How Beasley Is Building Podcasters

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Roy Brown is part of Beasley’s morning team of Manny, Roy and Lauren at KISS-FM in Charlotte. When the home office created a company-wide contest to find the best new podcast, Roy’s team went to work, and they won the contest.

They created a podcast called Mock Made, which is a mockumentary on how things are made. The cast of the show totally ad-libs the content and follows that up with compelling production. Roy and his team won Beasley’s podcast contest with the grand prize being a trip to Podcast Movement in Philadelphia.

Shannon Kelly is Beasley’s Corporate Director of Digital Content. It was a few years ago when she started thinking about the need for education about podcasting, inside the company, and the company-wide contest was born. Bonneville has done a similar call-out of its radio hosts, as we highlighted back on March 20.

Shannon Kelley and Roy Brown at Podcast Movement 2018

Kelley tells Radio Ink the company’s goal was to unearth talent and educate more people about the growing medium of podcasting. She says the contest created some good awareness and, surprisingly, there were a lot of hosts that participated. Creating a podcast is not as easy as simply turning on a mic and rambling on. The content has to be strong enough to keep people coming back and the Beasley hosts knew, according to Kelley, that the winner would be expected to produce a full series. “It was all in the contest rules. We had first, second, and third place winners. Our first place winner, Roy, won a trip to Podcast Movement which is a pretty cool prize. They all knew that your winning means you commit. We had a minimum of a six-episode commitment for a season.”

Roy explains the idea for his podcast Mock Made. “It’s a mockumentary on how things are made. The cast of my radio show will all take different character roles with somebody being the journalist, others being the inventors or founders of certain inventions, and then telling a different story — a more comedy-based story than what the audience may already know.”

The pilot episode, as Roy explains, is about the telescope. “We were introduced to Mr. Tele and Mr. Scope who were actually using the telescope to be a peeping Tom in NYC. They accidently bumped this device up to the moon and saw it was bigger. That is when they created the idea of the telescope. It’s all improvised. When you hear the podcast you hear us improvising on the spot which is even more entertaining. If I’m playing a character I don’t know what the journalist might say or what my other counterparts will say. We are constantly feeding off each other.” So far, four episodes are in the can. The goal is 13 episodes with the first season launching in September. Listeners will be able to tune in on all the popular podcast devices such as iTunes, Google Play, and Stitcher.

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