Accessibility and Ethics in Podcasting with Meg Wilcox – Episode 106

<< MUSIC IN – GHOSTHOOD FEATURING SARA AZRIEL “LET’S GO” BEGINS >>

MARY: What would you do if you had to create your podcast for a listener who’s blind? What would you do differently? And how would that also support all your listeners in general? I mean, maybe you’re thinking, well, my podcast is audio only, so doesn’t that count? Well, yes and no. Because what about all the other parts of your podcast? And in that ecosystem that your podcast listener, who is blind in this case, needs to navigate through? 

That’s exactly what Meg Wilcox had to think about and do when she co-produced the podcast Static: A Party Girl’s Memoir. As an associate professor with the Journalism and Digital Media Program at Mount Royal University and also co-director of the school’s Community Podcast Initiative, I wanted to get to know that journalistic side of podcasting and what that really means for accessibility and ethics in the industry as a whole but also, how does this all trickle down to the independent podcaster like you? 

So, in this episode, we’re gonna talk a lot about accessibility and making sure that your podcast is ready for your intended listener. Meg shares these insights because she’s also currently pursuing her PhD at the University of Glasgow, where her research examines how podcasting and new forms of digital storytelling can help underserved communities and individuals tell their stories in ways that reflect their communities, their values, and their lived experience. So you want to make sure that your podcast is what your listener needs, and we’re going to get right into that with Meg Wilcox. 

This is episode 106 on the Podcaster’s Guide to a Visible Voice.

<< WOMAN SINGS: So so so so let’s go >> 

Meg, thank you so much for coming. I’m really excited for this conversation because. tou are the expert, I’m not, and I just want to be curious and pick your brain and see what happens.

[INTRO MUSIC ENDS]

MEG: Oh, I think both of us are experts in our own field, but, yeah, no, I’m looking forward to the chat, too. Thank you so much for having me.

MARY: Yeah, it’s just this idea of, like, accessibility, ethics, copyright. Like, I think I have a, you know, grasp of these things through my professional experience back in radio. Right. But, like, even in podcasting, where the industry is just so new, like, it new in comparison to traditional forms of media like radio, there’s so many new things that we’re navigating in digital media. Right.

MEG: Mhmm 

MARY: So I just really wanted to get your point of view on all of these things. And let’s start with accessibility, because I feel like in the. In the things that I just described about ethics, copyrights and stuff, accessibility seems to be something that podcasting industry is actually looking at and trying to do such as, like Apple Podcasts and Spotify creating automatic transcripts, which has its, you know, positives and negatives, but like,… 

MEG: Yes.

MARY: …okay, beyond transcripts, define for us what actually is accessible media in your eyes.

MEG: Yeah, that’s tricky because when it comes to podcasting in particular, I think, I mean accessibility at its broadest level is just that as many people as possible, depending on their requirements, are able to use or enjoy or engage, engage with a piece of media. And whether or not they need technology to help bridge the gap or understand or translate something that they can still enjoy it on their own level and don’t need particularly extra help or translation in order to be able to enjoy it. 

Where it gets tricky on something like podcasting, I feel is already, it is a medium that is going to work more for certain access needs than others, right? So the show that I was working on most recently, which was part of my PhD thesis, was working with Ashley King, who’s a legally blind playwright and actor here in Calgary. And we adapted a play that she’d written about the story of how she lost her eyesight when she was 18 and travelling in Bali. And the idea was that, well, she always wrote the play for both the general public and a low-sighted audience in mind. And so we had that thought when doing the podcast as well. 

Now, inherently, podcasting is a great medium for someone who’s blind or visually impaired because you don’t have a direct visual element you need to be engaging with to understand the story. So, like, it was perfect when we, when we were looking at it from that side. But then of course I think to, let’s say a deaf audience member, right? Podcasting is not so great for deaf audiences. If anything, um, the idea of having a video with captioning written on it is what’s going to help them out. Right. And this is really looking at like just completely different ends of like the access spectrum, right, and requirements for what people need. 

But I think either way, it’s about putting out our work in a way that as many people as possible can engage with it on their own terms, I guess is the best way of putting it. So as you pointed out, you know, when it comes to access for podcasts, one of the first things that’s normally considered is transcripts. And I still think it’s worth mentioning, you know, Apple Podcasts and Spotify only really came out with their automatic transcript functions about a year, year and a half ago. 

MARY: Yeah. 

MEG: Like when we think, yeah, podcasting’s been around since like 2004, you know, in different iterations. It took that long, despite the technology that’s existed for auto transcripts, because I think arguably there wasn’t much of a demand because most of the audience either wasn’t, wasn’t asking for them or, you know, the big platforms didn’t think that it was that important. 

And I think it’s worth mentioning that because as you would know as a podcaster, like what were the options if auto transcription wasn’t around, right? You had to make your own transcript, find a place to host it on like wherever you were hosting. And you might have been able to do it through your podcast provider, like your podcast host, but maybe not. And then you had to link it in the show notes, right? Like it was actually a lot of extra work to go to the effort of providing that basic element of transcription. 

And a lot of the major shows did. I mean, I know this American Life was one of the first ones to really come out with that, in like a, I want to say a steady, maintained way. But it was actually really hard to create transcripts and took a lot of time, you know, and if we think about small producers and how much time they have as they’re putting their show together, is it something that they’re choosing to do, right?

MARY: Yeah, yeah. And I was talking to uh, someone who is deaf and she was like, well, the transcripts are great, but if I have to like click on a PDF somewhere and get away from the listening app, like it’s hard for me to listen while reading, trying to find the transcript and I want to hit pause and I have to flip back, right? Like there’s just so many levels of friction to that transcript that finally, if you are a Apple Podcast or Spotify listener, that you do have access right on that app, which makes it a little simpler for…

MEG: Mhmm. 

MARY: …a person to follow that transcript. But I know you were saying like, it was the demand that they finally saw so that they made this inclusion into their apps. So how do we demand for more?

MEG: Yeah, well, and it’s funny because it is demand, but I also think that like realistically the demand was for SEO, right? That uh, we can’t, we can’t actually do searching through audio like that’s not capable on Google. So anything that you have written that’s in a text form is more likely to be searchable so people can find your show or, or that other information. I mean there are access wins around it. 

And I think the one thing that I’ve at least found while working on my thesis is that a lot of the work that makes things accessible actually benefits everyone. Whether or not you identify as having an accessibility need, I don’t know if you do. I love watching TV shows with captions. 

MARY: Yes.

MEG: You know, it’s just like, it’s clearer. It’s easier if I’m doing something else. Or sometimes, if I’m watching something that’s like, partly in a different language or there’s accents that are going quickly, like, it’s nice to have that extra support. Right. I can hear just fine, theoretically, I guess, when I’m not distracted. But the idea of being able to have that extra support or caption is really helpful. And it’s funny talking with my students. I know a lot of them like to watch shows that way too. So, you know, this is technically something that’s built for access, but it’s not just limited to people who might identify as having hearing loss that would end up needing the captions, right?

MARY: Yeah, exactly. And I watch shows too, where sometimes the. Whoever mixed the sound, they mix it on purpose that the speech is a little bit more mumbled or quiet. They’re like, what? They have to hit pause, then you turn on closed captioning and then you watch it again and you’re like, oh, yeah, there’s that. And then also for, you know, podcasts, if people want to read, through the transcript, they can also copy and paste certain pieces and not have to write things down where it’s already there for you. 

MEG: Yeah, and when it comes down to web accessibility, m. The main things, if we think about it, like, well, it’s. If you’re accessing websites, I guess we could say, what are the alternate forms of understanding? So if you’re, for example, using a text, uh, to voice reader, if you’re visually impaired, are you using it or designing it in a way that it can actually read the text in order? Or do you have weird charts and things where if it was trying to read in order, it might not know the way to go or would hop around, right? 

If you have lots of images, is there alt text that’s, you know, letting, again, a reader describe what the image was. If it’s informational, right? If it’s based on something that they might need to know. If we look on the other side for sound or other elements of things are being described or transcribed for someone who might be hard of hearing. And then, of course, we could also get into the visual design, right? Of, you know, what fonts are you using? Can those be read? Well, either by a user reading on the screen or reading through text to voice reader, colours and high contrast, right?

MARY: Yeah. 

MEG: We often think about the idea of, oh, someone’s legally blind, they can’t see at all. Well, lots of people have some sight and they can maybe see very high contrast colours or things like that. But if things weren’t totally clear, then it would start to become an issue. Maybe you’re colourblind, right? So there’s different ways to look at and consider access in what you do and what you design. The exciting thing, but also the challenging thing in working in digital media. 

And often, I want to say, you know, small independent environments like podcasting is that, well, you’re the producer, and the editor, and the web designer, right? Whereas before a lot of the standards for access in the media sphere was determined by legislation and aimed at, you know, like outlets, like big news outlets that would, you know, often produce their own stuff and then just send it to companies to translate or do the captions or do whatever else is needed to meet their legislative requirements. Now as creators, we’re responsible for making things more accessible.

MARY: And with that responsibility, like you were saying, we have many hats that we put on. So accessibility, sadly, things like that always gets put to the wayside. It’s at the bottom of the ladder of all the things that you need to do. So what else can we do because we are so busy with everything that is beyond like, just transcripts. What can we do to support?

MEG: There’s a few ways to look at it and one of them is to, if you have the ability to know a bit who your audience is and what their requirements are, how can you make sure that you’re serving your audience? 

So maybe that is spending a bit more time on cleaning up and working with your transcripts. Maybe there’s a survey you put out occasionally about your listeners and if there were any accessibility features that they would find helpful, right? Because we do know that usually, like I think of transcripts in particular, to clean them up or do those other things can take extra time, right? And depending on how much time you have, especially if it’s like an independent free production that you’re just doing on the side of your desk, going to be harder to sometimes spend time on those things. 

But I also know, speaking with friends who are working in the accessibility realm, they often say that, yeah, transcripts are the main, like the base requirement that some of friends that even mentioned they’re like, oh, I will never even share a podcast with someone else, or recommend a podcast unless I can see that it has transcripts that, you know, if the idea is that this is a value system for them, then transcripts are the base, then they are not going to necessarily recommend stuff otherwise. Which I found interesting. 

Yeah. When it comes to like the technical elements of access, like that’s one side of it, right? And part of it is learning about like core web design and different things, how you can improve it. But what’s also tricky is unless you’re getting feedback from users who have those access needs, it might be tricky to find out if you’re doing it right too, right? So part of it is maybe is there a resource that you can go to or look to for some guidance on that? And I say that knowing that there’s actually very little out, uh, there. Like I literally have been just writing that in my thesis…

MARY: Yeah

MEG: …that beyond transcripts there isn’t really a lot of talk. But the other thing that’s kind of nice about podcasting, specifically from an access standpoint is that the other key way that you are accessing a podcast is through whatever player you’re going to use, right? Whether it’s a platform like Apple or Spotify, or whether you’re using a specific like, you know, audio player on your computer. And that actually means that users have a lot of control in how they access your podcast. 

So for some people, maybe Apple meets their needs in terms of the transcripts and let’s say the user experience and how they have their phone set up for accessibility. So they actually have a lot of control. As long as you’re putting your show up through the RSS feed and giving as many options as possible to play it, then the user can make a decision that works for them. So, it’s also interesting there that again, that flexibility can be there. And you know, we as producers maybe don’t need to have control over it as long as we just make sure that our show can be listened to from a variety of places.

MARY: Yeah. And then there’s also like, we’ve talked a bit about like, what creators, producers can do and now the listener aspect. But I also feel like there is the whole idea that it shouldn’t be all shouldered on the creator and user. It’s the industry as well that should, mhm. Be meeting these accessible needs. Are you seeing ways that the industry is changing right now to meet these needs?

MEG: Not really. I guess it’s hard. It’s such a fragmented industry too. Right. We think about it ranges from, you know, the big outlets like I’m thinking public broadcasters, right? Like, say, NPR, BBC, CBC. And then we’ve got these production companies that could be independent or a little bit bigger funded through other things than we have our independent producers, right?

MARY: Yeah. 

MEG: So I think it kind of depends on what level you’re looking at and who you’re talking to, because there are some independent producers who are very interested on an access side and working around it. But I’d say from a standard mode of production, I’m not really, or, I haven’t really found too much where people, unless they’re making accessibility a core element of their content or like, as an artist to their ETHOS, I don’t really feel like we hear too much about how podcasts are produced, right? 

It’s sort of the, you know, it doesn’t matter how the sausage is made, it’s how it tastes. And so we just hear the show, the sausage of a show, and we don’t really know, like, what did they do that was different to maybe accommodate certain things, right? And so I think part of it is there’s not a lot of transparency in how things are made or limited transparency. Cause what’s also tricky is, you know, a series can try to be as transparent as they want about how they made it, but they’re also the narrators. Like, they control the story, right? And saying how they’ve done it. And maybe they are being totally honest, maybe they’re not, but it’s kind of hard for us to tell. 

But what I also have to say, like, in terms of, like, access, is that I feel that a lot of companies, even, I want to say the independent ones, a lot of what they do is borrowed on some level from traditional media practice, right? Like, we think about how many people who’ve gotten into the podcasting industry, either from journalism, like say, radio or online, like working at one of those other places, or maybe they’ve come into the industry from, like film or TV. We’re seeing a lot of that too, right? And I don’t really feel like I see that, like, a wholly new type of media making is coming out of it. They bring their sort of bias and experience and training from their industry to podcasting, and they adapt it somewhat because it’s never going to be a totally clean change or it’s not a totally, totally different scenario, I guess we could say. 

But I don’t know. I don’t really know if I’m meeting anyone who’s like, I’m going to blow up the paradigm of how I’ve made things and I’m going to question everything about it. And part of it is time and resources. And also, I just don’t know if for most makers, it’s the way they’ve been doing it or they’ve been taught and it’s a system they’ve developed. I think you need a really, really big reason to stop doing what’s comfortable for you, right?

MARY: Yeah, it’s the whole comfort thing. And if people are also looking at the bigger shows, like the top 100 shows, right? 

MEG: Mhmm. 

MARY: A lot of people emulate that. And if those shows are just churning out the same thing, then we really won’t be progressing much further than where we currently are at.

MEG: Yeah. And it’s also tricky. I mean, for example, making Static. And Static is kind of a weird podcast in its own right, in that we decided to mash up two formats, I guess we could say, right? Like, one of the beautiful things about podcasting is like, we make the box that we decide to trap ourselves in. You can do whatever the heck you want. Yet somehow it seems very standard for shows to come up with one format. They don’t want to mix them and they stay very consistent. And a lot of them are normally interview based, understandable for resources and whatnot. 

But for Static, we decided that the first half of each episode, or first part of each episode is audio drama. And then we switched to a bit more of like, a current affairs interview style where Ashley then interviews someone from her true story. And that’s, you know, giving us a bit more context about, like, the, you know, what was going on behind the curtain. Even that was kind of unique in the format. Like, whenever I was trying to explain it to people, they were like, what? You’re putting drama and real information together? And there aren’t…

MARY: You can’t do that!

MEG: …Yeah, and I say this just, but like, you know, in theory we can do whatever the heck we want, but there are kind of standards that have been built into, and maybe it’s audience expectations and maybe it’s that producers don’t feel they need to change what they’re doing. But I say this because that’s the only thing that I think about our series would sound that different. But the way that we actually went about producing the series was decently different because I was working with Ashley so that we could tell her story and also that we had to adapt our podcasting practice to work with her vision impairment. 

MARY: Yeah.

MEG: So, Ashley has 2% of her eyesight. For context, she can see some things close up. She can see high contrast. But I mean, when it comes to editing audio or something like that, we would have had to come up with a total workaround if she’d wanted to edit the audio. But she was the producer host, like she had no interest in doing that, that side of it. But we still had to work around. If you think about podcasting, we use written scripts. We normally share a lot of our organizational information, but through writing, editing is a very visual process.

 Or even just physically recording something, right? You normally need to keep an eye on the level because you can’t monitor it by sound because you’re listening to the sound itself as it’s coming through, right? There’s, even though we’re an auditory medium, there’s a lot of visual elements that have been designed in how we actually produce and make it. So we had to find ways to work around that. And it wasn’t too hard actually in the end, a lot of the access needs that we worked to develop the show was more around physical access, but, I want to say it was more organizational. Like where would we have our meetings if we didn’t need to be in a studio or how could we organize time or how we revised how we did some revision sessions, we changed up a little bit. We didn’t do emails back and forth or anything. 

But that was also partly because Ashley was new to producing a series. And so, if we were to listen together, she could stop and give me notes and, you know, if you’re, if you’re a seasoned editor, you can just be like, oh yeah, timecode here, fix the double breath or something, right? But because Ash was new to this, she would listen to something and she’d say, well, it doesn’t sound right and she could maybe explain a bit why it didn’t sound right, but she wasn’t going to have a solution for me at this point, right? 

So for us to be able to sit and actually talk through it was more that we could like develop a language and an understanding together for editing. It wasn’t so much tied to her eyesight though realistically, asking her to sit and watch an audio piece and try to figure out the time codes for her to send me notes would have been like, way more trouble than it was worth. 

MARY: Oh, wow. Yeah, I didn’t even think about that.

MEG: And again, from listening to the series, with the exception that we decided to go with a more fun format which wasn’t really tied to access, that was more just the story as people listen, I don’t think they would have known particularly that Ashley was blind. Like, it becomes a reveal later. And part of that is that Ashley wanted the show to sound very professional. I mean, I wanted it to sound professional too, but I was open to allowing some of the pauses that maybe came with. You know, if you think about using a text to voice reader, right? 

Right now, while you’re interviewing me, you can keep an eye on your question line and you can read while you listen to me. At the same time, you can sort of think your next question. And that’s part of the reason you can jump right in after. If I answered and we finished, right? Yeah, but in Ashley’s case, she can’t do that. So if she has a question line that’s been prepared, her option is either to try to memorize the question line and go from there, or she can stop and use a text to voice reader to have it read her the question, which means there’s gonna be a gap between the answer and the next question. 

So, you know, I didn’t think that was a problem. And I thought maybe having some gaps and showing some of that process in the sound could have been really interesting. But Ashley didn’t want to. And I think part of it was it was her first podcast. And we think about what sounds professional, right? This assumption that the idea of that live radio back and forth banter, everything edited totally smoothly, is a sign of professionalism. And if there are gaps or there’s pauses or there’s weights, that’s probably an issue with the producer or that it, it’s like amateur, right? So I think it’s also, all of this is baked a bit into our aesthetic expectations in podcasting as well.

MARY: Oh, totally. I get that all the time with people who, they’re like, I want to sound professional. I’m like, yeah, but what does that actually mean? Like, what have we been told through generations of professional. And I say that with doing the air quotes with my fingers. The professional broadcast sound was just created, you know, hundreds of years ago. And now we’ve, we’ve still decided that that’s how we need to do things. But really, in podcasting, it’s this land of experimentation. And professional is, however you want to define it, that people haven’t been able to get that radio broadcast professionalism out of their mind and ears, but that also, we were talking about, like, inequities before we started recording. 

And I feel like that broadcast professionalism, which is now into plays, into podcasting, is really highlighting a lot of the inequities of even, like, who Is then the host, right? Like, gender inequities and things like that. So talk a bit more about other inequities that you see, aside from the accessible aspect.

MEG: Yeah, I mean, as you pointed out, I mean, there’s always a gender disparity when it comes to who’s in the microphone. And part of that, I mean, I think, would come back to, you know, radio history. The fact that radio was essentially developed as a white man’s medium, at least how we would understand it in North America and Europe. 

And even now, the idea of, you know, vocal fry, or higher voices being seen as less professional, right? By women, because it’s always been associated around the idea of the voice, of that being sort of like a male voice when it comes to accents as well, you know, do you sound, quote unquote, like a native English speaker? Which I think is ridiculous. And I think we’re seeing a bit less of that. We are seeing a greater variety of voices that come out. But again, it’s sometimes that assumption of the audience or how it might be viewed, but also I think it influences who decides to get in front of the mic, right? 

So it might not even be whether you have an accent, whatever your background is, how comfortable you are in the language or your gender. Like, it actually might just have to come from that individual of, well, do I think I should be in front of the mic? Should I have a show? Should people be paying attention to me and what I have to say? And I think that that’s a bigger and harder thing to tackle. Which was a bit. What I was trying to get at through my thesis or my most recent project was that idea of, what are the barriers to working in podcasting for individuals? And how do we start to reduce some of those barriers? 

Because, you know, everyone loves to say, oh, podcasting, anyone can do it. And yes, I mean, anyone can do it. It doesn’t guarantee anyone’s going to listen. And yeah, technically you need a microphone and I guess some confidence and you could put something out. But if we think a bit about the actual, like, organizational elements of putting together a show, coming up with your ideas, developing them, recording some level of editing, uploading, there is a decent amount of commitment and time to do it and understanding a certain process to get it done. 

And so I think being able to support certain individuals who have an interest and maybe an inclination or talents, that would lead to it being well, but they need some support to actually just get across that threshold of, am I going to do it? And if I’m going to, what are the decisions that we can make to maybe reduce the challenge of production, to actually get those first few episodes out so they can see what it’s like and actually, you know, decide if they’re gonna move forward with it or not? 

So part of me pitching the idea of the series to Ashley, and there were lots of reasons why I desperately like. When I learned about the project, I was very keen to work with Ashley was she’s originally trained as a journalist. She’s written this really fantastic play. She’s got a really easy personality. If anyone listens to the series, you could just listen to her talk all the time. As you say, she’s a Leo and she loves it. She’s a born performer. But when it came to actually talking about how we would adapt this for podcast or make a podcast, Ashley was kind of in the dark on it. And by that, I mean, she was just saying, like, I don’t even know how we’d go about doing this. And I was like, wow, you have media training. You’ve written a play, you’ve starred in it, you’ve done these things. But the organization, the podcast, the putting it together felt like a bridge too far for her to figure out. 

So that was part of what we were doing, was figuring out, you know, okay, what are our options? What are her skills? What do we both want to get out of producing this series? We know it’s going to take a while to do it. We want to make sure we’re meeting our own goals, and then how can we put all that together and develop a project that’s going to reflect that? 

And again, I think that’s some of the wonderful flexibility of podcasting, right, that you can choose your timelines, you can choose your episode lengths, you can choose your formats. And it allowed us to make more creative choices around our needs as opposed to, you know, you’re pitching something to a radio station, they’re going to need a certain length, a certain time delivered by a certain time. And you have to even sell them on the idea right before it would happen. And, you know, some of my colleagues and I were laughing that, you know, if I’d pitched Static to a place like the CBC, there is no way they would have accepted it. 

Like, I think they would have loved it consistently. I think they would have liked it conceptually. Like, the story itself is interesting, but mixing audio drama with a current affairs format, I don’t think they would have loved. They would have had a problem with the swearing in it, and some of the sense of humour, maybe. I mean, maybe less so these days as we sort of see what’s coming out with it. But then I also think that if we talked about the amount of time and the focus to actually get everything delivered, I wonder if there would have been some concern around the access element too. I think realistically, the bigger issue would be that Ashley had never produced anything for them before, so it would have been an unknown on top of these other variables, right? 

But in the end, the series has had a lot of success. I point this out and always feel like it’s bragging, but, I mean, I think in the first six months there were more than 20,000 downloads, even more beyond that. 

MARY: That’s awesome.

MEG: And actually the CBC did end up promoting it. Like, Ashley was interviewed on the Current. She was interviewed by the Guardian, other international outlets and also locally as well. There was a lot of media coverage on it. So in the end, you know, the series has done quite well. And that was with no advertising budget, limited advertising. It really helped. It ended up getting promoted by Apple for new and noteworthy, and then made the charts in Canada, the U.S. and Australia. 

MARY: Awesome.

MEG: And again, like, you know, helps get our listenership up. So, you know, we kind of have this wonderful proof of concept now that I think if I was to go to another outlet, they’d be more interested, I think, in hearing a pitch. But I don’t know if they would have been too keen just with the idea where we’re like, look, we think we know we’ve got it, but there just wasn’t an example of anything prior, you know.

MARY: Yeah. And it’s again, that idea of, like, oh, the top 100 shows do it this way. Yet, as you said, it’s proof of concept. So you never know what can happen now into the future.

MEG: Yeah, And I think, I mean, the other thing that sort of happened with, uh, the podcast is that we’d been. Obviously been working on it for quite a while. Ashley lost her eyesight in 2011. So, you know, this is an old story, quote, unquote. But I think it was the second week, the second episode that was about to come out was just when there had been the news out of Laos that six tourists had been killed from suspected methanol poisoning,… 

MARY: Oh yeah. 

MEG: …which is how Ashley lost her eyesight. And so suddenly, this story that, you know, I think had journalistic interest anyways, actually met with currency of suddenly reporters around the globe trying to make sense of a story, not having a lot of resources on. And Ashley now suddenly, like, having a series and also being an expert herself that could do these interviews and talk about what was going on and contextualize it. 

And, you know, that’s really important. I believe the stat is, like, 85% of people who are poisoned by methanol don’t survive. So it isn’t like there are lots of people who are able to speak about their experience, right? But from that, all I was going to say is you mentioned, like, what might happen in the future is that Ashley has ended up reaching out to one of the survivors, and they’ve become good friends, and they’ve been doing a lot of methanol awareness activism now. Both, I was gonna say Bethany’s based in Australia, but she’s British, and Ashley’s here in Canada. And so, you know, she’s now talking about, you know, the feed is gonna be hers now. Does she want to make a second season maybe, where she’s now more of an expert in talking about issues around methanol poisoning and, like, ways that other countries are dealing with it or something like that, right?

That now this, there’s suddenly this thing that she has that she can elevate and turn into something else if she’d like to, which is great when we think about that flexibility of the medium, right. That, you know, season one could be one thing, and it’ll always be there, like something people can listen to. 

MARY: Mhmm.

MEG: But she choose to adjust it or change it and change up the format and the focus again.

MARY: Yeah, exactly. That’s the beautiful thing of podcasting. It’s yours. You’re not tied to any big corporation or radio broadcaster. You can just do what you want because it’s your show, and each season can be different. I love that. 

I could talk to you about this stuff forever, but I want to switch quickly now to ethics. You touched very briefly earlier when we were talking about transcripts about trust, and I was like, trust and ethics really go hand in hand together. And when I think of ethics, I think of, like, you know, the use of AI and stuff. But there is so much more around ethics and podcasting. So touch quickly on what you’re working on about the ethics. 

MEG: Yeah, yeah. There’s a few angles right now, but the one that mostly I’ve been focusing on with one of my colleagues, Kyle Napier, who’s out at McEwen University, is around the idea of copyright. And this started several years ago where we were working on a podcast that ended up being, uh, in an academic journal. And at the end, we were talking a bit as he sort of, as we were putting away the gear, and he was talking about copyright specifically, and he said, yeah, did you know that copyright is determined by whoever does the recording? And I kind of looked at him and I was like, I guess I theoretically knew this, but I hadn’t thought too much about it. 

And he’d said, and the reason he sort of made this as a comment is he’s like, well, technically, Meg, you were running the gear on this, and there were four of us around the table talking, and he’s like, so technically you own copyright on our podcast episode. And I just kind of looked at him and I’m like, oh, that’s, that’s weird. Like, that doesn’t seem right. And he’s like, yeah. And I think what I’d said to him is, well, you know, in theory, if there was ever a source who wanted a copy of our interviewer tape, like, I would happily give it to them. 

And he’s like, oh, yeah, you know, 99% of the time it’s not an issue, but what happens, you know, in that 1% of the time, or just what might happen with the actual physical recordings at some point, right? Especially in the world of, say, audio podcasting, interviewing, particularly, it’s the person that you’re interviewing who’s sharing their story, sharing the information and their expertise, but it’s the person who’s recording it, like, right now. You know, I’m happy to talk to you about my research and stuff, but you’re running the recording, so technically you have copyright on this. 

Ultimately that’s important because you’re the one who’s going to be distributing it, right? 

MARY: Yeah. 

MEG: But if we actually think about where this goes after, right. If you own the copyright to this, you could choose to sell this recording to someone else. You could choose to charge for it, could choose to put it for free out on the internet, where people could like, you know, remix or mess with or do whatever, right? I guess technically they can do that because they could download a podcast anyways. But the idea is that when we think about when copyright laws were developed, and it was more around the idea at the start of print publication and broadcasting and things where it was harder to maybe hold on to, say, digital copies of something, what you were agreeing to when you gave up your copyright was a little different. 

Whereas now, and I think, particularly in podcasting, the idea that these interviews can be, you know, stored on the cloud and then maybe reshared another time, right? Because you don’t necessarily have the gatekeepers. Like, I’m thinking, when I was a journalist, you know, technically I held copyright to what I recorded, but it was also put to a server or put to archives after it was used in like, one very specific context. And it wasn’t coming back necessarily, right?

MARY: Mhmm.

MEG: Whereas now, you know, someone could hold onto an interview and decide three or four years later to re air it or cut it or work with it as they wanted. I guess coming back to that idea of equity, I like to think that all my work sort of around podcasting is thinking more about how can we be more equitable and how can we be ethical in what we’re doing is what does it mean, if the laws are automatically giving us, as recorders and journalists the rights? 

And part of that is, well, we could do the right thing. We could hand over tapes or make sure that we’re being clear in consent, which is obviously really important. But I also am looking at, you know, how can we adjust our practice to not just verbally say or promise that we’re going to, you know, give recordings or something to someone. How can we build in a stronger level of consent, right? 

Or whether that’s forms and understanding whether there is going to be, let’s say, shared copyright on it or copyright to the guest, but with licensing for me, if I was doing a series, right. To produce it. Thinking a bit more about how do we share raw tape, right? Or interviews, making sure that we’re providing those to guests so that they have at least a copy or access for it and being clear about if things are, we’re going to be reused or republished in some way, shape or form. 

So, yeah, it’s something that we’ve been sort of thinking about and thinking about how we can provide practical solutions, I guess, for journalists and podcasters that maybe haven’t thought too much about it.

MARY: Yeah. And I think a lot of people don’t even have like, a guest release, you know, like, where you can have a legally binding thing that says, okay, we will share copyright, or I, as the host, have all copyright. And yeah, what does that really look like? And it’s, I think it’s just more about being forthright and what you’re going to be doing with the piece of audio. 

MEG: Mhmm. 

MARY: Because there are also a lot of companies right now that will buy your backlog of shows so that it can learn people’s voices for generative AI and AI voices and things like that. Companies are paying podcasters for their interviews for that. And yeah, is that something that you, as a guest will allow, but you don’t know because the host can do whatever they want with the audio ever since they’ve recorded it, right?

MEG: Yeah, there’s all these other different utilities or ways that tape could be used beyond how we first conceived of it, right. And I even think about just from like a digital storage side of things, right? Like how many of us are storing things on digital servers? Are we being good about, you know, password protection and those types of things, or how we’re sharing files and where they go? Like, is it possible that you have interviews from five or six years ago that you either haven’t like, deleted with time or been maintaining or those things? And what does that mean to have those things uploaded? 

I know, was it now with the new changes with Google and Gemini, I believe they can be scraping your email or some of your other folders for info that could be fed into their AI systems. And so, you know, has, have you put something up somewhere where there’s been a change in policy now and maybe you’re not actively managing your files in a way that is ideal for the guests, right?

MARY: Yeah. You think, oh, it’s in the cloud, it’s safe, it’s password protected. But there are other means and ways of getting around that sometimes these days with technology. You know, we’ve talked about the past, we’ve talked about the future, but what about, like, right now, as we close out our session and our conversation with you? What excites you about podcasting right now?

MEG: What I’m really enjoying about podcasting right now is seeing this growth in Canadian podcasts and the Canadian podcasting industry. I think about Kattie Laur, who’s now about to be working full time with Pod the North, which is a fantastic newsletter for people that don’t, don’t know. And, and I think there’s, you know, part of this is coming out of, you know, the anti-U.S. tariffs, other things going on right now, but there is a desire for Canadian content, whereas before, some of the most famous Canadian podcasters are known for going to the States and doing their shows there, right?

MARY: That’s right. 

MEG: So that’s really exciting for me to see that there’s more content that could be made at home and that there will hopefully be an audience for it, but recognition as well. The other thing that’s sort of tied to that is this year and the awards were just in October, the Rosie Awards or the Alberta film and television awards. And again, biased because Static won the award for best podcast this year. But this is the first time ever in the awards. The awards have been around since the 80s that they’ve ever had a podcasting category. 

And, you know, they’ve been doing documentary and film and TV and all these other things. But this was the first year that they have an award now for podcasting, which means they’re going to be recognizing podcasts. And I’m hoping that’s going to lead to more grant opportunities as well, right? Like, once it’s sort of recognized at an awards level, then we look at, say, the Alberta foundation for the Arts or these other areas that we’re already funding other projects for this, now it can hopefully make the medium more legitimate, I guess, right? Right now there’s been a bit of a gap if you want to pitch a podcast around arts grants. So I’m hoping that this interest in Canadian podcasts and a few of these other things happening are really going to help production here in the country.

MARY: Yes. I’ve looked around for, like, Canadian awards, and most of the awards are U.S. or maybe even UK based. Like there’s. 

MEG: Mhmm. 

MARY: There’s maybe one or two for podcasts. Uh, one specific, the Canadian Podcast Awards, but also,… 

MEG: Yeah. 

MARY: …like the provincial level ones like you’re talking about. So it’d be great to see more of that recognition… 

MEG: Mhmm. 

MARY: …so that it drives people to create more shows that are going to be celebrated and well loved. Like Static.

MEG: Yeah, absolutely.

MARY: Meg, thank you so much for your time. I am, um, thinking about so many things and I wrote down so many notes and I’m just like, okay, I got to research this and research that now. So thank you for bringing all these.Things to the forefront and just having this conversation that most people just aren’t doing. Because like you said, we’ve got so many hacks that we’re doing that we don’t even have time to think about the aspects of, like, accessibility and equity and ethics and stuff. So thank you so much for all your research and your work and especially your time with me today.

MEG: So happy. Thanks for having me.

MARY: Yeah, this conversation got me thinking as usual, right? I was thinking about this recent report that came out earlier this month, November 2025. It was called Inequality in Popular Podcasts, an Examination of Gender and Race Ethnicity By The USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative. What they revealed was that not only are the top 100 podcast hosts primarily male, so only 35.9, almost 36% of hosts are female. And this disparity is almost across the board, across the different genres, with the largest difference, that is a 12 to 1 ratio of male host to female host in the business and tech category. 

And it goes all the way through the different categories except for one, the only category where they highlighted there were the most female hosts more than male hosts was in the true crime category. Which actually isn’t that surprising for me because whenever I’m looking through on your podcast listening app or I’m reading things in the industry highlighting new true crime podcasts, it usually is a female host. And there’s something about the female brain who just loves listening to true crime. So not surprising for me on that one. But yeah, the thing is, male hosts are still the mainstream. 

And then when we talk about representation and ethnicity, hosts are also predominantly white, where only 22.3% of the top 100 podcasts are underrepresented ethnicity hosts. You’ll have to read through the whole report yourself. And it actually has some really good graphics and highlights so you can digest this really easily. I’ll leave the link for this in the show notes, if you wanted to dive deeper into this sort of disparity that is going on in the podcasting landscape. 

But one of the things that I think we can take action on is supporting the ones that are not in that mainstream, that top 100, right? It’s beyond that. And so this is the idea that Meg left us with, the idea of awards. I remember when I was in radio, I hated the awards process, mostly because it was pay to play. So that meant it was a huge amount of money for budgeting purposes that the radio station didn’t have for us to submit our work to, even though we were very proud of our audio work. And we were like, what if this one could win last year, why can’t we win this year? But then our company was like, nope, sorry, we have no budget for that. 

And there is still a bit of that disparity in the podcasting space, where it is a lot of pay to play, especially for the mainstream awards. But there are also some very lovely smaller awards that you can submit to. And although an award doesn’t actually mean you’ll get loads of extra downloads, awards are a totally different category of what you’ll receive, like what you actually get out of having an award winning show or producing an award winning show. But mainly it’s because I love to see that the underdog did get some recognition, right?

That I believe podcasting is still that underdog, as you just heard from what I read, through that report. And although right now podcasting has a bit more inclusion in the mainstream space, in that awards space, especially the Golden Globes. Yes, the Golden Globes actually has a podcasting category that they’re going to announce the winner for in January 2026. So that’s coming out soon. But of course it’s going to be those top 100 podcasts that we were talking about, right?

And there’s actually a list of 25 of those podcasts have been announced to be eligible to win the Golden Globes. This was released back in October and I’ll leave a link to that as well in the show notes for you to look at and see if you recognize some of these shows. So, when I’m saying about taking action, we can look towards the end smaller awards like provincial ones here in Canada or state ones if you live in the U.S. that are primarily for audio only. Or you can also look to things like, women-centric podcast awards, like the International Women’s Podcast Awards. Those are great. I was a judge for those last year. 

And so you can apply to these awards and get that recognition and be that underdog to win. And I am rooting for you, you. So I’m going to be doing more research into that for the new year as well. I usually do a little bit of research into it, but I think Meg’s just really got me thinking more about this here and now, especially at the end of the year, you know, we’re thinking about what are we going to do next year. And there’s a lot of awards that are coming up that you can submit to. Some deadlines have already passed, but there’s still a lot of deadlines that are coming up. 

So do your research, check your local award awards and see if there’s something that you can submit to. Maybe there’s a creative non profit in your area that you can apply to. Maybe there’s an organization that does film and television and you don’t know that there is now a podcast category like Meg was saying with the Rosie Awards in Alberta. So check out things in your local area and you never know, you could be an award winner.

And when you are, please, please let me know. I would love to hear your feedback. I am all ears. You can email me at VisibleVoicePodcast@gmail.com and you know what, if you’ve got other pieces of feedback about the show, accessible things, I’d love to hear it because we were talking about accessibility at the start of the episode and so I want to be more accessible. If I’m missing anything, please do let me know. 

There’s also a full transcript of each episode on my website and so you can check that out too if you want to jot down some notes or those show notes that you have on your podcast listening app, they are clickable, at least the way that I’ve put them in. They are usually clickable for you, but if they’re not, let me know and I can figure out if there was a better way to make those show notes clickable for you, right? So you have that less friction to get you the resources that you need. 

So on the next episode, it’s actually going to be the final episode of 2025 before my year end break. I’m going to walk you through what you can do to audit your podcast and especially your podcast voice. Whether you already have episodes published or you’re thinking about launching that new show in the new year, what can you learn about your voice now so that you can grow your show? 

You know, it’s about that confidence in your voice and how you can showcase it and really highlight it to make your show more enjoyable and for your listeners to care about the message that you have to share. So thank you again for listening and for Meg as well for coming on the show and I’ll chat with you next time.

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MARY: Thank you so much for listening to the podcaster’s guide to a Visible Voice. If you enjoyed this episode, I’d love it if you share it with a podcasting friend. And to reveal more voicing and podcasting tips, click on over to VisibleVoicePodcast.com. Until next time.

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