Wil Williams Writes

This Week in Podcasts a weekly* roundup of mini-reviews of all of the podcasts I’ve listened to in a week.

*Except, as you might have noticed, it hasn’t really been weekly at all lately. The posting schedule has gotten more and more malleable in a way that I think makes it less and less helpful. I’m currently subscribed to 65 podcasts, and I’ve been adding more just about weekly. I still think it’s important to showcase really phenomenal episodes, talk about episodes that fall flat, and show brief takeaways from the episodes that fall in the middle.

I’m also someone who works a real job 40 hours a week, helps run events, attends events, takes classes, and has a pretty active social life. Keeping up with a review per episode per week just isn’t feasible. This means that my “This Week in Podcasts” posts are going to need to change structure, because I think they’re still a fundamental part of this blog.

Instead of writing paragraph-long reviews of everything I listen to, I’ll be writing short reviews for the highlights and pitfalls of the week. This will probably be 2-3 per section, unless the week is really stellar or really awful. The rest of the episodes will be given letter grades, ranging from B+ to C (anything with higher or lower will get an actual review).

Update 7/12/17: It should also be noted that if a show is a rerun, I will no longer be rating it. The ratings will be given to new episodes only. When shows–and it’s usually the bigger shows that do this, like This American Life or Radiolab–rerun their best episodes, it skews how their current content is being rated on a week-to-week basis. I could write a note each time an episode is a rerun, but that just looks so silly in a bulleted listed. If a rerun has added content, though, it may or may not be rated–this comes down to, basically, how much new content has been added to the episode. If an episode is a rerun that has been “remastered” (e.g. the recent remasters done by The Penumbra Podcast), they will be rated. Their original versions will not have their ratings altered, though; I’ll basically consider them to totally separate episodes. If a show broadcasts a rerun and I haven’t rated it, you can always contact me and ask how I liked it.

As we move forward, this structure might still change. It’ll be a learning cycle, for sure. Please feel free to give me any feedback on the structure in the comments below, in my asks on tumblr, or on twitter.