Everybody needs so time off now and then. Podcasters are no different. But when you establish your podcast as a weekly show driven by current events, what do you do when it's time to take a vacation?

In the year since we've launched The D Brief podcast, which focuses on upcoming events in the metro Detroit area, we've borrowed a number of different approaches from different sources at different times.

We record the show on Monday evenings. Stand-up comedian Mike Geeter and I launched the show in October of 2017, so the first time we took a vacation was around Christmas and New Year's Day of that year, both of which happened to fall on Mondays. For one of those shows, we could cobble together excerpts from the few interviews we had done to create a "greatest hits" episode. This is a technique that syndicated radio shows, such as Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! often use when they are off for a week. But at that point, we had barely published enough episodes for one "greatest hits" episode (and we're using the word "greatest" very loosely here), but we had two weeks to cover. What would we do to cover the second week?

I have always loved the idea of a large, regular cast of characters in a radio show. Years ago, when I was still early in my career, I wrote a proposal for a radio show that incorporate recurring characters. The idea was based on the television show The Simpsons. In ...

When it comes to podcasting, one of the questions I hear over and over again is, "What's the ideal length for a podcast episode?" When people ask that question, they usually expect the answer to be a specific length of time: "Ten minutes," "45 minutes," "an hour," ...

It's the first question at the forefront of every new podcaster's mind: How do I build my audience? In eight years of podcasting, the best answer I've heard is this: Tap into a pre-existing audience. Stand-up comedian Marc Maron launched his popular WTF podcast by ...

When I originally conceived of The D Brief podcast, the show contained about a dozen segments for one reason: to make the same content work on different platforms. The two platforms I had in mind were radio and a "podcatcher" app, such as Apple Podcasts. I wanted to ...

When you borrow live radio concepts and apply them to a podcast, one of the challenges you face relates to the timeliness of your podcast. For years, I've been pointing out that the shelf life of a podcast episode can have a big impact on its consumption. For example, ...

When I first conceived of The D Brief podcast, the intention was to create a show that covered everything happening in the Detroit arts and entertainment scene. Although the show borrowed a number of concepts from commercial radio morning shows, the content covered by ...

In October of 2017, comedian Mike Geeter and I launched a podcast about the Detroit arts and entertainment scene. After a few months, Mike had to bow out due to other time commitments. But before he did, we added a third co-host to our lineup. Mike and I knew from the ...

Originally, I launched The D Brief with Mike Geeter, an up-and-coming stand-up comedian here in Detroit. Mike and I had met on the local open mic circuit and hit it off. Mike was already hosting a podcast and looking to take it to the next level. We teamed up to ...

On an early episode of our new podcast series, we invited Heather Jay, a Detroit comedian, to be a guest on our show. My co-host at the time, Mike Geeter, had recently taped a performance for the Comedy Central show Kevin Hart Presents: Hart of the City. In the show, ...