Fresh Air. Fresh Air production.
Hello, and welcome to Fresh Ears. I'm Neil Cowling, the founder of Fresh Air Production and we're the UK's leading producer of podcasts for brands. In this series, we look to see what we can learn about making branded podcasts by talking through one of the projects that we completed
with the producer and with the client. We talk about why they got into podcasting in the first place, the choices they made along the way, and how they judged it to be a success. We also, of course, talk about those bumps in the road. Radio DJ link coming up. But today we're not talking about roads but train tracks, as we explore Lives on the Lines, a podcast
series for Greater Anglia. In this series, our producer turned presenter to navigate her way around the branch lines of East Anglia, and speak to the wonderful people she met along the way.
Generations would have the same name passed down, wouldn't they?
They would, yes. Like West and Peg. They would sometimes have the same first name and therefore they would develop nicknames. Those nicknames varied greatly. Pongo, you had Teapot.
I can see them now. Poor old Teapot.
So, why would a train company create a podcast as a piece of owned content? Joining me to talk this through are Carrie Worrall, the PR consultant on behalf of Greater Anglia Media Team, and our client on this project, and Katherine Kerr, our brilliant senior producer for Fresh Air. So Carrie, let's start with you and let's ask the obvious question of why would Greater Anglia go for a
podcast? Why was that the piece of content that you decided to create?
Well, there was a couple of reasons, really. Firstly, that we'd done some research and discovered that podcasts were gaining in popularity. And then with the arrival of the pandemic, a lot of our planned activity in regards to making videos, holding events and other things that we'd normally do from a promotional point of view, all of a sudden we couldn't do.
So, we had spare budget and some time to fill and thought that as it was something that we'd been interested in for a while, it could be a good way to fill that communications gap, try something new, and experiment and see how it would go down with our customers and with people more widely in the region.
And so did you have clear objectives that you wanted to achieve from the start of the podcast? Or was it more of, as you say, experimental piece of content?
No, absolutely we had clear objectives because one of the things we thought was really good about the podcast format was it was something that we could to use to reach people during lockdowns. We
were seeing that podcast popularity was absolutely soaring. So, we thought it would be a really good way to present some of our beautiful scenic branch lines to people while they couldn't travel and give them that seed of this is something you might like to do when you can
travel again. But then equally, we thought they'd have a longevity that would mean that when restrictions were lifted, we could then use the podcast in a different way, almost as a guided audio tour that people could even listen to while they were traveling those lines.
And so just explain to us the branch lines and the community rail partnerships. How do those relationships work? What are they to start with?
So, we operate all the trained services in East Anglia. But on some of our rural branch lines, we also work in partnership with, and we fund, Community Rail Partnerships and their organization is comprised of ourselves as the train operator, local authorities, county councils, other interested stakeholders who are interested in improving that link between the railway and the communities that
they serve. And so the Community Rail Partnerships really kind of work with the community to drive improvement, to do projects that benefit the community, actually on stations and on platforms. So, they might work with local people to turn a redundant building into something that the community needs, or they might create station gardens. They might grow things on the station gardens that the community can use. They do
lots of outreach work into schools and other organizations. So, they are fantastic organizations, the Community Rail Partnerships, and they work really hard to promote the rural branch lines, to keep them thriving, to make sure that they are serving the needs of those communities that are around them and bring people to the railway, but also make sure that the railway is giving something back as well.
And so, people might assume that a podcast created by Greater Anglia would be for train nerds, for want of a better phrase, train enthusiasts. But that wasn't the case here. Who did you have in mind as the target listener? Who did you really want this to appeal to?
The podcast were made in partnership with our Community Rail Partnerships. What we really wanted to bring out was that our branch lines are really scenic, really beautiful, a really nice way to travel and to see the region. But also there is that real community feel and that real
community input into those lines. So, we wanted to bring out not only the lines and what you can do and see, but also the people that make the place special as well. That was our focus. And we wanted to just create a snapshot of these really special places and these really special people and present that to people
in East Anglia. Let them know about the history of the area as well and just encapsulate, really, what the lines are all about.
Lovely. So Katherine, as producer, you also became presenter of this series, which I'm pretty certain is the only series that we've made for a brand where the producer has crossed the line into also presenting it. It's fair to say this was a bit of a dream project for you and a passion project as well, wasn't it?
Yes. Especially given the timing as well. After we'd spent however long in lockdowns, to be able to ... Because it didn't start out, as the plan, that we would go to the places. But we just felt if we wanted to convey what Carrie was saying, the kind of community feel and the sense of place so strongly, we wanted to have
people recording locally. It didn't start out, obviously, with us saying that we would send someone down there in that period after the first lockdowns when it seemed things would be opening up, there was still a lot of uncertainty. But as it evolved, when you start to talk about a project in the early stages, you think regardless, how
big can it be? And you try to think how you do this if all the logistical things were no object. And so I think what we had in mind when we were throwing ideas around initially, was that we could ... First, I think Carrie's idea was we could get people locally to record things and send them in. And then it evolved from there into actually us going to the places and meeting people face to face and capturing
sounds and experiencing a part of their lives actually. And so the concept kind of fed back into itself. But yeah, as a producer, it was a dream project because as I'm very enthusiastic about rail travel, particularly in certain areas of our country, and East Anglia is such a beautiful and diverse, magical patchwork of people and landscape and industry and history. It was basically all the stuff I love
just rolled into one. So, it was great to work on it. Absolutely brilliant.
And you are a brilliant location producer. You're a really passionate ... The other work that you do with us, English Heritage. We've done National Trust, Historic England in the past. You've always found yourself going out and exploring these places and recording on location. Let's just talk about that for a moment. Why is location recording so special now that
we're able to get out of home again? What do you love about recording on location?
Obviously there's the thing about capturing the actual sounds and feel of a place, which you just don't get in a studio. But the other side of it is speaking
to people in a place where they are themselves. And when you have a conversation or an interview on location with someone in their hometown or someone able to talk in a space where they're particularly passionate about whatever you're talking to them about, you get a different side to
the conversation. People are more relaxed, open, because you don't have that sense of it being a live show with the deadline if you book the studio for a certain time and people have to get trains to and from. In all the location stuff I tend to do, when you're speaking to people who are experts in whatever area you are talking to them about, or have a passion, they're in a place they love to be. So, you're
just going to get a real sense of that. And that's why I really enjoy location recording.
And it's obvious to hear you that you are passionate about the topic and about the area and it's very clear why you were a choice for presenter on this. But how did that work? I think there would be a fear that if you are both producing and presenting, that there's a risk of frankly self- indulgence, without having somebody there to
control you or tell you what to do. How did you manage to make that work of doing both those jobs at once?
That was really hard actually, because it definitely got self indulgent at points. I was having a really nice time and I was swept away. And particularly in the writing side of things as well, I tend to enjoy going off on one
and waxing lyrical about something particularly wonderful or moving. But that's where working with Carrie was so brilliant because I just think, obviously we shared things between us or they went anywhere in first mixes, but Carrie's judgment and knowledge of the area and basically editorial notes really helped us refine things from the script stage through to the edits, through to
just refining things more and more as we go through the different stages of mixes, to make sure that we are focused on key pieces of content. I think what's really hard when you are talking to people face to face is that you get lost in the conversation and you are not aware of what an observer ... You shouldn't be aware,
really. I think the presenter shouldn't be necessarily aware of what producer here or someone there is thinking about in the moment. Obviously different for radio, but with podcasting, we want to be able to make the most of that recording time that we have to allow people to talk in as much depth as they can. So, it's very different, a live environment where you don't have that edit
process afterwards. So yeah, I think the edit process was completely essential in terms of that. Having that distance and having some collaboration, working with Carrie to make sure that we focused on what was important, what was universally interesting, and got the best out of everybody and did our contributors justice.
And Carrie, how did that work from your side of that two person team of you and Katherine creating that work? Was it particularly labor intensive from your point of view? Could you describe your input into the process?
I just feel so grateful that we found Katherine and we found Fresh Air. We had looked around at other places. But when we first spoke to you and then hearing that Katherine already had that knowledge and that passion for our subject, and then the way that she went on to approach all the different people, get their interviews, and the way the interviews came back, as Katherine says,
when she sent us the first mixes and things. We were just so happy. We were so pleased that she'd really just delivered exactly what we were hoping to get. A really high quality, just a real in depth look at
our rural branch lines. And I think we've just created something that is going to last for a really long time and people will look back on and say, " Isn't it lovely to hear those voices and those experiences?" So, it was a really, really lovely project to work on. Katherine made it really, really easy and yeah, collaborated really well with us all the time. Always made sure that
we were happy with what was coming through. She was really flexible. I know there were times when we said, " Oh, somebody's got in touch with us and they really want to see this angle. Can we revisit this?" So, sometimes I think we were a little bit demanding, but she was just really accommodating the whole way through. And we do just really couldn't have asked for more. We were so delighted with the final pieces.
Do you know, it was really great, actually, to have those things pop up as we went along because we
were building the story as we went, weren't we? And then the fab thing about the transition that has happened in people's understanding and willingness to adopt technology, to connect, meant that, okay, maybe we didn't get this person when we were on site on location, but we were able to do remote interviews with people and make that work.
Because the other thing is, even though we were in this relaxed period, we weren't to know that further lockdowns were on the way, it was very much, let's go cautiously and obviously make sure that we were compliant and erring on the side of caution with every kind of health and safety consideration in the way we recorded things, where
we recorded things, who we recorded with. I think it was great that we were able to have those interviews laterally with people via Zoom, if we needed to put in last bits that just added to the story. We probably wouldn't have been able to get those people to do that previously when they've got busy lives and they're not naturally using Zoom as a communications medium or happy
to talk over internet. So, I think that the level of willingness there meant it was possible to be more flexible from a production end.
And how did that process evolve? Did yous start off wit a clear wishlist, Carrie, of where you wanted to go and who you wanted to speak to as this overall narrative?
It did end up actually really full, so many people on the wishlist, so many places on the wishlist, and only 30 minutes or so that we were aiming for for each podcast. So, I can't remember if we ended up going over in some instances or not. But we really, really tried to squeeze so much into them, didn't we?
Yeah, they were packed. I think we kind of said it at the first stages, we went, " What if we had one day per line and we had a real time journey?" Because that's what we wanted it to sound like conceptually as well. We wanted the listener to go on that journey me. And what if we coordinated everybody down that line to be waiting at the stop, the
moment we disembarked? And in some cases that actually nearly happened, but there was a little bit of juggling and staying in hotels. But not so much. Do you know what was also really cool about that approach, Carrie, was at the same time I was down recording around East Anglia, there was a very well known television production filming
their take on East Anglia. And every time I went to some of the bigger sites, so of course when we're reflecting a sense of an area and place, then you want to go to those big hotspots the tourists have heard of and know. That's par for the course. That's what all the big production companies are going to
do. But we weren't doing that. We were there to tell a story of what it means to live in a place and meet the people there that you wouldn't hear of if you didn't live there yourself. Maybe you'd meet them in passing as a tourist. So, (inaudible) to
give that flavor. I think what we ended up doing was something really unique from the traditional documentary format where you just go and tick off that site, that site, that site. But we couldn't feature everything. And so we tried to be a little more selective and little unusual in our choices, just to give listeners something that they might not also have experienced of these places, and add a bit of depth
to the general understanding. Because we're speaking to a national audience. We're talking to people who are planning their travel to the area or have maybe even never been before. So yeah, I thought that evolved really nicely.
The other end of the process then, Katherine, you mentioned it, of the having gathered loads of stuff, and it's very easy with this type of project to go on a lovely journey, meet loads of brilliant people, gather loads of stuff, and then give yourself a real nightmare afterwards of trying to cut that down and trying to turn that into a story.
So, how did that balance work? Because you obviously set off knowing what you want people to say, but did you then end up with hours and hours that you had to troll through? Did you have a very disciplined process between you of cutting that down? How did that work?
So we naturally did end up with a lot more than we could feature in these programs. I was having this conversation with someone yesterday when I was doing another location recording. It was their first podcast into and they said, "
We talked for an hour. How are you going to make that fit to seven minutes?" I hardly needed to answer because someone I'd worked with previously as an interview guest came up and said, " You'd be amazed at how it gets cut down, and you can't figure out what's been taken out." And it is true because if you think
of natural conversation, that's your first thing, isn't it? Removing all those thoughtful moments or bits where a bus goes by and that sort of thing where you stop and start and grab a coffee, whatever. So, there's all that stuff. It always comes down to a point at the end where you're making really hard decisions and that's where you definitely need more than one person. Especially if you've
been the presenter as well. You definitely need more than one person to discuss what to leave in and what to take out because you need to always bear mind the range of people who are listening and also, not just what their perception's going to be of an interview in isolation, because we are montaging all of these pieces, but actually how it's going to sound as a full show and their
experience of listening. Are they going to be really tired by the end of it?
Carrie, so did you have to be very brutal in that final edit?
No. We also brought in our Community Rail Partnership offices nearer to the end as well to get their take on everything. And they helped with that final thing of did everything fit together well? Have we included everyone? Is there anything missing? That kind of thing. So, there was
actually quite a lot of people inputting into that. I remember, I think you actually provided us with transcripts, Katherine, for them, which actually really helped because you not only could you then listen, but you could read through as well, and that sometimes really helped you to see where you thought, " Well, maybe there's some repetition there, or this bit goes on a bit too long." So, that was
really, really useful. So, yeah, no, I didn't ever feel like we had to be too brutal. I think a lot of the really lovely bits just really stood out.
That's worth saying, actually, it's worth explaining the transcript for those who are interested. What we always do with the client is when we have the first cut, we provide that with an automated transcript, just a computer generated transcript, which
becomes the feedback document. So, it allows you as a client to, as you say, listen through, read the transcript at the same time, chop out all the bit so that you don't want, highlight things that you want moving around, even highlight things that you think are worth using for promotional activity. And then that's just an iterative process based on the transcript. It's a really, as you say, a really
useful tool, Carrie. It means that we are no longer having ... We don't have emails where someone says, " Oh, can you cut out from 15:26 through to 15: 45, please?" We've all got the transcript. We all understand what that means. It's a really handy tool. And then transcripts for the final cut, what we do these days is get a human generated transcript that's 100% accurate that we can then
put on the website, which works for SEO. It's a brilliant tool for accessibility, for those who have hearing difficult. So, all that content is there both in written form and in audio form as part of the final product. It's a great tool, isn't it Katherine, from a producer's point of view as well? The transcripts.
Yeah, absolutely. I think it helps, as you say, it takes out that uncertainty when it comes to time codes and it actually speeds things up for the clients. So, everyone has a faster process and you can action feedback more
accurately and quickly. Also that that paper edit you do before you even, in some cases ... I don't think we did it with this one actually, just because of the fact that sometimes I think it's easier to get in, especially if it's quite fresh in your mind, to get into an edit not long after and just work through the
conversation you've had and select it that way. But sometimes if you are coming to something cold as a producer, actually having a transcript there in front of you helps you quickly understand the subject and almost do an edit before you've done the edit.
Really important to say, what we always really, really want to encourage from a client point of view is listen at the same time as reading. Things sound so different from the written page and it's very difficult to just edit on paper. We have had clients in the past who clearly haven't listened to the audio and have cut out chunks and it might mean that you end up cutting mid sentence
when it doesn't really make any sense. You are getting, as Katherine says, the cadence of the conversation wrong, if you're not listening as well. So, it's really important that they're done in tandem, that you read and listen at
the same time. So Carrie, from a promotional point of view, I know that COVID got in the way, a lot, of promotion, it was a real restriction on what you were able to shout about, what you were able to push, particularly during lockdown, because you were essentially not allowed to promote people traveling during that period, weren't you? So when it came to promotion, what sort of tools did you
use? How did you shout about it?
Yeah, so during the lockdowns and when we had travel restrictions and people couldn't travel, our aim was really to put them out on ... We promoted them through our social media channels and also through the Community Rail Partnerships' social media channels. I think we also did some promotional work through the local media. During the lockdowns, they received over a
thousand listens. So, we were really happy with that because we couldn't really go all out as much as we wanted to really shout about them, but they did kind of achieve the objective that we wanted of keeping up our visibility during a time when we couldn't push travel and giving people that escapism while they were in lockdown and just setting that seed of being able to travel
on those lines at some point in the future. And the feedback that we got for them was absolutely brilliant. They went down really, really well and people were getting in touch with us to say how much they enjoyed listening to them. And the plan, now that restrictions have lifted, is that we will be able to put some paid social media promotion behind them and hopefully increase their reach even further.
I think that was something that we were bearing in mind throughout with the content creation as well, that we wanted these things to be evergreen, to have some kind of permanence to them. And so we, we deliberately didn't mention COVID in the recordings. We were making these for a time when we could be beyond it. And also so that people could escape that a little bit at the time of listening.
Yeah, you've built up a library of evergreen content there, haven't you? A box set of content. And people may just choose to listen to the branch line that they're interested in. They may be pulled in for all manner of reasons in the next couple of years, and you've got beautiful audio content that they will discover for a long time to come, I'm sure.
Yeah, that's it. I feel like we've got it forever now. It's just such a lovely way to pay tribute to those lines and all the work that people do on them.
So, to finish off then, Carrie, from your point of view, any tips or insights that you would give somebody who was looking to do the same in your position? What have you learned along the way?
Yeah, I think working with a professional production company was just fantastic for us and it meant that we got really high quality content. If we'd have tried to do something like that ourselves, it's not something we could have begun to try and achieve. As a result of that, we've got a really brilliant product. We can use it for a long time now to keep promoting those lines.
I would just really recommend everyone to give it a go. When we looked at doing it, we thought it would be a bit of an experiment, really, to see how it would go down. But it did really pay off
and the feedback was absolutely fantastic. So, I think we know now now that we have got an audience out there who are receptive to our podcast and who do want to hear about the railway in the region, and that's given us now the impetus to start looking at doing some different podcasts, some more behind the scenes of the railway type ones. So yeah, it has proved to be
a really good medium for us. It's something additional that we can add into our communications mix and it's just another format, one that's growing in popularity. So, I'm really pleased that we took the chance on it and yeah, it paid off for us.
Fantastic. And Katherine, from your point of view, projects that are trying to illustrate a sense of place, meet characters, tell stories. From a producer's point of view, what insight can you bring?
There was so much insight on this project just because of the circumstances we were working in. I'd say just let people talk in the place that they're most passionate, the places they live, and you will get the most compelling stories.
Brilliant. Thank you both very much, indeed. For anyone who's interested, it's called Lives on the Lines. It's available on all podcast platforms. It's a podcast full of characters, it's passionately produced, passionately presented as you can hear, and it is from a train company and you may not have expected that in the first place. So, thank you very much to Carrie Worrall, PR consultant on behalf of Greater Anglia
Media Team. To Katherine Kerr, senior producer and presenter from Fresh Air. And if you'd like to find out how you can make great podcasts for your brand or business, you can find us at freshairproduction. co. uk. In the meantime, I'm Neil Cowling. Thank you very much for listening.
Fresh Air.