Catherine Saint Louis is the Executive Editor at Neon Hum Media, a podcast production company. She helps oversee The Binge, Sony Music Entertainment’s limited-run subscription offering, with a new podcast out on the first of every month. She spent 18 years at the New York Times as a reporter and editor. She joined Neon Hum in 2018 and has since edited limited-run podcasts such as My Fugitive Dad, Betrayal on the Bayou, Sympathy Pains, Fake Priest, and The Sellout. The next podcast she edited drops in February: Hello John Doe: A Sleuth, A Family and A Serial Killer. Catherine started Neon Hum’s Editors’ Bootcamp with support from Sony Music’s social and racial justice fund. You can find her at @cslwrites on X and @cslspeaks on Instagram.

I’m a story editor, but what that really means is I’m the person worrying about the story. I worry about the outline, the facts, the twists and turns, where we reveal what, how characters develop over an arc, how the whole story develops over an arc, where the cliffhangers are.

A story editor is kind of like a showrunner, but they also have to keep themselves at a distance. They need to be the listener’s advocate.

It’s my job to constantly worry about why somebody might stop listening. What can we do to make people remain engaged? What can we do to make the stakes clearer? What can we do to make this character more interesting and nuanced?

I dare say that if they could make Walter White engaging in Breaking Bad, if you could truly fall for a guy who makes meth, lies to his wife and children, and is a killer by the end—if you can still like that guy, then the storytellers are doing their job.

Subtle tweaks are what get people behind someone for a long time in a podcast. Like the antihero of Betrayal on the Bayou. He has a lot of issues. Some of his victims call him the white devil. He’s a cop, he’s not necessarily likable. But he has this ability to work cases to the bone and get anyone to talk to him. His name is written on prison walls because people were like, if you’re in trouble, call Chad Scott. He’s going to pick up the phone. If you call him at lunch, he’s going to pick up. If you call him in the middle of sex, he’s going to pick up. He’s going to come through for the people who call him, and that makes him likable. Even though he spent a very long time at the DEA cutting corners and really sticking it to people of color. 

There are so many different kinds of podcasts and I happen to specialize in what I think is its own distinct art form. Just like a novelist would never presume to tell a short story writer how to do their work, or a novelist would never presume to be able to write a poem very well, I think the limited-run narrative series is a very distinct thing. I think those podcasts have more in common with a limited-run show on HBO, like Mare of Easttown. Although that’s pure fiction and I’m working with nonfiction and reporting.

What really helped me in my job is I had a whole life as a reporter and an editor at the New York Times for 18 years before I transitioned to podcasting.

I like to start the writing process with an extremely clear, detailed outline that breaks out scene by scene, episode by episode, when we will reveal what. And as a team, we move those bits around and having conversations that help us understand how our story operates, what is best for the story, and what we’re aiming to make.

You need to figure out the facts before you can figure out the story. (continued below)