Nov 10, 2017

From the desk of Courtney Stanton

How do you GIF a podcast?

Dear Reader,

We were connected with This American Life (TAL) almost two years ago now to help execute an idea they’d received funding for from The Knight Foundation and the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. TAL had participated in an audio and podcasting hackathon and some exciting proof-of-concepts came out of the event; thus they wanted to see about creating a workable prototype for something that let fans share the podcasts they love with others.

The project, Shortcut, was widely considered a success, and unlike other available tools, it lets listeners select and clip a podcast’s audio. From there, Shortcut generates a video clip to match, and then you can download and/or share that clip on social media. However, the prototype version was only available for TAL.

But no longer! Thanks to generous further funding from The Knight Foundation, Shortcut is now open sourced and available to any podcast. We’ve done our best to thoroughly document the project, so take a look at the wiki to get your bearings (and if you’re a developer, you can jump right in with implementation here). If you have any support questions, you can reach us on Gitter. And please note that anyone participating in the Shortcut community is expected to abide by our Code of Conduct.

While we have done our best to make implementing Shortcut an easy-to-understand and well-documented process for folks, we also know that for a variety of reasons, not every podcast is ready to implement their own software. If you’d like to talk about implementing Shortcut for your podcast, say hello!