Jigsaw Politics

A podcast I started with my friend and colleague, Kyle Shearer, during the COVID-19 lockdowns in June 2020.

What I Do

I am a cohost, marketing director, and audio supervisor for Jigsaw Politics.

When the show first launched, Kyle and I were in different states, so I had to find and implement a remote integration solution that would allow us to record into the same OBS session in high quality.

We used OBS.ninja for the first couple of episodes. After it started becoming unreliable, we transitioned to Zoom for video capture and mix minuses.

We each recorded our own separate audio tracks locally, and I combined and processed them in a Pro Tools session. We then re-synced the processed audio to video in Adobe Premier and made our final edits there.

Now that the show has grown, we have been able to bring an editor and social media manager onboard as part of the team. Most of my job related to editing and marketing these days is just answering the team’s questions, troubleshooting, and approving final content for distribution.

What I Learned

I enjoyed learning how to get a podcast set up for distribution. It surprised me how different the processes are for submitting a podcast vs music for consumption on the same platform. When my band submitted our album, it was a long process that could easily get frustrating. With the podcast, all we had to do was upload a link to our RSS feed, and the distribution platforms handle the rest. I’d love to see music distribution services like Distro Kid move towards this way of distribution in the future.

One of the biggest challenges in the podcast’s early stages was figuring out a useable remote integration system so that we could get the highest quality audio and video. I’m happy I was able to learn about different media sharing applications and plugins, especially since remote integration is the only way a lot of content is able to be safely produced right now.