What Does “Producer” Mean, Anyway?
With no consistent norms for naming their roles, podcast producers and editors often borrow their titles from other industries.
It’s a staple of high school English classrooms everywhere: William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Its most important lines, at least as far as podcasting is concerned, are the ones Juliet calls down from her windowsill to a melodramatic, sappy Romeo sitting in the garden below:
What’s in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other word would smell as sweet;
Some people in the podcasting world are also asking “what’s in a name?” As the industry rapidly expands, it can be hard to find consistent titles among podcast creators.
Just ask Jody Avirgan.
Along with producer and editor, there’s also assistant editor, executive producer, managing producer, story editor, sound composer, and sound designer. And some people are all of those titles at once.
“None of these terms are effective terms if they mean different things in different places. You still have to describe things,” Willow Belden, host of the podcast Out There, told me. “It’s not the biggest problem, but it would be nice to be understood based on who you are and what you do.”
Like many independent podcasters, Belden fills various roles when creating her narrative, journalistic podcast. She employs someone to help market the podcast and a few freelance producers, but she researches story pitches, trims and mixes hours of audio, and hosts the show herself. On the podcast, she introduces herself without any title, and on her show’s website, Belden calls herself only a “host” and “founder.”
“I could give myself more titles, but that would see a little bit self-indulgent,” she said, laughing.
Belden comes from public radio — she was a reporter at Wyoming Public Radio before she launched her podcast — and that background influences her definitions of “producer” and “editor.” She says that in a public radio setting, an editor is someone who specifically edits the script and helps to conceptualize the story. An editor is not someone who is “fussing” with audio. The term producer gets more nebulous, though.
“I never know what producer means. I think it’s a really hard term. Producers, in my mind, are more behind the scenes in doing work that’s a little bit more hands on,” Belden said. “So they would be the people that would help book interviews and help mix the audio. But because we don’t have producers, I haven’t had to define it literally for us yet.”
For other independent podcasters, “producer” encompasses the whole role.
“I took the term “senior producer” on Hard Call because I conceived of the podcast and was the main creator of it,” Elaine Appleton Grant, who has a background as an editor in magazines and public radio, told me.
For Grant, terms like “executive producer” and “senior producer” signify the one’s role in leading the audio editing process. At a larger podcast network or a bigger public radio station, these senior producers oversee associate producers, who do much of the heavy audio mixing.
Grant related her perspective to the roles and titles of the magazine industry that she was familiar with. “The editor in chief of your magazine is going to be your visionary, the person that’s setting the tone and direction. The managing editor is the person making sure the train is running on time,” Grant said. “And what’s that person in the podcast world? I don’t know. It could be that you have an executive producer that’s the visionary as well as the managing editor.”
Belden and Grant agreed that much of the confusion regarding titles likely occurs because podcasting draws so many people from a wide variety of fields. Many new podcast creators have no audio background whatsoever, so they use titles from other industries. That’s what Gimlet Story Editor Devon Taylor thinks, too.
“I think it comes from the fact that people are pulled from a lot of different industries. And I think that’s something that is really exciting about podcasting that’s making the work so much richer,” Taylor told me. “But, I think that also means that people are bringing with them the titles from their own respective industries.”
At larger networks like Gimlet, there’s less confusion about what titles mean because there’s a bigger budget to fund more specialized positions like “story editor” or “sound designer.”
“Smaller teams and networks that don’t have big budgets are probably going to share those terms,” Taylor said. “In a lot of cases, they’re wearing a lot of hats. They’re doing the work that needs to be done and not worrying about what the title is.”
For Taylor, being a story editor means she handles editing the scripts for shows, which is her specialty — but it’s a far cry from her former profession as a lawyer.
Titles like “story editor” are only a recent phenomenon, used to best describe specific roles in the industry when there are no other consistent terms or rules of thumb to follow.
“I think these terms will change, and I think it’s because the industry is going to evolve into things that we don’t even imagine it will,” Taylor said. “The roles and titles may change as the industry expands. I have no idea what that will look like, though.”
And neither does Belden, but she did have one suggestion for podcasters.
“I really think that podcasts really need a new title that doesn’t exist yet,” Willow Belden said. “Or maybe it does exist, but I haven’t heard it.”
Liam Niemeyer is a recent college graduate working in public radio, with a passion for pods and obscure jazz. Have more titles you want defined? Send them to the Bello Collective at editor@bellocollective.com
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