I feel uncomfortable with the practice of placing "highlight" montages at the beginning of podcasts, and before explaining why I feel this way, I need to clarify what a montage is.
What is a Montage#
Most of us have seen movies, and whether a movie trailer is exciting largely determines whether we will watch the film (the same goes for video game trailers). A movie trailer typically consists of key shots from the film; how can these shots be made interesting, exciting, and not spoil the plot? The most common method is to disrupt the narrative rhythm.
A typical example is director Stanley Kubrick, who used a lot of descriptive text and a series of fragmented, restructured shots condensed into a few minutes in the trailers for "Dr. Strangelove: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" and "A Clockwork Orange." This editing style, which differs from linear storytelling, is called "montage."
Trailers exist independently of the main film, and their purpose is to serve as a promotional tool to attract viewers, whether they are sitting in a theater or clicking on a video website. Before the main feature starts, there may be advertisements, but it won't be a trailer. Therefore, my discomfort with highlight montages in podcasts stems from the fact that trailers are inserted before the main content begins.
Why It Feels Uncomfortable#
Before discussing the specific reasons for my discomfort, I want to crudely speculate on why podcasts do this.
Programs with "highlight montages" are usually conversational podcasts that diverge in viewpoints based on themes and may or may not reach conclusions. This is a process of thinking through speaking. Thinking can be experiential or emergent, but speaking needs to be coherent, which takes time, so it's common for a podcast episode to last one or two hours.
As the publisher, we hope that listeners or a passerby surfing the internet will listen to this episode, but we also assume how listeners will face a segment of unknown information density that lasts for hours. So, just like editing a movie trailer, we will segment and restructure key, interesting, and exciting clips from the main content in post-production; this serves as a preview for the podcast episode. There’s nothing wrong with that.
Nowadays, going online is no longer just called going online; instead, it involves picking up a phone to scroll through something. Behind the waterfall and information streams are recommendation algorithms that understand you well, and we refer to what we scroll through as "content." Setting aside traffic pushes, let’s assume a podcast episode has already captured the user's attention with its title and cover; the next step is to immediately provide useful "content" that makes users willing to pay their attention to this episode.
So, having a trailer for a podcast episode is fine, but treating the trailer format with the mindset of short videos makes me uncomfortable.
An Alternative Approach#
Podcasts naturally have a storytelling quality, and the feeling after listening to a podcast episode is similar to finishing a book, a movie, or an album. Having a highlight montage at the beginning of a single episode breaks this storytelling quality. Would a suspense movie reveal the true identity of the villain in the trailer?
Just as there are film materials specifically shot for trailers, my ideal podcast preview would be a brief introduction recorded specifically for the episode. In fact, many conversational podcasts do this; they don’t extract clips from the episode but rather provide supplementary commentary from the host, with some footnotes appearing before the episode begins.
Designing the beginning of a podcast episode like those memorable openings in films or the intros in music albums, rather than using a highlight montage like a short video, would make it truly a short video, suitable for separate release on video platforms.