BulletPoints - How to Three-Way Podcast

Today on BulletPoints I’m going to outline the rules I try to follow when picking news blurbs for our podcast. Please note that I’m not the only one who suggests stories for the podcast, as Nicole does as well. Likewise, any member of the team is welcome to suggest stories if they like. Longer members obviously have more say than newer members on what can stay in the podcast and what can’t. And more priority is given to topics related to topics discussed in the podcast already (such as holiday-related podcasts or big events like Avengers or the death of Monty Oum). That being said, let’s get started. 

First the general rules I follow every week, regardless of topic. For starters, I add no topics that are over a week old (ie, no older than the previous podcast). The reason for this is so we don’t accidentally cover topics more than once. And if it wasn’t interesting enough to make it into last week’s podcast, then it won’t make it period. That being said, exceptions will be made for announcements made during the time of the podcast we may have missed, but because we record late, that’s not all too common an occurrence.

Next, I don’t cover stories that are built up from events we didn’t cover. For example, we’re not going to cover a story about an apology a company made unless we talked about the problem when it was a problem. Now if said event took place before our podcast started and it’s relevant to what we talk about, an exception may be made. But without the whole context of the story, we won’t likely cover something because we don’t want to miss important details or be late to the party.

Lastly, while we are nerds and will go on for a while about Avengers, Monster Hunter, or the Amiibo Shortage, we will try to not cover topics that are too niche. We want to try and get a large audience if possible. This cannot be done if we’re talking about specific details to a show or game too often. Sure, this means we may not be able to cover all the topics we WANT to cover or have to listen to topics we aren’t as interested in. But because enough of us know enough about different things, it balances out so at least SOMEONE can talk about it if need be.

Now for more specific points we make. We will not talk about the lives or issues going on with specific celebrities for the most part. We don’t care what Oprah said to Tom Cruise or anything like that. That’s not something any of us really want to cover. Unusual casting for a property we’re interested in (such as Spider-Man or Star Wars) will be talked about because that gets our attention. But the private lives of celebrities will remain quiet. We may bring up the recent deaths of specific celebrities like Robin Williams or Monty Oum, but, again, nothing much beyond that.

When talking about a show, game, movie, or ect we will NOT be talking about anything regarding the plot of the game. We can talk about announcements, trailers, casting, and for things that we all saw, we may even do “SpoilerCasts”. But these will be labeled as such in the title of the video/podcast so you know what to expect and it won’t be a surprise. That being said, if we spoiler Harry Potter or Citizen Kane for you in casual conversation, we’re sorry. But those are kinda getting old enough now where if you haven’t seen them by now, you probably shouldn’t be on the internet. The reason for this is not only to prevent spoilers for people in general, but because we aren’t a podcast dedicated to talking about plot-breakdowns for anything. If that’s something you want to see, let us know and we’ll maybe work on incorporating that in to future productions.

We have four categories we work from when looking for topics: games, movies/TV, science/tech, and sports. When looking for topics, I do games first and narrow down the topics that are trending the most or topics that relate to something we may have already talked about. This may accidentally result in a situation where we have more topics than originally desired. For example, on a slow week, we may say something about Shovel Knight getting some exclusive PSN content (Kratos). But then a week or two later, on a heavier news week, we may have another announcement regarding Shovel Knight content exclusive to the XBONE (Battletoads).

In sticking to what’s trending most we’ve noticed quite a few things that we talk about a lot. First, Nintendo is a big deal and we talk about them a lot. They either do something controversial in the industry or make brilliant and colorful toys worth discussing about. Fan-made projects also tend to be popular, so we may start covering those in more detail in future podcasts. Likewise, certain news trends become big for a week or two before slipping away. Konami’s fallout with Kojima and the resulting loss of Silent Hills being a good example of a trend that took place just a few weeks ago we HAD to cover because it was the big gaming news of the week.

This applies to movies as well. We’ll cover big hits like Furious 7, Kingsmen, or Avengers. But don’t expect us to cover news on EVERY MOVIE EVER MADE. Because of the people on our podcast, we likely won’t talk about musicals much. We won’t cover too many indie films unless it’s related to the current discussion. This is partly because unless we have the money to plan to see it, we likely won’t have interest for it. This sort of applies to games too, but business and corporate news regarding the games or film industry will always be covered if its big enough because such changes can impact more than just a specific film/game or two.

When it comes to Science/Tech news, there’s really no set rule here other than it can’t be related to gaming or film because we already have those topics covered. For news of this category, I tend to look for something weird that you won’t hear about in most other places. This is because this category adds something a little different from the usual entertainment news that we cover and it’s also educational to a degree. Because of that, we don’t do more than a couple topics a week in this segment as we don’t want to bore the listeners. We also don’t want to cover something none of us will understand, so we try to keep it simple if possible.

“Sports” is Nicole’s segment and she generally plans all of that. I know or care little about sports myself, and this topic has, at times, become an open forum for making joke news-blurbs and saying how they can be vaguely sports related. But (at the time of writing) we’re trying to flesh out this segment more to actually have news in it, and so it’ll likely change by the time this goes up, but how and when I’m not quite sure yet.

All that being said, what are things I’d like to cover more if possible? I’d love to discuss more fan-made or community made projects like the custom-painted Amiibo craze we saw a few months back. I love promoting creative works from people who have way more talent than us. I’d love to be able to do more “SpoilerCasts” in the future, but we’ll have to plan those out if we want to do them appropriately. I know some of us would like a deeper and more detailed anime-segment to our TV/Film segment. And we’d like to add other components as well. But our podcast is still fairly young and has a long way to go before we can do lots of this stuff on a regular basis.

On top of this too, we do plan to have special one-off podcasts where we just mess around for an hour doing something like Family Feud, Mock Award-shows, or re-enacting Shakespeare but instead of being humans, we rewrite it as if we’re supposed to be sharks. (Please note, the last one was meant to be a joke and is not being planned in any way shape or form). These are ways for us to experiment with the format and just have fun while still recording something for you guys to listen to on a regular basis. If you like them, we’ll do them more often. If not, then we’ll try something else. That’s kind of how experimentation works.

That’s really all I have for this week’s BulletPoints. Hope you enjoyed an inside look to how we throw together our podcasts. If you want more information that we may have forgotten to leave out, then please be sure to leave a comment. And if you enjoyed this article, like, share, comment, and subscribe to the blog or visit our YouTube channel to see the podcast we were just talking about. Thanks for reading and I’ll be back soon with more BulletPoints.