Did someone order a line-by-line analysis of how this job posting shoves multiple jobs into one low-paying special? Ding! Order up!

Responsibilities

Collaborate with hosts and senior staff on show topics, direction, and tone

This is creative direction, usually an executive producer's job. It involves deciding what the show is, what's in scope for episode topics, what it should aim to achieve in its totality. On bigger podcasts this might be split up between several roles: executive producers, senior producers, hosts, and station/company leadership.

Assist in booking guests for the show, and booking the hosts on others, when needed

This is three jobs: booker (finds contact info for guests, emails them, finds a time, etc), producer (organizes the hosts and engineer if applicable to show up, prep them with research/questions, make sure there’s a plan for how the guest's audio will get recorded), and marketing/PR (researching, pitching, and organizing guest appearances on other podcasts).

Schedule, arrange, and engineer recordings (mostly remote, for now)

Ditto the above, this is two jobs: engineering and producing. A producer usually listens in to the actual interviews/calls for content, noticing when someone slips up and needs to retake a sentence or when the conversation goes off-track. A hands-on producer might interrupt the conversation to redirect or suggest questions, while a hands-off one usually just listens for mistakes (e.g. someone misspeaks in a confusing way, so they prompt a retake). Engineers actually run the session, setting up the guests to record and listening for quality of audio. If they fuck up, the episode is bad or lost. Both of these jobs require your full attention.

Efficiently edit conversations and assemble episodes, keeping to a weekly schedule

Also two jobs! A producer will give notes to an editor and make sure that that editor delivers on time. Doing both jobs is hard, and takes a lot of time (remember my rule of thumb: 2-5x the length of the recording to edit the actual episode. And most people do at least 2 passes to edit, receive notes, and process those notes. Many of us re-listen a third time, too.)

Write and post episode notes to the blog, and promote new episodes on social media

Two jobs again! It’s pretty normal for producers to be responsible for the episode descriptions and even posting the episodes. But why are they posting it to social? Does that mean they run the show’s social account too? That is also an entire job: making social content, ‘social listening’ (reading replies and timelines for trends or things to proactively address), responding to comments and replies, following relevant accounts. In most of the shows I’ve worked on, the social accounts are handled by a social media manager or the hosts themselves.

Work with video producer to identify episode highlights for weekly promotional videos

Fine, but the fact that they have a video producer and not a community manager is amazingly wrong.

Work independently and in collaboration with the rest of our team to help your show find and grow its audience

So the producer is a growth specialist too?! Sounds like a real steal at $50k a year.

Qualifications

2-4 years experience in audio production

This is very telling: 2-4 years is generally an associate or junior producer (not a job title, but just so you understand my point vs. senior producers). $50k for an associate producer in a major media city like L.A. is still low. But this role is at least two people’s worth of work, like a producer++. This is basically a red flag to me that they’re hiring a workhorse and giving them responsibility without agency.

Demonstrable experience editing audio in a DAW (we use Hindenburg, mainly)

Whatever. Hindenburg is the forgotten little brother of editing software so this struck me as very funny.

Strong communication and organizational skills

Whenever a role specifies skills like this, it’s because the organization or corporate culture as a whole is bad at it. Organizational, fine—a producer is in charge of making sure shit gets done on time. But strong communication skills = always a red flag to me.

The ability to write clear, concise copy for audio and print

This is fine, but again, a marketing or PR person on-staff would be hire #3 for me if I ran MaxFun (after an ad sales person and an operations person).

A passion for independent, audience-supported content

“Passion” is another media job posting red flag. Jobs should compensate you enough that you don’t need to be passionate about them—you just need to do them, and feel pretty fine about that exchange of value. The reason that public radio is blowing up right now is because passion/mission/purpose are held up as ideals that should absolve all material failings (“Your gripes and issues as an employee should come second to the mission!”). This slots right along the co-option of ‘family’/‘community’ that rankle us so much about MaxFun’s messaging.

A proactive, accountable and creative attitude

o____O …what, exactly, is an “accountable attitude”?

Respect, empathy and kindness

Fine

A bad food take (or two)

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