The times they are a changin’. If you take a continually growing audience of a bi-weekly podcast and attempt to move their loyalties to a monthly podcast format, is it risky? Well, the answer to your question would have to be “Yes”. But less so if one were to understand what we, those of us working on the Free Range Texan, understand about the realities of meeting the production deadlines and producing creative content for a podcast as multi-faceted as ours.
First, let’s look at the facts. Producing the Free Range Texan is not free. There are a number of people who have or do commit a significant part of their time, focus and funds to make the Free Range Texan roll out on time every two weeks. I’m about to share something with you that I don’t normally talk openly about. The truth is we have dozens of really great ideas, but when it gets down to implementing the production process, our production funds simply aren’t in the budget … and we find ourselves stepping back, drawing a breath, and finding something else to work on. Sometimes it’s frustrating.
If a few weeks ago you would have told me that basically cutting the number of Free Range Texan episodes in half annually could be a good thing, I would just have bent over with a knot in my gut and walked away. I mean really! On the surface it would seem like somebody shot us with a torpedo. But then, we began to think about our production process and asked some pretty important “what if” questions.
What if we had twice the production time and budget per podcast than what we are currently working with? What if as a production team we no longer felt under the gun to find content, get it recorded and produced, and build an entirely new episode every two weeks? In big-time network programming, each show has three to five production teams. And like a deck of cards, the show’s episodes are dealt out to the team members so that each team has a number of weeks to complete their production by the time it airs. We are not big-time network producers. We have one team and we produce everything, on time. So spending more time with a greater budget per episode started to look like a higher quality podcast with a higher quality life for its producers.
This is gonna be fun! To our regular listeners, please forgive us for not knocking on your door with a brand new episode every other Thursday. We still love our listeners alot! And we promise to continue to bring everything that you expect from our Free Range Texan Podcast to you with a few more layers of icing on our cake. We are genuinely excited about our new schedule as our last bi-weekly podcast rolls out Thursday, July 2nd. And our new monthly podcast schedule begins on August 1st, 2020.
There is one more thing … We believe we have been remiss in not urging our podcast listeners to subscribe to our podcast. We have always provided a direct player at FreeRangeTexan.net. You can still accomplish listening to our podcast thru FreeRangeTexan.net … our web page gives you all of the biggest podcast players and/or our Free Range Texan YouTube Channel. Either way, you can easily subscribe. Without going into a large amount of detail, suffice to say our new schedule makes our subscription rate vital to our future. Thanks for listening … FreeRangeTexan.net.
Better for my hectic schedule.