Making the switch from radio broadcasting to podcasting is easy because they’re essentially “variations of the same job”, according to former BBC 6 Music presenter and podcaster Shaun Keaveny.
Keaveny, who has hosted a number of podcasts in the past, including Shaun Keaveny’s Show and Tell for Spotify, Sony Music UK’s music podcast The Line-Up, BBC Radio 4 travel series Your Place or Mine, and Global’s newly launched daily podcast Shaun Keaveny’s Daily Grind, told PodPod that the transition from radio to podcasting came naturally to him, and that as long as radio broadcasters know how to communicate, they can do it in any format.
“I'm sure people who are a bit more experienced in podcasting would say it's quite a different skill set, but to me, it just feels like variations of the same job,” Keaveny told PodPod in the latest episode of the podcast. “You can switch from doing a YouTube thing to a TV thing to a radio thing to a podcast thing; it's the same basic job.”
Global’s Daily Grind podcast, which launched on 16 October, uses a similar format and tone to his long-running BBC breakfast radio show, and includes elements commonly found in radio such as listener dial-ins and recurring segments. Keaveny told PodPod that the podcast is more of an “experiment”.
“It seemed like this idea of doing a daily podcast was catching a lot of attention and a lot of numbers,” said Keaveny. “There are lots of fantastic podcasts, in particular current affairs ones, that do things like that, but we had noticed that there weren’t that many that tried to have that relaxed, daily, sort of nonsense stream of consciousness radio program vibe.”
Unlike live radio, Keaveny also told PodPod that the podcast format is less restrictive than radio and allows him to experiment with different formats. The radio broadcaster also hosts Community Garden Radio, which is a two-hour subscription-only live-streamed audio broadcast on Patreon, which helps him “scratch that itch” when it comes to digital radio.
“The thing that is a bit different when it's a podcast, and when you're working with a genius which I am with [podcast producer Ben Tulloh] and with people who are really supportive, is that you've got more options,” said Keaveny. “We're not just stuck in the padded cell, we can get on the bus and do a feature, we can go to the pub and do a feature, we can go to the canal side, we can go on holiday - any of it can feed into the actual story of the podcast which is brilliant. I mean you can't do that if you're doing Radio 2 drivetime.”
