent results for Asian languages, even from noisy environments.
• Article: Many of MAEKAN’s earlier stories had an audio story accompanied by a text story. Not everyone necessarily enjoys reading transcripts of conversations, but they enjoy reading a story that’s told through the voice of a narrator. Having notes and timestamps will save you time on sifting through audio again if you choose to write an article.
• Audio pull quotes: After text assets, the next simplest assets are audio quotes from your finished story. These quotes are helpful for when you want to showcase a short audio part of your story. Occasionally, you might need to trim these similar to how you would paraphrase a longer written quote (as long as you don’t go overboard with alterations) or re-export a version without any music.
• Images: accompanying your podcast with images can always help set the tone for your story and fill in any gaps in context, especially if the people speaking don’t end up providing it. For instance, audio stories might not always describe the environment where it’s taking place. So if you have some pictures or footage on location or of places described in the story, this would be a good time to choose some, edit if necessary and set them aside for later.In the above screen shots from Social Effects — Vivien Liu, Charis made the hero image (slide 1) by combining two images provided by Vivien. She also did this for the album art featuring Edward Barnieh, the host of Social Effects. Aside from drawing in potential listeners and readers, this approach helped tie the series together and give it a more distinct visual identity.