Jason Phipps is a former Commissioning Editor for BBC Sounds where he won a Peabody award for work across genres from blue-chip journalistic serialized podcasts to blockbuster dramas.

New York Festivals Radio Awards: Chalk & Blade is an award-winning creative agency specializing in podcasts located in London.  Jason Phipps is Head of Content & Development.  

NYF: How do you and your development team decide what to green light?

Jason Phipps: As a small indie production company we follow our passions and only pitch stories that we genuinely feel we can bring to life in a unique way.  Also, we have an open internal process when it comes to finding and pitching ideas, nobody is or should be afraid to develop their own ideas.  Added to that we are lucky to have deep roots into the podcast community, so we link in with brilliant journalists and writers and we are a trusted sounding board even if we don’t land specific projects or pitches.

In recent years we have created our own originals, funded by C+B and licensed to networks. Our brilliant parenting series ‘Tiny Huge Decisions’ was launched on APM in 2023 and we greatly enjoyed that sense of freedom. We have a number of other projects in development and production and what we green light in terms of our direct to market originals tends to be ideas that genuinely add to the medium of podcasting and are worth taking a financial hit for.  

NYF: What are the most profound changes you’ve noticed in the art of storytelling in the past 5 years?

Jason Phipps: I’ve Exec’d two Audible narrative titles this year, ‘Coatbridge’ and ‘The Madman’s Hotel’ both were Dolby mixes.  In order to utilize this level of audio production and sound design, our team had to adjust how these stories are structured, and it’s been a really interesting experience and steep learning curve.  Specifically, we needed to adjust our thinking about how we place voices and characters in sound spaces. We had to think about locations and scenes in each story that would heighten the acoustic experience without disrupting the story as it unfolded. I can see a lot more high end and subscription services wanting and perhaps needing to render their audio in ambisonics and Dolby so that’s definitely a change in the last five years and one that will evolve going forward.

NYF: What types of technology do you find yourself using?

Jason Phipps: I think like a lot of podcast creatives we are in the middle of a big technical evolution in our medium and the tools we use.  For research and copy checks/translations, I use Perplexity as the default citations embedded in its results/answers can be followed through in order to fully fact check - it allows for complex ideas to be fleshed out quickly and this is critical in a pitch intensive business like ours, particularly when you ‘re a small team on limited resources.

Riverside is our go to remote recording (video and audio) platform and of course Descript into Adobe Audition are the most common process tools we use for editing.  

We also need to turn around visual assets and I honestly cannot think how we did this before Canva which is an incredible visual design platform that we heavily rely on for both assets we use around our productions but also to render samples for more elaborate or bespoke visual design that we commission as part of a project.

Finally we are playing with lots of AI audio tools that are still very much beta and emerging, such as NotebookLM and for music sketches and textures we use Udio and Stable Audio.  Again, all of these tools help us develop and execute the human part of our creative processes, they have not replaced the human yet and as much as I’m passionate about AI tools I’m also skeptical that they will replace the human voice or human decision making within the day to day in podcasting and audio imminently.

NYF: Share your thoughts about the future of storytelling.

Jason Phipps: Well to follow on from my last answer, there will definitely be a new era of audio creation tools in the next five years or so, some have already landed as mentioned above.  It takes no great foresight to see the potential of AI tools in audio storytelling, and the way things are shaping. In my opinion this will just give us (audio creatives) the same production and post-production tools that have existed in the visual realm for over two decades. Synthetic voice creation and manipulation is essentially animation for voice and the capacity to “fix it in post” will be very empowering.  I can see these new tools liberating a new generation of storytellers and by extension a very different sense of story pushing its way into the podcast space.  For fiction this will represent, literally a new dawn in podcasting.  In factual storytelling, just as documentary film has expanded its use of illustration to cinematic levels, AI tools will help journalists and audio creatives to be more ambitious in their storytelling.