Advice on how to drop a guest?
Hello fellow podcasters,
I run an interview-style podcast (aidevolved.com). Recently I recorded an interview which frankly... I'd like to drop. The guest is a respected, accomplished individual; however the tone of our interview was so dry and impersonal that I know my audience will not be engaged.
Any tips on how to let this go, without burning bridges? I'd like to be up front with the guest and let him know I won't air the show.
Tough situation! Here's some language you could try out:
"I appreciate the time you put in to the conversation we recorded. Thank you! After listening to it again and thinking about my goals for the podcast and the audience I'm serving, I realized that the conversation we had isn't a great fit for this channel at this time, so I'm going to hold off on publishing the episode. It may be that I can use some part of it in a future episode, or that we can use that conversation as a basis for a future interview that even further highlights your work and accomplishments; I will let you know if that opportunity comes up. I apologize for the change here. Please let me know if you have any questions or if you would like to discuss further."
Without knowing you or the guest or your podcast, my thought is that if the guest follows up to ask for more detail, you probably owe them a clear and direct answer about why you've decided to pull the episode. Hopefully they will appreciate your honesty and the chance to understand the situation, and maybe it will lead to some other kind of future collaboration.
Good luck!
What a thoughtful suggestion! Thanks for drafting this for me. I think it's exactly what I need.
What's more, some guests don't even care if their episodes get dropped. So if this person is in that category, this email alone would be sufficient.
Thank you!!
Can you rerecord it?
This is typically my first fallback. What's tricky about this particular case is that I'm not confident it'll be a good episode, even after re-recording, and I don't want to use up more of my guest's time if I suspect it's not going to go anywhere...
This is generally a good suggestion, though.
Here's another odd suggestion: Find 3 good 3 minute sections. Edit if you must to make it less dry. And then release them as bonus episodes after your next 3 episodes.
Or If you can edit it down to make it interesting and short, release it one week along with another episode. So you release it, you get it out there, but you make sure that your audience has good content all the time. You were already planning on not running it so you'll have an episode for every week ( i assume) already.
Not a bad idea. Hm.... thanks for the suggestion!
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