Goal: The 9pm Edict live from Adelaide on Sat 24 Mar 2018

Hello, I’m Stilgherrian. It’s time for another Public House Forum episode of my podcast The 9pm Edict. It’s time to do one in my home town, Adelaide. And it’s time for me to record some of Adelaide’s wonderful people.

A Public House Forum episode is a forum recorded in a public house. Yes, a pub. Here’s what the last two looked like.

And here’s what they sounded like. This one in West Ryde, Sydney, which you can listen to immediately below, or on SoundCloud, Spreaker, or my own website.

And this one in Melbourne, which you can listen to immediately below, or on SoundCloud, Spreaker, or my own website.

Venue and guests will be booked once it’s clear that the target will be reached. I’m travelling to Adelaide from Brisbane on Thu 22 Mar for another gig, We’ll record the podcast in Sat 24 Mar, and I'll stay in Adelaide through to Wed 28 Mar to record further material.

Further rewards may be added as the campaign progresses. Suggestions welcome.

That’s a photo of the Exeter Hotel up top, yes, but that’s for illustration purposed only.

Your contributions will provide me with an income while producing the podcast(s), and cover costs such as travel, accommodation, taxis, and of course the fees charged by Pozible, PayPal, and credit card processors.

I’m basing my calculations on the MEAA award rate for casual freelance journalists, about $960 per day. As a casual rate, that already includes allowances for superannuation, leave, WorkCover and the like, as well as equipment costs. I’m discounting that by 30% to $650 per day because a lot of the work involves copying and uploading files and other mechanical tasks, so I can do other things at the same time.

Each normal episode of The 9pm Edict takes roughly a day to research, prepare, present, and post. Each Public House Forum episode takes two days all up.

In addition, I need to rebuild the podcast’s presence in iTunes and across other distribution networks. Apple dumped it from the iTunes catalog because the RSS feed contained errors. Other distrbution platforms have spring up since the podcast first started. Building the audience is an important part of my plan for 2018. Charging a proper rate for producing the podcasts will give me the time to do that.

Pozible’s fees, bank fees and other administration costs take about 9% of the total funds raised. On top of that there’s 10% GST.

If you want to see my working, check the numbers (PDF).

When reading these numbers, bear in mind that my freelance jouralism doesn’t pay these rates, and health issues prevent me from working full time. This is a rebalancing.

Producing media, and managing other people who produce media, are what I’ve been doing for most of my adult life. There’s no real challenge here. I do this stuff every week.

The keys risks when producing any media to a defined schedule are that there won’t be any interesting content, that the production crew runs out of time, or that they’re suddenly not available due to illness, accident or disaster.

There’s always plenty of potential  content. In fact the real challenge — not that there are any challenges, sorry — the real production issue will be selecting what to cover.

As for the schedule, I know precisely how long it takes to make media. I’ve already blocked out time in my schedule.

The worst-case scenario — unless I’m actually completely incapacitated or even dead for the duration — is that things will be delayed. Even a failure to get to the destination can make for interesting media.

If I die, you’ve blown your money.