Salvaging a Bad Podcast Interview

Ever play back an interview and feel your stomach drop? We’ve been there. This week, we tackle the exact moment a conversation misses the mark and walk through practical ways to turn a messy interview into a clean, confident episode your audience will actually love. Plus a teaser for next week’s episode.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Fan Mail Question: Salvaging a Bad Interview
• 1:04 Why An Interview Might Fail
• 1:43 Salvage Plan: How do use what we've got
• 3:08 When To Scrap And Re-Record
• 6:47 Teaser: Fixing Bad Audio Next Week

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Welcome to Podcasting QA, brought to you by the people at Buzz Sprout. I'm your host, Kara Passetti, and I'm bringing you the best tips and strategies to keep you podcasting with confidence. Today's episode of Podcasting QA is an exciting one because we are answering another fan mail that we have received from a real podcasting QA listener. So thank you so much for sending your fan mail. As we get them, I try to record an episode answering the question super quickly so I can get the answer back to you. And so we received this one, I believe it was a couple of weeks ago, from Fort Collins, Colorado. And I'm going to read the fan mail message. It says, Hi, what if I did an interview and I feel I didn't do a good job at bringing out useful info from the guest? How can I salvage this recording? So I've definitely seen this happen before, and it's incredibly frustrating. Depending on the circumstances, maybe you were nervous, maybe your guest was nervous, maybe it was just an off day, but you work through recording your episode only to export the file and listen and think, oh, I could have done that differently. And it's hard because now the interview is done. Maybe it's been a day or two and you're listening to this and you just don't know what is the next step. Do we re-record? Can we salvage this? First and foremost, review the content and see what can be used. So as you're listening back, you may realize there's more that is worth saving than you originally thought. And the cool part is this is not live, it is a recorded episode. So you can actually take clips from your interview and incorporate them into a brand new episode where you, as the interviewer for the original episode, are now taking the seat of more of a narrator and kind of bouncing back and forth between those interview clips, and you can kind of describe or narrate what was going on, maybe some context around each answer. And so that is one way to take that content, that's great content, but forming it in a way that you can create or shape the outcome. So now you are a solo podcast host and you are featuring an interview from a previous episode. Another option, you could offer this episode as a bonus episode. This is a new episode with a new intention. So what maybe felt like a mistake because it's going against what you originally planned has actually now shifted to a creative episode that you are offering as a bonus. And it's going to be new for your listeners and new for you. So if you shape it in a way that allows the episode to feel exclusive because it is, it's unique, then that will give you more confidence when releasing this episode and you can walk into it knowing that this is creative, this is intentional, and this is not just a mistake. Now, if you find that the episode is just not salvageable, there's just no redeeming qualities in this recording, that's okay too, because that does happen. And if you find yourself in that situation, my recommendation is to make the call quickly. And when you're communicating with your guest, make sure you're taking ownership of why the interview went the way it did. The last thing you want to do is approach a guest that took time to be a part of your podcast and then shift the blame fully to them for the outcome. You, as the podcast host, knew the intention of the episode, knew how you wanted it to turn out. And when that doesn't happen, there's a little bit of ownership there. And so you want to make sure that you are communicating that, that you're owning it, and that you're owning the next steps forward and how to handle it. My best piece of advice here is just be honest and transparent with your guest and let them know that unfortunately, if they are not able to re-record this time, it's not likely that the episode is going to go live at all. It will end up just being a scrapped episode. And of course, that is not great news for you. It's not great news for your guest. But you'd rather let them know up front your plan and what you're gonna do with this episode, because the last thing that you want to happen is to invite a guest onto your podcast, decide to scrap the interview without communicating that to your guest. And then your guest is just left there waiting for this episode uh to be released. And if your guest is somebody who is very well known or maybe has a very busy schedule, and honestly, it was a great opportunity to get them there in the first place. You need to be flexible. When you are asking for their time again, you will have to accept that they'll be able to meet when they can. And so flexibility is going to be key here as well. And then this time come prepared. Make sure you're communicating with your guest what the new intention is of this episode so that they know. Because sometimes open-ended questions are wonderful for interviews, but they can lead down a rabbit hole that wasn't intended. So if you can communicate in the beginning, hey, my takeaways for this episode is that we are going to come out with XYZ and that our listeners will hopefully feel or learn or experience XYZ. That allows you and your guests to be on the same page. And so your questions and your answers will all be tailored towards that common goal. And so you want to come prepared. And so that's gonna, of course, take some intentionality on your end to prepare the questions in that way and also communicate that with your guest early. But in this case, since it is a re-recording, another piece of advice is to go ahead and send the questions prior to the interview. That way, your guest can review them and kind of work through their answers on their end as well. And so depending on why you feel that your episode was not salvageable, don't write it off as a lost cause. Um, if you think that it's not salvageable, it might be. You just need to take some time, walk through these different ways of viewing it. And if you have to re-record, that will be totally fine. A huge part of podcasting is trial and error and learning along the way. So there are many times that we've recorded something and then we just had to go back and do it again because we learned from our mistakes the first time. Now, while this episode was focusing primarily on salvaging an episode because the content was not right. So the interview went south. We all know there are other reasons why an episode may not get released. And a big one is audio quality. And while I have other episodes that explain how to take steps before the recording or even during the recording so that you can avoid those audio mishaps, what happens if the recording is over and you are left with less than great audio? So stick around next week for part two because I am going to go through some of those audio mishaps that happen and you don't realize it until you are listening back to the episode. That episode will go live next Monday. So be sure to join us to kickstart your week. I hope this episode was helpful for you today. For my listener from Fort Collins, Colorado, I'd love to hear from you if you want to let me know what you decided to do. Did you rerecord? Did any of this help you to redeem that episode? I'd love to hear how it all played out. Um, you can reach out to me in the support inbox at support at buzzsprout.com. Any of my listeners, if you have questions, reach out to us at any time on the Podcaster Success team. We are eager to help you. If you have a question you'd like answered on a future podcasting QA episode, just click the send us a text link in the show notes. This is how this question reached me, and I was happy to answer it. And so I'm happy to answer your questions as well. Be sure to join us every Monday to kickstart your week. Thank you so much for listening. And as always, keep podcasting.