FDR’s Presidential Podcast
This podcast audio served as the source for the blog post “Presidential Podcasting.”
The transcript was rewritten to produce the blog post, which is the cornerstone of the Shortcut Content system.
Transcript:
Shayla: Thank you for joining us today for the Shortcut Content Podcast. I’m talking today with founder Dave Young. And, Dave, right now, it kind of seems like podcasting is all the rage. Everyone’s treating it as this new, creative thing, but you’re telling me it’s actually been going on for awhile. You say presidential podcasting is was actually a thing…
Dave: Yeah, the didn’t call it podcasting, but it started in the early days of radio, which has been around since the 1920s. And that’s all a podcast really is is a radio program, right, at it’s core, you just don’t have a transmitter and a tower. People listen to it by downloading it or streaming it off the internet. But, in essence, it’s radio. That’s all radio has every been is just content that is broadcast over a tower instead over the internet.
So when Franklin Delano Roosevelt needed to communicate with America at large, rather than putting out a speech and letting the newscasters pick it apart, starting in 1933, to talk about the banking crisis, he just went on the radio for about a half an hour. And he did that thirty more times between 1933 and 1944 on a variety of topics. There was a lot going in the world between 1933 and 1944. So each of his fireside chats, is what they called them, focused on a different topic. They had the economy in the 1930s, that very first one was on the banking crisis, and then, he talked about things from the judiciary to all kind of topics, including the European War in 1939 and then everything pretty much escalated into a discussion of World War 2 after about 1939 or 1941 when we got dragged into it with Pearl Harbor.
Right up until probably close to the time of his death he was doing these on fairly regular basis. He wasn’t every week, but they came to be known as Fireside Chats. I think it was actually a journalist that coined that phrase, because he wasn’t sitting at a fireside, but that was the way people listened to it. I think the thing to keep in mind is that’s how audio content is consumed, whether it’s radio or whether it’s a podcast. A fireside chat is a just a good analogy for it, it’s a good metaphor, because what happen is and when I was in the broadcast business, this is what I used to tell my announcers, even though your sitting in the control room, speaking into a microphone and your voice is being sent out to a tower and broadcast to people all over town where they can all listen to you, it’s a different type of communication than if you were standing on a stage delivering a speech. You speak differently if that’s the case. You say things like “all of you standing out there.” The audience becomes plural as opposed to singular.
The very best radio shows and the very best podcasts are conducted as if we’re having a conversation and then there’s one person listening in. So you and I are having this conversation and in our minds we don’t think of thousands of people. We think of one other person sitting at the table that’s just not participating in the conversation. And that’s the intimacy of radio and podcasting.
Reagan, during his term, started doing the Saturday morning weekly address, and that’s something that’s been continued by every successor since that time. Reagan picked it back up in 1982 and every President since then has been doing a Saturday morning radio address.
I think that’s the beauty of the medium is being able to get on an share your expertise, establish your credibility and then talk in a way that let’s people deepen their understanding of what it is that you do and the kinds of problems that you help your customers to solve.
Shayla: So if someone that’s listening today wants to know a little bit more about how to do that for themselves, what do you suggest?
Dave: Well, here at Shortcut Content, that’s what we do. The format that we use to create written content is to start with a podcast, to start with this one on one conversation, just like we’re having, and then we turn that into a written version that you can put on your website or your blog that continues that conversation in your voice, but just as a written voice. And you don’t have to do the writing; all you have to do is have this little five-minute conversation that you and I just had.
Shayla: Dave, the website is ShortcutContent.com?
Dave: That’s it.
Shayla: Alright, thanks, Dave.
Dave: Thank you.