Expert Podcasting Practices For Dummies®

Chapter 49. New Hosts, New Podcast?

In This Practice

• Making a graceful exit

• Finding a quality replacement

• Evaluating your new program

• Making the necessary changes

Podcasts can be a personality‐driven enterprise. Good hosts forge a connection with listeners — and have the personality, knowledge, and charisma to keep the masses coming back for more. Hopefully, you have just such a host at the helm of your program, whether it's you or somebody else. And yet, people move on and times change. Hosts go elsewhere, whether it's David Letterman moving from NBC to CBS or your friend deciding to leave his more general videogame podcast to focus solely on his love of small‐leaping‐Italian‐plumber games (but only the original work — those new games corrupted this message).

There are a lot of factors to consider at this point, including how a new host affects both the podcast itself and the program's listeners. You have to decide what (if any) changes need to be made in the program itself, and you need to decide who's going to come on board to replace the familiar voice at the mic. That person may, in turn, require more changes in the program. With all these priorities flying around, you'll need to get a pen and paper to write all this down and make sure you keep everything straight.

Heading Toward the Door

If you have got a little lead time before you know a podcast host is going to be moving on, it might be best to lay the groundwork for a graceful exit. Audiences don't like to be surprised, and losing ...