Pressing publish is the step most of us treat as the finish line. It is also the only step in making a show that you can do entirely alone, in a second, and it tells you nothing about whether the people an episode was for will ever hear it.
Mark Tweddle works with storytelling in coaching and team building, and made a season of a podcast that then stopped. At the time of this conversation, six more of Tweddle’s episodes were unreleased. Craig Constantine, who hosts this show, grants the value of the creative work, the hard work and the story, and asks Tweddle what the act of publishing would add.
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Tweddle’s answer starts from a throwaway line earlier in the conversation, a joke that podcast discovery is “almost impossible.” That difficulty, Tweddle says, is “probably what’s stopped me from publishing.”
Publishing itself, Tweddle thinks, would add very little for someone who has already published so much. “We did four hundred and fifty YouTube videos in a year,” Tweddle says of an earlier stretch of video work. What interests Tweddle now is a different act: “how do you actually make sure it gets in front of the people that you want it to get in front of.” Not necessarily many people, Tweddle adds, but “the people that it would make a difference to.”
That could be mistaken for the familiar comfort about small audiences. It is not a comfort here, because Tweddle has no way of doing it.
“I do want to get these out, because I am quite proud of them and I think I got some really good interviews. But what I really want to know is […] how do I get the people who really would gain most from it to find it and listen to it, and I have no idea on that.”
Constantine’s reply is the honest one: “I don’t know either. That’s a great question. No, I have no clue.” The conversation ends half a minute later.
Publishing and reaching are different acts, and only one of them is something our tools do. Publishing addresses everyone, which comes to the same thing as addressing no one in particular. Reaching has a recipient. It is the difference between leaving a letter on a table and putting it in somebody’s hand.
Reaching looks less like publishing and more like handing. As far as this conversation shows, the unreleased season has reached one listener: Tweddle’s son. Asked to edit an episode, the son ended up enjoying it, and hearing Tweddle in a way that was new. The son was reached by being handed the file, for a different purpose altogether. That does not scale, and it is not a flaw. Reaching happens one person at a time.
Scale is what publishing offers instead, and it is a poor substitute. A season made for nobody in particular has to be sent to everybody, and everybody is the address that never answers.
Constantine’s “I don’t know either” is evidence too. Two podcasters with a great deal of work behind them, and neither of them knows. Whatever reaching takes, it is not a trick everyone else has found and you have missed.
The finish line was never the publish button. It is somebody in particular, holding the thing you made.
This field note references the Podtalk episode “Work Ethic with Mark Tweddle,” published August 31, 2022.
This work was produced using AI language models directed through an editorial system designed by Craig Constantine. The author selected all source material, designed the creative framework, directed the editorial process, and made all acceptance and revision decisions. The prose was generated by AI under sustained human editorial direction.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://podtalk.show/publishing-is-not-reaching/