How I make... Podnews

I’m often asked how I make Podnews every day, including the podcast. Here’s the deal, in case you’re interested. And up there is the office when I tidied it. It’s a very old picture, because I haven’t tidied it in a while.

The Newsletter

Story research is done using an RSS app Inoreader, and lots of groups in Facebook, Discord, Slack, Twitter, and the rest of the web. I use a Macbook, iPad and Android phone, and more than fifteen years experience.

Writing is done using iA Writer, a Markdown writing tool.

Website is bespoke PHP code, coded by me. I code using Visual Studio Code. New content is mainly added in an SQL editor: I’ve not bothered to build a back end for everything: some bits have a rudimentary input form, though.

Newsletter software is Sendy, which is hosted on our server. I use Amazon SES to send mail.

Hosted I use Lightsail, Amazon RDS and Amazon CloudFront.

Domain management is via Gandi.

Hero and thumbnail images are generated from Keynote, and exported using some Applescript. Images on the websites are resized automatically and dynamically by a set of scripts that I’m quite proud of. (The resizing only ever happens once.)

Artwork: the Podnews logo was done for us by someone on Fiverr who isn’t there any more. I only knew their username there. This is a shame: I’d have used them more.

The Podcast

Microphone: A Shure MV7 dynamic USB microphone, and Bose QC35 II headphones.

Recording/Mixing: I record directly onto the MacBook Pro, and edit using Hindenburg Pro.

Host: I self-host for a variety of reasons (some sensible, some less so).

Music: all components are custom composed for Podnews by Studio Dragonfly.

Madness publishing technique: Since I self-host the podcast, I use a spidersweb of AppleScript.

While travelling: I don’t take a nice microphone on flights with me after The Incident. Instead, I stuff a tiny Shure MV88+ microphone in my backpack instead. I’ll normally use this to produce the podcast on my MacBook. It’s perfect for this, and uses the same software as the MV7.

The podcast audio

I currently produce six different versions of the daily podcast.

• An MP3 file, 160kbps stereo, at -16 LUFS
• An AAC file, 128kbps stereo, -16 LUFS
• An Opus file, 16kbps mono, -14 LUFS
• An MP4 video file, currently unused
• An MP3 file for Podcast Radio, a UK radio station
• An aacHE file for Siri’s news briefing service

I then run a number of scriptsto add cover images and reorder the metadata (since it’s faster for me to run an automated script than play with Hindenburg’s image tools).

Podcast Radio and Siri get the same edited audio, which only contains the main news section, doesn’t contain advertising, and is broadcast-safe. If you add “pr” to the audio filename, you’ll find these.

Libraries, components and tools

• I use Asap for headlines and images: that’s designed by Omnibus-Type.
• Icons are from Google’s Material Icons, The Podcast Font, and Nathan Gathright’s podcast badges.
• getid3 helps me produce the RSS feed. It checks how long the podcast is.
• PHPMailer is used for transactional emails from Podnews’s server
• stripe-php is used for Stripe payments
• Parsedown and Jolitypo are used to make the text look nice.
• MentionClient is used to send webmentions.
• Squoosh for image optimisation.
• My home network is protected with NextDNS, which encrypts DNS requests and allows me to block individual domains.

Some links on this page are affiliate links, from which I could earn money