My NPR News colleague Stacy Bond shares word that San Francisco-based AudioLuxe will be holding another podcasting workshop this weekend. Some blogosphere pals attended the last edition, and all the reviews I heard came back enthusiastically positive. Stacy 'splains:
We're holding another Content Crash Course this weekend, April 22nd and 23rd. We’re doing them monthly now. This time around, Tom Krymkowski – a stellar mixing engineer who works on a couple of rather well-known SF podcasts and travels around the country with NPR’s Next Generation Radio – will handle the technical side of the class; he’ll cover things like setting up a mix and choosing a good mic.
As usual, I’ll cover the content stuff: writing for the ear, booking hot guests, streamlining the production process and so on.
The weekend is a blast, we always get yummy lunches from Whole Foods, and everyone learns from each other as well as from the instructors. The course is held at the luxurious studios of KQED in SF. Cost is $350 for the entire two-day weekend, breakfast and lunch included. (AudioLuxe is a non-profit and the workshops help cover our modest operating expenses). Our goal is to teach DIY podcasters to apply professional techniques to their own, cool content.
I seriously believe professional broadcasters should not have a monopoly on quality, especially because of their failure to innovate. They had their chance and wasted it. Now that audio producers can go directly to the listeners with their message, we want to help folks sound great.
Everyone’s on a giant learning curve (kind of like when desktop publishing first started and everyone was making “brochures” for their home daycare biz, but no one had any design experience so everything had stick-figures and balloon icons).
If indy producers know how to apply the craft of making great audio, we level the playing field a bit. I’ve still got four spaces open for this weekend.
