A little while ago, we ran a listener survey to learn more about how you access our show, what you listen to, what you like and dislike, and so on. That survey garnered a lot of wonderful responses — thanks! As such, The Skiffy and Fanty Show will be changing a bit.
These changes aren’t permanent. They’re an experiment. We’ll reassess in a few months to see how it’s working out, and we’ll ask you all for feedback again (because you’re awesome).
Here’s what you can expect around these parts for the foreseeable future:
1. Shorter Episodes
A number of listeners mentioned that they either preferred episodes no longer than 1 hour or didn’t much care for S&F episodes that ran longer than that time. You may have noticed that our episodes have already started to drop in length. Since we’ve never consistently recorded episodes under 1 hour, this is a bit of a learning process. However, we plan to reduce the average length of all future episodes (minus Torture Cinema) to a 45-60 minute average. Torture Cinema episodes will increasingly fall below the 2 hour mark until we can get it to as close to 1.5 hours as possible.
2. More Discussion; Fewer Interviews
The majority of respondents wanted more discussions, whether centered on our yearly theme, on general genre-stuff, or on genre-happenings. As such, we’re going to put more focus on curated discussions than on interviews. We’ll still run a few interviews here or there, but they will start to lean more towards the kinds of interviews we used to do way back when: spoiler-y, in-depth monstrosities (with a little silly). This will also get us away from a problem many listeners identified as “interviews as PR machine.”
3. Topic Suggestion Form
To make the show a little more interactive with you, the listener, we’ve decided it would be a great idea to take topic suggestions from you! You can use this form to suggest a topic for any of our features.
3. Fewer Episodes
Last year, I (Shaun) recorded so much stuff that we’re still releasing material to this day (two more left!). On top of that, we recorded an average of 6 episodes a month. This format is going to change for one simple reason: we’re doing too much and would be better off being a bit more focused. As such, we’re going to reduce releases to an average of 4 episodes a month, with the occasional 5th episode (very occasional). This will allow us to put more effort into what we’re already doing to improve the overall quality of the show.
4. No More Skits
Not enough people said they liked them, and so they are going the way of the dodo bird. Shaun (me) weeps; Jen laughs maniacally as her evil plan comes to fruition.
We might make other changes, too. The above changes are just the beginning.
What do you think?
15 Responses
I think we might have to do another to talk about all this…
Oh? Why?
Ch-ch-ch-changes
What’s wrong with changes?
Nothing at all -it all sounds good, I was just looking for an excuse to do another interview with you guys in future…
You can always do interviews with us. We’re not cutting those out 😛
Glad to hear it!
Hey Shaun, just realized my first comment was unclear, sorry about that (late at night where I am.) All I meant to say was “these changes sound good – we will have to do another interview some time to talk about them all!”
No worries!
How’s about transcripts (or at least summaries) for those who don’t like/can’t hear podcasts?
I’d love to do something like that, but we’d need to find someone to do the work of transcription. That’s several hours of added work for each podcast. Otherwise, we’d have to use some kind of automated software, which may or may not be terribly accurate.
It might be worth running a couple of shorter episodes through the automatic software to see the results.
I don’t know much about transcription software. If you have any recommendations, that would be great.
I didn’t even know it existed, so you’re already ahead of me, lol.
I heard about it on a podcast, but a quick Google doesn’t bring up anything. So not sure if it’s just really crappy and nobody wants it or it doesn’t really exist.