A few people have asked me what process and equipment I use to produce the Richmond News Review, so I thought I would share some of that in case it's useful to others.

During the week, I collect information about news and opinion being printed and posted online. I do this largely through the use of syndicated RSS feeds, which allow me to read stories from a lot of sources in a central place. Of course, some of it is just sitting down and reading newspapers, talking to people, and being generally plugged into what's going on. Also during the week (at least lately), I make contact with people and potential interview subjects who I think may be able to contribute to the show. On or right before the day the show is recorded, I use the open source office suite NeoOffice to write any script elements that I want to use and to organize the format and order of the stories.

To record the show, I use an Audio Technica AT2020 microphone and the Alesis Multimix 8 USB mixer station connected to my Powerbook running Mac OS X. Garageband is my primary software for recording and mixing down the tracks, but I also make use of Audacity, Quicktime Pro, and a few other related tools. For conducting interviews I'm using Skype, which also allows me to provide the Listener Feedback Line voicemailbox. For field recording I'm starting to use an Olympus WS-310M digital voice recorder, we'll see how well it works.

Once the show has been completed, I use iTunes to convert it to an MP3 file, and then upload it to the web hosting account at Summersault. From there, I use the Wordpress weblogging software and the PodPress plug-in for it to create and manage the podcast "feed" that transforms it from just another file to something you can listen to online, fetch through the iTunes Music Store, etc.

So far, producing the show has taken incrementally longer with each episode. For the first one it was a couple of hours (though I'd been doing a lot of planning up until that point). With each new episode I've added some complexity (a new segment, a new kind of production process, etc.) and so I'm not surprised that the most recent show (RNR#4) took me the better part of a day to do (interview and all). But it seems like a lot for a show that's only 10-20 minutes long! My hope is that as time passes and the details become more routine, production time will at least level off, if not decrease. (Of course, that could happen more quickly if more people get involved in contributing content.)

I hope that's useful. If you have other questions, feel free to post them here or drop me an e-mail.