Podcast craft from the room where it happens.
Werk It: The Podcast turns festival sessions into practical audio for podcast makers. Its recent episodes move from grant writing and audience growth to community events, true-crime production, freelance survival, and the workplace realities facing people of color.
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Werk It: The Podcast is professional-development audio drawn from live Werk It festival sessions. It treats podcasting as a craft, a business, and a community practice. The recent excerpts keep returning to the practical questions makers run into once an idea becomes work: who the show is for, how it finds people, how it pays for itself, and what kinds of support make a career survivable. The tone is candid. Speakers talk about launches, cross-promotion, grant applications, listening sessions, freelance mistakes, and the hard limits of trying to do every promotional tactic at once. The show is not only about growth. It is also about responsibility. In the audience-focused session, speakers challenge default assumptions about who public media serves and describe listening to communities before building a project around them. In the Locatora Radio session, Diosa Femme and Mala Munoz describe turning podcast themes into real-life gatherings in East LA, with parties, art, politics, and local collaboration working together. Other episodes lean into production problem-solving. The Man in the Window discussion follows a difficult true-crime project through documents, archival audio, reporting, sound gathering, and choices about genre boundaries. The freelance and grant-writing sessions bring the same plainspoken energy to money, rejection, mentorship, and treating creative work like a business. A Transparent Look at the Glow Up adds a workplace dimension, with Keisha TK Dutess and Gabrielle Horton speaking about jobs, pay, coded interview language, imposter syndrome, and helping one another move forward. Across the excerpts, Werk It keeps the microphone close to people who have actually made the thing under discussion. That makes it useful without becoming sterile. It is best understood as a working notebook from inside podcast culture: specific, frank, and alert to the gap between making good audio and building a sustainable place to make it.
Made for: Suits a listener who makes podcasts, wants to work in audio, or studies how shows are built behind the scenes. It also fits listeners interested in media work shaped by audience trust, funding, representation, and labor.
What sets it apart: The show’s edge is its live-session specificity: makers explain choices, constraints, and mistakes in front of an industry room. Similar podcast-advice shows can feel generic; this one is grounded in festival talks about actual projects, grants, marketing, community events, and workplace navigation.
The Werk It festival brings together women from around the world who host, produce, edit, sound design and love podcasts, for a few days of workshops, conversations and presentations. This podcast is the on-demand version of the live event. Think of it as the ICYMI, FOMO version for podcast geeks everywhere. We’ve kept only the best stuff in. Our episodes are in no particular order, so you can dive in and out and just explore, on your own time. If you’ve got a long road trip, go ahead and binge listen! If you’ve got a 20-minute commute, we’ve got something for that, too! Final thought: This podcast is for everyone; the voices you’ll hear belong to women, but the messages are universal.WNYC S…
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A grounded panel on making audience listening part of editorial practice.
"Who Are You Making This For?" treats audience as an editorial obligation, not a marketing afterthought. Dessa guides Christina Kim, Tanya Mosley, Camille Stanley, and Barry Syke through the choices that come after producers ask who is actually listening.
A grounded guide to growing a podcast audience without chasing every available marketing tool.
Audience growth is framed less as a hunt for every marketing lever and more as an editorial judgment call. Mathilde Piard, a senior project manager at NPR, brings the perspective of launching 20 podcasts in five years and tripling NPR's audience in three, showing how promotion…
A grounded look at the reporting, sound, and persistence behind Man in the Window.
How They Made It: Man in the Window frames a live festival conversation as a clear look at how a difficult true-crime investigation became a podcast. Paige St.
A sharp look at turning podcast themes into survivor-centered community events.
Diosa Femme and Mala Munoz frame Locatora Radio as something larger than a show, tracing how its ideas moved into community work in East LA. They describe a network built with friends, homegirls, community members, and local artists, including the practical choice to pay people…
A candid conversation about trust, money, bias, and the private support behind career growth.
A Transparent Look at the Glow Up frames career growth as a shared, often private act of trust. TK and Gabrielle talk through the ways careers can rise together, moving from recommending a friend for a job to salary questions, executive producer ambitions, pep talks, and the…
Range trade talk for firearm instructors.
Clinical CE for busy veterinary teams.
Work It: The Podcast centers a panel on who podcast audio is actually made for, with Tanya Mosley arguing that when you make it for everyone, you're making it for white, middle-to-high-income, cisgender straight folks.
Paige St.
Mathilde Piard, a senior project manager at NPR, says the network launched 20 podcasts in five years and tripled its audience in three years without real marketing budgets.
Work It's "Using Your Podcast to Create Community IRL" follows Locatora Radio's East LA strategy for turning audio into live events.
Avery Truffelman, a 99% Invisible producer and host of Articles of Interest, builds an audio story from a question about kidney-shaped pools.
At the 2019 Work It Festival, Anna Sale, Katie Bishop, and Annabelle Bacon explained how Death, Sex & Money turns listener stories into episodes.
["Werk It: The Podcast's \"A Transparent Look at the Glow Up\" is a live 2019 Work It Festival conversation led by TK and Gabrielle Horton.", "The episode focuses on how women of color in podcasting use follow-up emails, referrals, rate checks, and direct feedback to move through the industry.", "Isabeth Mendoza, Aaliyah Tavakolian, Vera Lynn, and Kelly add concrete examples from freelance work, newsroom life, and executive producing.", "The conversation also names WNYC, WBAI, Crooked Media, Spotify, and Here to Slay while staying focused on boundaries, imposter syndrome, and mutual support."]
Juleka Lantigua-Williams shares advice on managing a freelance business and avoiding common pitfalls.
A workshop on grant writing for podcasters, sharing strategies for finding and applying for grants, and celebrating rejections as learning tools.
Marketing experts share six key things indie podcast producers need to know to effectively promote their projects.
Allison Behringer shares tips on pitching a podcast to funders and creating a budget.
Former BuzzFeed pod squad members discuss lessons on teamwork, boundaries, and responsibility in podcast production.
Lena Waithe discusses coming out and using comedy to tell painful personal stories in a conversation at the Werk It festival.
A talk from the Werk It festival featuring therapist Esther Perel discussing her podcast 'Where Should We Begin?' and the art of intimate conversations.
A podcast festival session where music supervisor Jane Marie discusses legal and creative aspects of scoring podcasts.