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Mignon presents Grammar Girl and is Founder of the Quick and Dirty Tips podcast network — this interview has been lightly edited for style and readability
This interview is from the Podnews Weekly Review
Mignon Fogarty: Grammar Girl started as a quick tip about writing a quick and dirty tip to help you write better. Today, it’s about language, and everything that is exciting and fun about language, as well as the quick tips.
James Cridland: I was listening to a recent episode and the first thing that I heard was an advertisement for the Gold Coast University, which is just down the road from me here in Australia! You must have seen an awful lot of change in podcasting in the last 18 years. What’s the biggest changes that you’ve seen?
MF: It’s funny that you would mention that, because I do think dynamic ad insertion is one of the biggest changes - at least, it’s had the biggest effect on my business and what I do. Producing the podcast hasn’t changed that much really.
I’m also the founder of the Quick and Dirty Tips Podcast Network, and the nature of our shows mean that it’s all evergreen. We have a massive archive of episodes that are still live, and get a lot of traffic. And so our ability to monetize that backlist has just made all the difference in having a business.
JC: Can you remember who your first advertiser was?
MF: Audible was there in the beginning. I don’t know if they were the first, but they probably advertised on the show for ten years at least. I remember very early on we had a couple of movies advertising - Stomp the Yard was a movie that advertised in Grammar Girl way back in the very early days.
JC: Why don’t why don’t movies advertise in podcasts anymore?
MF: That was probably the last one.
JC: How did advertising work?
MF: They were all host read. It feels not that long ago that I had to record ads every week. And now I don’t have a single ad to record myself this month: it’s all pre-recorded and dynamically inserted.
JC: So you say that the way that you make your show hasn’t changed that much - you’re not using AI or any of these new fancy tools?
MF: Well the tools have gotten better, but, I still research the topic, write a script, record that script, and then we produce it in an audio program. Like the meat of it hasn’t changed, but all the technology around it has. It is so much easier to do an interview than it used to be. We have SquadCast, and Riverside and Cleanfeed, all the various tools to record interviews. None of that existed when I started. It was much harder to do an interview. And I used to transcribe my interviews by hand - that took hours, you know. Now we use Descript and it just pops out a transcript, and it saves hours of time.
JC: Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.
MF: Thank you, James.
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