The first Technical.ly podcast recording, with a shot of Juliana Reyes and Andrew Zaleski.

Notes on putting the Technical.ly podcast on hiatus

After 18 months and two phases of the fledgling side project, we’re setting aside the monthly Technical.ly podcast.

We couldn’t invest the time into the project that it required, it didn’t fit into our short-term strategy and the audience wasn’t growing fast enough for an exception to be made. (We were only regularly getting a few hundred downloads).

Here are a few quick notes as we take a pause:

  • We regularly heard the feedback and felt ourselves that to truly build a podcast audience, it should be weekly.
  • We had two phases of the show: The first six episodes, from January to June 2014, the podcast was nothing more than a monthly curated conversation between our reporters and me, then in an editor role. Then from August 2014 until May 2015, our editor Zack Seward led the production of a monthly half-hour show with shorter segments around a theme.
  • We talked a lot about what our goal was for the show. It started simply because our reporters wanted to compare notes with each other, so we simply decided to record the conversation. Then we moved into a more richly produced show.
  • As I began to feel like it was time to set the experiment aside, I got excited about doing a live-recording of the show, which we organized in March 2015. I was really proud of that show — and my contribution to it.
  • We also had an episode with Peter Thiel and Jack Dorsey and tied it to big trends we were seeing in our beat.
  • I could see us returning to a regular podcast but it doesn’t make sense for us now.

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