The World in Brief — The Economist
Daily podcast production at scale, delivered without a miss.
The Economist's Asia-Pacific edition required a fully produced, distribution-ready episode every weekday — three files per episode, delivered to Acast and Apple Podcasts within a four-hour window from script to submission.
The workflow had no margin for error. Scripts arrived from The Economist's editorial team and had to be reviewed, prepped with pronunciation guides, and sent to voice talent before recording could begin. Once audio came back, it was QA'd against the script line by line — catching mispronunciations, missing lines, and delivery issues — before production could start. Any problem at any stage compressed an already tight deadline.
Common friction points included late scripts from the editorial team, occasional audio quality issues from talent, and distribution platform outages that required real-time troubleshooting. In several instances, errors in The Economist's own scripts were caught and flagged before going to record, preventing downstream issues.
To absorb that friction without missing delivery, a template-based signal chain and session structure was built for the show — reducing production time from four hours to three, a 25% improvement in turnaround. Over approximately 375 episodes produced across 18 months, the revision rate was near zero.
