Tony Kahn, a 35-year radio vetera and host of Morning Stories, a wonderful broadcast and podcast on WGBH public radio in Boston, talks about creating a voice for yourself and the differences between broadcasting and podcasting:

”’Podcasts need to reflect personality and passions of the podcaster.

”Appreciate how big podcasting is, how much bigger it’s going to get. Stand back in awe because it IS a revolution.

”Podcasting audiences are very, very different from broadcast audiences. When it comes to emotional attachment and a desire to participate creatively in what you’re producing, they’re nowhere near what a podcast audience is.

”Podcast audiences aren’t just on your side. They want to get into bed with you. They want to be part of what you’re doing. Ask a podcast listener to do something for you and an amazing number of them will come through for you. Two weeks ago we asked people to write reviews, hopefully favorable ones, to help our visibility on iTunes. Overnight, we got 20 of them, all five-star reviews. And people were saying we had changed their lives.

”There was a survey of 40,000 podcast listeners; I don’t remember who did it but there were forms filled out from links on podcast sites. When asked how much of a podcast they listened to, 88% said they listened to all of it, 11% said they listen to three-quarters of it. Talk about supporting the local team! This is not your average broadcast audience.

”They also said these were the most important attributes of a good podcast:

• 9.3 out of 10 said content was cruicial
• Second most important was the quality of the host
• Third most was audio quality
• Fourth was reliability, meaning that new episodes were available when promised.

”The way I read this is that the audience is interested in the subject and is looking for people who are as passionate about the subject as they are. And they want people to show up. It’s like a dating relationship.

”Podcasting is a community, really a collection of sub-communities built around a topic or an idea. Podcasters feel they’re more part of a movement than a market. It’s more about making connections than making money.”

He said Morning Stories tries to get people to tell stories. They want to capture gasps and sighs and hesitations and the little nuances of speech that make the speaker sound human. They try to keep people from reading and encourage them to associate. Maybe they’ll be telling a story and they’ll mention a red couch. So we’ll ask them to stop and talk about that red couch for a while. What experience do they remember with it?

”We tell stories to make sense of an experience, to give something as an experience to somebody else and to explain ourselves to ourselves. In our interviews, we’ll sometimes have someone tell a story for the first time. They’ll tell that perfect five-minute story out of an hour interview and boy, is that a gift. It doesn’t happen very often.”