Five things I learned working on the podcast Ransom: Position of Trust

I've spent the last two years working on and off on a new 9-part true-crime podcast, Ransom, which just launched today. You can listen to episode 1 above.

I'm really proud of the work I've done on it, and it's definitely the podcast I've sunk the most time into of any I've worked on. It was a blessing to get editorial support and to have the luxury of time to go through multiple rounds of revisions (some past projects of mine could've really used one more draft). In fact, Ransom, the only serialized true crime show I've worked on that was basically all in the can at the time of launch. 

That being said, the slower process has also taught me a couple lessons that I hope to take to the next project I work on.

1. When you have time then the struggle becomes motivation and consistency
   If you're under a tight deadline, there are things you wish you could change but don't have time to. This project I had the opposite problem — because of issues on the business side (we'd sold the podcast to Kast Media, shortly before it went down in flames) that meant I had extra time to refine the show, but I had to worker harder to remember what had drawn me to the story in the first place and to maintain the "tone" consistently throughout the show -- not to mention the new nightmare of matching VO tracks from different sessions conducted over months.
   
   
2. Collect pictures and links that you'll want to use in write-ups and marketing along the way.
   In general with this sort of thing I trust my memory -- if a quote's good and important, it'll be "sticky," I'll remember and be able to search back for it later. That's generally pretty easy to do with audio, because I'll remember the quote well enough to find it in the transcript. But pictures are much harder to search for - where did I see that again? I swear a stumbled upon the flicker of a photographer at the trial at some point, but now can't find it anywhere.
   
   
3. Similarly, learn how to do OCR (Optical Character recognition) on big .pdfs
   This is something I didn't do for this project but want to make sure I do on future projects. I spent way too much time, fact-checking and looking for a little snippet of something I remembered from disorganized hundreds of page pdfs from the FBI and Sheriff's department. In the future I need to digitize them with OCR so I can search, re-organize them with a table of contents the first time around. It'll be a pain but ultimately pay off.
   
   On the flip side, I did have the experience of leafing back through pages towards the end of the project, and stumbling upon something significant that I didn't understand the first time around. So flipping back through everything towards the end of the project is also important.
   
   
4. Be super explicit with your FOIA and on your hunt for archival.
   Ask multiple times to make sure you got everything. We nearly missed photographs from the sheriff department because we didn't explicitly ask for photos. Similarly, we almost missed some crucial archival footage by talking to the wrong person at a TV station. People at the station might not even know if or where their archives are kept somewhere.
   
   Explain how valuable any media like photos, home video or voicemail are to sources, and offer to do all the work of digitizing them.
   
   
5. Record everyone's contact info when you first connect with them (don't rely on phone and email for those records)
   When I switched from employee to contractor I lost access to my email, and forgot to back up messages I'd made with sources (and to add their contact info into my master spreadsheet). Similarly, my phone glitched, and because my iCloud was full, I lost a lot of contacts I'd made. Luckily I had done a decent job of keeping the master spreadsheet up to date, but I need to really make that a solid habit. So, future me: Once you make contact with anyone, update the spreadsheet that same day!
   ​​

There will probably be more thoughts to come, but these are the ones that jumped into mind on launch day!