True Crime Podcasting Tips with The Reporters Notebook

In this episode I interview Karin, Gary, and Kristine from the Reporters Notebook creators of the popular True Crime Podcast Still... The team talks about what it takes to create an investigative style true crime podcast and offers of great tips for creators going down the same path. This was a really fun interview with lots of good information. I hope you enjoy it.

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Chapters
00:00 Podcast Creators Into
01:28 Reporters Notebook Intro
03:40 Relationship between Reporters Notebook and Still...
05:22 Naming a True Crime Podcast
06:20 Podcasting as a full-time job
08:10 Journalist True Crime compared to Armchair Sleuths
10:15 How to start an Investigative True Crime Podcast
13:00 Download performance
14:20 Biggest hurdles creating a True Crime Podcast
15:45 Rapid release strategy for Serial Podcasts
17:27 Episode and Season Considerations
19:20 How do you spend time on the podcast
21:30 Logistics of creating a True Crime Podcast
25:35 Learnings from Starting a True Crime Podcast
28:30 Where the show is recorded
30:30 Equipment for field recording (Audio Technica shotgun mic, boom, deadcat, Zoom H4N)
33:38 Advice for Podcast Creators
35:45 Season 2 of Still...
36:20 Search for Still... in all your podcast
37:00 Podcast Creators Outro

Hosting
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Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Hello everyone, and welcome to PodcastCreators, a show where we get podcasting
advice from real podcasters. If youwere just checking out the show for the
first time, hit that follow button. How hard is it to create an
investigative true crime podcast? What skillsdo you need? What type of equipment
do you need? How do youknow if the show's any good? How

(00:21):
can you stay true to the case, the victims, the families, and
also get decent performance on your podcast. We're going to learn about that and
more today on the show we haveCatherine, Karen and Gary from The Reporter's
Notebook, creators of the popular investigativetrue crime series named Still. Today's interview
was recorded on Riverside FM. Soif you like the way this sounds and

(00:42):
you want to check it out foryour show, I would appreciate it if
you use my affiliate link in theshow notes below. Speaking of links,
I will put all the links toStill, plus the links to all the
tools and equipment we talk about downin the show notes, so you can
check that out. All right,let's go, Karen, Gary, and

(01:03):
Christine. Welcome to the show.How are you guys today? Doing great?
Thanks for having us, Yeah,no problem. Why don't we just
start by introducing yourselves and what yourkind of role is on the show.
I listened to Still, which Ithink is your first show, and we'll
get into that. So I kindof have an idea, but let's tell

(01:23):
the audience what your roles are.Christine and I used to work together as
reporters at the Dallas Morning News andbecame best friends doing that and just loved
hanging out and doing things together.And I started listening to true crime podcasts

(01:44):
and thought, wow, I coulddo this and she could do this with
me. So what y'all roles?Right now? So that's how we got
into it. And I would saythat our roles have been finding the case
is, doing the research, doingthe writing, kind of the brains behind

(02:04):
the operation as far as the writinggoes, the technical part, that's gary,
right. So my role has beenfirst and foremost the voice of the
podcast. I have a background inperforming arts, and I kind of have
have done that before, so itjust kind of made sense. I have
a lot of digital backgrounds, souh, you know, learning and using

(02:27):
editing software was more in my wheelhousethan anyone else's, so it kind of
kind of fell into my lab Christine, do you want to talk about your
role now? I think Karen coveredit. I'm my title, I guess
is associate producer, So i'm Ido. I'm like a chief cook and
bottle washer person. I just dowhatever I'm asked to do. I do,

(02:52):
like Karen said, the research andhelp her with the writing and then
some editing. And I got tobe a voice in the last one.
Also, that was fun. Yeah, I heard that. I just finished
the last episode this morning, andI thought, I thought, oh,
Gary's passing the rains a little bit. But I thought it was good.

(03:13):
So maybe we can just kind ofdive into what reporter's notebook is. What
is still kind of explain? Whoeverwants to take that question, well,
I want to give Christina a chanceto answer. First of all, the
Reporter's Notebook, and I might getthis wrong, guys, is the podcast
arm of Karen and Gary's own multimediacompany. So the podcast arm is the

(03:38):
reporter's notebook. And we settled ona storyline in this last one. We
found cases that we wanted to pursue, potential suspect that we wanted to say
whether or not he was the one, and so we put the podcast together.

(03:59):
From that, I don't know howit's explaining. One of the things
with our company, Grayson Shaw Media, we hope to branch out and do
all sorts of content creation, andsince we're all former journalists, we wanted
to do investigative work and we wantthe Reporter's Notebook to be that brand,
and so that's kind of what theReporter's Notebook is about. Eventually, I

(04:21):
foresee us doing potentially, you know, podcasts about you know, government corruption
or you know, just crime inthe streets or just whatever is a compelling
story to tell that may not necessarilybe true crime, or may not necessarily
be a cold case. So hopefullywe'll have different podcasts kind of up under

(04:43):
that brand, but still is ourfirst cold case. So how did we
land on still the titles still?Yeah, well, we we went through,
honestly, lots and lots of titles, because if you're trying to come
up with a name for a newtrue crime podcast, virtually everything you can
think of has already been taken.So it was it was really difficult,

(05:05):
and we were trying not to getoverly specific because we thought if we come
back with new cases later, wewant to still be able to use the
same umbrella name, and so wethought, while these cases are still unsolved
and these families are still hoping,still waiting for answers. So that's how

(05:29):
we came up with the name now, The Hard Question, Right, an
investigative true crime show. I meanthis is serious business, right. I
assume that you know you're working onthis full time, you have some sort
of funding. I mean, thisis not I went to Wikipedia, you
know, I googled a case inmy neighborhood. I read the report on

(05:50):
a podcast. Can you go intolike what what led to this creation?
Like, did you have a plan? Did you quit job? What happened?
Well, Gary was already out ofwork. He had been laid off
from his job the previous year prepandemic, and then the pandemic hit.
Yeah, so he had been lookingfor a while and this was just something

(06:13):
I was itching to do and wantedto leave my job, and so we
just kind of took a leap offaith. I talked to Christine first and
said, would you be willing todo this with us? And Christine can
talk kind of about what situation shewas in at the time, but when
when she said yes, I woulddo it. Then I talked to Gary
and we said, Okay, I'mgoing to quit my job, and so

(06:35):
yes, we're doing this full time. And as far as funding, we're
we're self funded. Yes, ourretirement is swindling right now. So wow,
So Christine, what were you upto and how did how did this
all come about? I had recentlywhen that occurred, moved to New Mexico

(06:57):
and with my husband and who hadreturn hired. And because of that,
I kept the job I had inDallas for several months, but then they
couldn't. It's kind of a funnything about taxes. You know, New
Mexico does a state income tax andTexas doesn't, so they couldn't keep me

(07:17):
on and so I ended up losingthat job, and so I was sort
of semi retired myself just because ofthat, and so I had a lot
of time on my hands to beable to commit. The only thing I
would add is that you know thatKaren and I listened to a lot of
true crime podcasts. We like them. It's kind of, you know,

(07:39):
something we're very interested in. AndI'll just tell you there are many times
we would finish one and we werelike, you know that was really good,
but we think we could do better. I mean, we we're journalists.
You know a lot of these peopleare just armchair sluice, you know,
or yeah, just people who areHey, I made a podcast,
and you know, I knew wehave to learn the podcasting side of it,

(08:01):
but I knew that between the threeof us, we already knew how
to dig in and do the work. So I was more than confident in
our ability to find a story andtell a great story. Now, I
don't want to take anything away frompeople who are, as you said,
arm tires sluice though, because alot of I mean they do great work.
They do great work. And ifyou haven't had the training and journalism

(08:22):
and know all the tools that wehave, it's amazing what they've been able
to learn and uncover. And alot of these cases have been solved,
not all of them, but alot of them have. So, you
know, I want to give creditwhere credits due to all the people out
there that are doing this and aredoing it with right motivations to try to
help or enclosure and solve some ofthese cold cases. So one thing I'd

(08:46):
learned maybe the hard way, isthere are subgenres within subgenres, within subgenres
of true crime. It seems likeit goes on forever. One thing I
liked about your show it you know, as soon as I saw it.
It was interesting to me immediately becauseit's a niche that has a high barrier

(09:07):
of ventry, and it's an investigativetrue crime that has real investigation, talks
to real families, thinks about realthings, but also looks at cases that
maybe are you know, at leastin Still's case, coal cases, and
you know, you pick a geographicarea at least with that case to kind

(09:30):
of pinpoint. So it checked.It checked a lot of boxes. It
had locality going for it. Ithas trained reporters investigators working on it,
which is a very high barrier ventry, right, I mean that's the biggest
barrier entry is skill. How didyou frame how you wanted to start this?

(09:50):
And keep in mind an indie podcastersprobably listening to this thinking, you
know, oh, you know,I have a journalism degree. I love
I love true crime, Like maybeI could do this, Like what structure
that the beginning? Well, Iwould say that a lot of it started
with Christina and I sitting down andjust combing through cases because we really we

(10:13):
were looking for a case. Weknew this is what we wanted to do,
and we went in with the ideathat maybe we would handle one cold
case. And the more we lookedinto it, the more we said,
ooh, it's really hard to ruleout one case in particular, or rule
in one case in particular without rulingin others, because they all seem to

(10:33):
be connected, and just it's Iguess it. With journalists, it's kind
of like the story reveals itself,and that's what happened. I think the
more we looked into it, wejust kind of said, wow, we
really think this is the story thathas to be told. And in reality,

(10:54):
there were probably more cases we wantedto talk about, but we realized
that it was becoming too big ofan elephant to try to eat. So
we just had to start whittling awayand saying, Okay, these these have
the closest connections. Well, andit would have been too big an elephant
for somebody to listen to, right, I guess you have to you know,
you have to tell a story that'sconsumable if you're building the you know,

(11:16):
the web like you see on crimedramas right where there's where there's a
thousand you know, strings attached topictures like you can't convey that very well
on audio. I'll give Christine aton of credit. She's the one who
actually found these cases in Fort Worth. And the one thing I will say,
Greg, is that I was tryingto be I don't know, the
rational guy looking at the bottom line, going hey, you know, if

(11:39):
we found a case close to home, it might be a lot cheaper to
produce. So that was the onlymy only contribution. But then Christine jumped
in and found these cases, andfor word somewhat agree with that. But
I always think Karen should get somecredit there too, because she's the one
who found the website that had thecold cases on it. We disagree on
this. I remember Christine finding it, but it you know, we're both

(12:01):
getting a little bit older and ourmemories are a little fuzzy. But yeah,
well I've heard the final result.I think there's enough credit to go
around, for sure. So let'sadd some context to this. You know,
I like to to get into thenitty gritty, as Gary will will
know. I pester him about downloadsand what's happening and how's it working?

(12:26):
And all these things. The showcame out in January, essentially, it
was December. January was the introand the and you know, episode one.
How is the show doing today?As of today, we're above eleven
thousand total downloads. You know,we're happy about that. Our downloads are
seeming to starting to improve. It'sstill just not where I want it to

(12:50):
be. I just don't think we'regetting the exposure at scale that you know,
obviously the big network podcast as getjust because you know they're out there.
But that being said, I've seensome indie podcasts that are doing a
lot better than we are, andI've listened to their work and it's good,

(13:11):
but it's not any better than ours. And it's like, ah,
we're just not getting our name outthere and yeah in front of the right
people. Now, that being said, that's just me being you know,
I want I want it all now. But overall, I would say,
no, we're growing and things aregetting you know, we're getting more out
there, you know, I'll behonest. You know, being included in

(13:31):
your show was a huge bump,you know that we saw in June,
and I shared those numbers with you, so that was a big help,
awesome, and I hope that itcontinues to help because really that's the whole
point of Indie drop in is isif I build a mega show, then
I can feature people who deserve tobe featured, and the credit kind of
goes that direction. You know,I'm not where I want to be yet

(13:54):
because I now I just make littlemoves. But hey, you know one
or two listeners, or you knowone or two thousand listeners. I think
you know is helpful. But maybewe can kind of walk through what are
the largest hurdles for creating a showlike this? Well, I think first
we didn't know what we didn't know, So we were, as Gary likes

(14:15):
to say, trying to build anairplane while we were flying it. So
it's, you know, just learningon the fly, learning what the challenges
will be, and trying to figureout what other people were doing and decide
do we like what they're doing ordo we not like what they're doing?
How do we want to do ita little bit differently? And I think

(14:37):
a lot of it has been reallyjust providence that things have worked out as
well as they have. I guessone of the things you have to keep
in mind is that as your writingepisodes, they're going to live on for
a long time, hopefully, hopefully, and you have to keep that in

(14:58):
mind as you're writing it. Ifyou're writing it in a serialized form,
it's not episodic where this is today'sepisode. That in a serialized form,
you have to tell it in away that the listeners may be coming to
your show a year or two downthe road and things may have changed,
things may have happened, and youhave to keep that in mind. Yeah,

(15:18):
I think it also kind of feedsinto the performance in the downloads.
And you know, I have alot of author friends, and I think
serial podcasts and books have a lotin common how they're marketed, how they're
sold. Basically, what my authorfriends tell me is is when you write
your first book, you put itout there and it gets let's say eleven

(15:39):
thousand downloads, just to add context, right, But then what happens is
you get book two, in bookthree, and book four and book five,
and then all of a sudden peoplestart to want to consume the catalog
and understand what more things that youmake, and you know, a strategy
they employ that I've seen people doin serial podcasts is a rapid release,

(16:02):
right, So you'll put out seasonone and then season two is already in
the can, right, and you'llput it out like two months later,
and you just get the marketing enginein a manner that just doesn't ever stop.
I think is that serial podcasts havea have a disadvantage and an advantage.
The disadvantages is that people don't getan episode every week, right,

(16:23):
so they can't like join the family, they can't like join the investigation that
you know, they're not interacting withyou on Twitter. But that said,
they're almost never complete stories like aserial type podcast like what you make.
So whether or not one is betterthan the other, I think history shows
us that serial podcasts outperform. Butyou know, episodic podcasts, there's way

(16:48):
more of them. Who can saywhat is better. But I think I
think what you're gonna find is iswhen you get season two out, your
season one downloads are gonna guy rocket. And honestly, Greg, that's kind
of one of the things you weregoing back to talking about a plan.
That's one of the things that wetalked about was that we wanted to keep

(17:10):
the episode count to a reasonable amountWe'd seen some that had eighteen nineteen twenty
episodes and that just felt a littleoverwhelming to us. So we wanted to
kind of, you know, aboutten episodes. We felt was our sweet
spot. We wanted to limity eachepisode to about thirty five to forty minutes

(17:30):
about the average drivetime, you know, of a commute. That was a
strategic decision, and then we talkedabout we also don't want to take three
years to release our next season.You know. We talked about that up
front, and I told the twoof them as we were nearing the end
of you know, dropping our finalepisode back in March, I said,

(17:51):
Okay, it's time. We've gotto find the next season because I want
to release something by the end ofthe year. So our goal was to
try to get something out every sixto seven to eight months. So that's
our goal, and I think we'regoing to hit it with season two.
Yeah, we're actually working on twoseasons kind of simultaneously. We started on

(18:12):
one and it has been slow goingas far as the investigation, because there
are some elements we're still waiting tohappen. There's a trial that we're waiting
to happen. But then we cameacross another case and it feels a lot
more immediate because we're waiting on DNAresults, so we're, you know,

(18:32):
we're kind of doing both at thesame time and shuffling which one will actually
get released first. Well we thinkwe know at this point, right,
most likely. I think that's reallyreally smart. So question for Christine,
like, do you treat this likea nine to five job, because I

(18:52):
you know, Gary and Karen theyown the company, right, so it's
got to be twenty four to sevenfor them. But for you, you
know, how do you approach thisas far as spending your time and effort?
And that's a great question. Idon't really have a schedule. I
sort of just do what I needto do when I need to do it.

(19:15):
Being semi retired and having a retiredhusband means that we have a lot
of flexibility, so we can dothe fun things we want to do when
we want to do them. Isort of just kind of fit in where
I can the things that need tobe done, which means that I sometimes

(19:37):
procrastinate and I shouldn't, so Ihave to be more, have to be
pushed myself a little bit. SometimesI'm not trying to put you on the
spot here for sure. I justthink it's always interesting when there's a team
and understanding the team dynamics, especiallywith remote people and different priorities and and

(20:00):
all that kind of stuff. AndI want to be clear too that Christine
is not our employee. She's ourpartner. And you know, she's not
part of Race and Shawn Media,but she is part of the reporter's notebook,
so she's she's our partner. Andwe all support each other and also
kind of, you know, holdeach other accountable that have you gotten this

(20:22):
done? And you know, canyou help me with this? And and
we're all in this together. That'samazing. The best thing that happened recently
was we traveled for one of theseasons and that really increased my interest in
the whole process and made me morefeel more committed to doing things every day

(20:47):
and making sure, you know,that I was on top of things.
So that was a lot of fun. The three of us was a long
trap. It was really great.It was incredibly rewarding. Yes, well,
that's a great segue actually to thenext question, because it seems like
there would be an extreme amount oflogistics involved in what you're doing. I

(21:07):
mean, you go to a location, you have people to talk to,
schedules to make I mean, youknow, Gary and I it took us
three weeks just to plan a halfan hour interview. You know, how
are you managing the logistics of makingthis show? I would say that a
lot of times the availability of peopledictates our timeline, you know, because

(21:29):
we have to find the people,get them willing to talk to us.
And we have really been helped bygracious people. The families of a lot
of these victims have volunteered information,have volunteered their time where we just traveled.
The daughter of one of the victimsspent a lot of time arranging for

(21:52):
us to talk to people, andwe didn't even have to worry about it.
She just had it kind of linedup. So it was really amazing,
you know, rewarding for us,not just to get the cooperation from
families, but their help and theiradvocacy, and they're just really you know,
we're in it because this is interestingto us and it's our job,

(22:15):
but they're in it because this istheir life. And they've just been really
remarkable in how much help they've offered. I mean, based on what I
heard in the show, it seemslike a lot of them are still suffering
or working through where where are theirloved ones? They just don't know anything.
Yeah. That was one of thethings in the first season that I

(22:36):
think we both kind of learned thatwe weren't quite expecting, was the response
that we would get when we wouldjust call up a family member out of
the blue and say, hey,we want to talk about your daughter who
died thirty five years ago. Sometimesit was pretty negative. That was a
difficult thing to deal with, youknow, just on an emotional human level.

(23:00):
Most of the times it was prettyneutral, people who were just like,
no, I don't really want totalk about that or whatnot. But
then a handful of times it wasextremely positive. You know. Some some
people we spoke with were ecstatic totalk. They were just thrilled that somebody
cared enough about, you know,their loved one who died thirty five years
ago, and they they they've justbeen our biggest fans, And to me,

(23:23):
that's been the most rewarding aspect ofit. I think these types of
things, you know, you'll getsome media coverage and these things will get
the ball rolling. I mean,one thing that people always I say,
I don't know if it's misunderstand oror um. Maybe they get into podcasting

(23:44):
a little more ambitious than than whatthey should. But it takes years.
Like there there is no shortcut totime unfortunately. I mean, you can
spend a bunch of money if youadvertise the show, you could definitely get
listeners, but the averages in betweentwo and five dollars per subscriber. You
have to sell a lot of adsto pay that back. You know,

(24:07):
the surefire way is exactly what you'redoing, which is make amazing content,
make contributions, provide value over anextended period of time. And then I
think what you'll find is, beforeyou know it, you'll log on and
you'll say, man, why didthis go from three hundred and twenty five
thousand downloads this month, not intotal this month to three hundred and sixty

(24:33):
thousand Did we get put you know, like did the somebody put us in
a blog or something like that?Will happen, Like, it absolutely will
happen. It'll take a lot oftime. You know, it's going to
take a couple of years. SoI hope, I hope that you're ready
to to survive till then, Yeah, it's delayed gratification. But the one
interesting thing about it, though,is it's the exact same amount of work,
Like when the thing's getting a milliondownloads, It's the exact same amount

(24:56):
of work as it is today,right, which is which is a funny
way to think about it, becausein any other business, the bigger it
gets, the more the harder itis, you know, the more people
you have to hire, and youknow, all that kind of stuff.
If there's a creator, an indiecreator looking at creating this type of show,
there is there a couple of thingsor one thing that you did wrong

(25:18):
that we should avoid that they shouldavoid, yeah, or if you had
the chance to do it over,you would approach it differently. Everything we
did was a learning experience, soeven even the failures had value, you
know. I guess the only thingthat we might have done differently was spend
a little bit more time in likea pre planning stage, you know,

(25:40):
while they were researching and writing,and we were working on the first season
this time last year. It gothot and heavy by September of last year.
I mean they were actively writing byOctober, and the whole time I
was just working on some of theproduction value things and whatnot, so like,
for instance, so she asked meat one point, she said,

(26:02):
Okay, if we're shooting for thirtyfive minutes, how many pages should I
write for the script? Oh?No, And so we had to do
some trial and error to figure thatout. You know, she likes her
font size at a particular size.She likes to write using this font blah
blah blah. I said, justwrite an episode. I'll go record it,

(26:22):
and then we'll find out. SoI guess, you know, not
that that was a mistake or somethingwe would have done differently, but I
guess what I would say is,if you're going to produce a podcast,
is do that kind of trial anderror more upfront than we did. I
guess yeah. I would say,allow yourself time. Don't promise that you're
going to have an episode out beforeit's really really ready. The first episode

(26:47):
we wrote, we went back andchanged because we realized we were biting off
more than really anybody could digest inone episode. It was too complicated of
a story to try to the waywe wanted to tell it. I think
we were talking about the first fourvictims in the first episode, and we
realized at that point, Okay,we need to slow down and take our

(27:11):
time because we've been immersed in thesecases for months now, but our listeners
haven't, so they've got to understandwhat we understand. So we had to
we had to kind of rejigger ita little bit and figure out how to
tell the story a little bit moreslowly. One of the things I think
of when I think of mistakes isand these aren't, like Gary said,

(27:37):
not really mistakes, they're learning opportunities. But what I think of is the
sound quality, because in the verybeginning, we didn't even know how a
room should be arranged so that thesound was optimum. And so it's funny,
but I was moving in an RVfor months during this early part of

(28:02):
the process, and I actually triedrecording in the RV, which turned out
to be disastrous because of the tinnysound and and you know, I had
some good equipment, but it justwasn't the right place to do it.
So that that was a learning experience. Wow, So where do you do
it? Now? We've learned thatthe best place to do our actual recording

(28:26):
is in our master bedroom closet becauseall the clothes absorbed the echoes and things
like that. It is a naturalsound booth. Yeah, Because we have
a big dog who barks very loudas you as you've heard, we have
to put many doors between us andhim. One of the other biggest challenges
that, you know, talking aboutthings that we learned, is we had

(28:48):
to figure out how to record onthe phone the best way possible because with
the pandemic going on, which waspretty much hot and heavy this time last
year, we had to do italmost everything on the phone. And you
know, as a journalist I hatedthat. I just hated it, and
as a podcaster I even hated itmore. You know, I wanted the

(29:08):
good quality sound of a face toface interview and we couldn't do that.
So that was a challenge as well, right, and fortunately for us in
Texas, the privacy laws, orI guess is it privacy law consent for
doing a phone interview is that youdon't have to ask permission to record the

(29:33):
call. So if somebody said somethingreally valuable before we had gotten their permission,
we were able to use it.Although we you know, we really
don't want to use somebody's recording withouttheir permission. Correct, But it's important
for podcasters out there to understand thatthere are laws in different states, and
if you're calling someone an indifferent state, that state's laws will apply to the

(29:56):
phone call. Well, that's reallygreat. One thing I do want to
touch on, and we're not goingto have time to dig too deep.
So, um, when you're outfieldrecording, what type of equipment do you
use? What do you bring withyou? And you don't have to go
too deep, because what I wantto get is it I'll get an equipment
list from you and we'll put itin the show notes, but just maybe

(30:18):
the highlights, just for creators wondering. I guess that falls on me to
answer the Ironically, enough, likeI said, with our first season,
almost everything was done on the phone, so we didn't have much need for
field recording. I have. Ibought a couple of SURESM fifty eights that
I used for our voice over workhere in the in the closet. But

(30:42):
anyway, when we were getting readyto go to Oregon, I told her
and Christine both I said, Ineed to get a good mic. You
know, we're going to be outin the field and I need a good
mic. I don't want to berunning around, you know, like Bob
Barker with sticking a mic in people'sface, and so a lot of research.
This was back at the beginning ofJuly, end of June. I

(31:03):
guess did a lot of research andended up buying an Audio Technica shotgun mike.
I bought a boom, you know, bought a dead cat to put
it in the whole windscreen. Allof that. I did as much research
as I could. I'm not anaudio professional. We didn't spend a ton
of money, but we didn't cheapout either, so we bought it.

(31:25):
I thought, what I was prettypleased with a you know, a pretty
good quality mic, and it savedus when we were in Oregon. It
absolutely saved us. We would havebeen in trouble without it, I think,
although Christine was able to get somereally good audio on her iPhone using
that external mic, it's the externalmike there. I bought a sure external

(31:45):
mic last year that you know,connects into your iPhone and I've used in
on a couple of occasions. Christinewas able to use it while we were
up there, and man, itdoes a great job. Just for a
little you know, handel I've seenmicrophones that connect to the bottom of an
iPhone like their Zoom makes one shirtlike you said, sure makes one,

(32:05):
and I'm just always shocked by them. It's just unbelievable what you can do
on an iPhone. That shotgun Mikewas the big one. And the other
one that we had that we've justused has been the best purchase that we
made was a little Zoom H fourM recorder that that joker has been awesome.
I've used it for everything. TheZoom recorders, they're just the best,

(32:29):
like you get. They're small,you can take them anywhere, they
run, the batteries, you canplug them in. I mean, they
just do anything. We were inOregon and she was going to go into
the police department with one of oursources, and I said, here,
and I just whipped it off andI said, stick this in your purse
and just see what happens. Andultimately she got some great audio. We
may or may not be able touse it, but it was still it

(32:51):
was guerrilla audio, and I wasit was awesome. I mean, we
Christine and I sat out in thecar and she walked in and with just
a zoo sticking out of her purseand so that's like a movie unbelievable.
All right, So we're a littlebit over. Maybe we can start wrapping
it up. If you could givean indie podcast or just a little bit

(33:12):
of advice about creating a true crimeshow, maybe doing investigation, anything that
you think might be helpful, justone little nugget. Well, I'll just
say from my perspective, because Iapproach this more as a journalist than I
do as I guess a professional podcaster, because I don't have the skills I
think to do the audio or theediting or things like that. But I

(33:37):
would say you've got to be carefulabout verify, verify, verify. If
somebody tells you something, try tofind another source that can either verify it
or disprove it, and keep checking. Don't take somebody's word for it.
And people's memories are faulty, sotry to get as many sources to back

(33:57):
this up, because it's your reputationputting at stake when you put information out
as a fact. Would I wouldsay, just from a technical standpoint,
by a zoom recorder, it is. If that's all that you can afford,
there are like three hundred bucks dependingon how many bells and whistles you
want. But if that's all youcan afford, that you can produce a

(34:21):
great podcast with nothing but that awesome. And I think I would say that
be as unbiased as you possibly can. When you're covering a story, you
need to give both sides if possible, and then you can. I mean

(34:42):
that comes from my journalism background.Also, it's you know, it's you
don't want somebody coming to you andsaying, well, you can't. You
told that story so slanted that ityou know, doesn't make any sense or
whatever. Yeah, you're obviously byas or something. When I look at
true crime shows that submit to me, I look at their comments, and

(35:05):
whenever there's lots of those comments inthe description, I'm a little bit weary
about it. All right, Sowhy don't we give the still fans a
little love out there, tell uswhat we can expect from season two,
and then tell us where to findyour show. Okay, it's hard to
give a little bit of information withoutrevealing everything spoilers, but I will say

(35:30):
Season two really is the story oftwo cases and how they intersect. There
is a Jane Doe and there's amissing woman who is presumed to have been
murdered, and the question is arethese in fact the same person. We're
still working on that getting those answers. That is amazing, that well done,

(35:52):
Like I got goose bumps over here. All right, So tell us
where to find still order's notebook,any information you want to give now,
now's the time. Yeah, We'reavailable on any podcasting platform. We recognize
that just searching for still Is pullsup a million different podcasts. My recommendation

(36:13):
is always to search for still dotdot dot. That seems to help quite
a bit. If you can't findus there, search for the reporter's notebook.
And if you can't find us there, then you use our RSS feed
and ping me on Twitter and I'llbe glad to send it to you.
Perfect and I'll put all the linksin the show notes below to make it
super easy for everybody to find theshow. And you know, your your

(36:36):
website, social media, all thatgood stuff. We're just going to load
the show notes up with tools andtips and everything that we all the nuggets
we got from this interview, whichthere are so many, so I'm gonna
listen back and write them all down. Christine Karen Gary amazing interview. I
really love your show. I thinkseason two is going to be a big

(36:57):
hit. Thank you so much forbeing on the show. Thank you for
having us. We appreciate it.Thanks bye, bye bye. Thank you
so much to Karen, Gary andChristine for coming on the show and teaching
us all about how to create andrun an investigative true crime podcast. I'll
put the links to their show,plus everything we talked about in the show
notes below, so if there's anythinginteresting, you can easily find it.

(37:21):
If you're a podcast creator and you'relooking to grow your show, you should
check out Indie drop in dot comforward slash creators for a chance to submit
your show and be featured on oneof indie drop in shows. If you
liked this podcast, make sure tohit follow. We interview lots of other
podcasts creators, so don't forget tocheck out our other episodes. Thanks again
for listening. Bye bye,