Building a home studio doesn’t have to break the bank — and two veterans of news/talk radio know exactly how to make it work. Erick Erickson, host of The Erick Erickson Show on Compass Media Networks, and Tony Katz, host of Tony Katz Today on Key Networks, have each spent years refining their home studio setups.
Both offered candid, practical advice for hosts looking to upgrade their on-camera presence without getting lost in the weeds.
The temptation for newcomers is to chase perfection before ever hitting record. Erickson warned against that mindset directly, drawing a parallel to his own reluctance in the kitchen.
“What you need to do is just get going with it,” said Erickson. “And when you get comfortable with getting it going, don’t worry about getting the mental roadblock of, ‘Well, I can’t do this because I don’t have the best look.’
“As a side note, I do a lot of cooking, and I put up pictures online. I’ve kind of got that same situation in my head where I don’t want to do cooking videos because I can’t get it to look exactly the way I want it in my head. And all my friends are like, ‘You idiot. Just use your iPhone and put the content out.’ The content is king,” Erickson added. “And if you remember that rule, you’ll be less likely to bog yourself down in the minutia of needing this camera and this lighting with this temperature and this sound and this look.”
Katz echoed the sentiment, though he stressed that lighting deserves more attention than most beginners give it. Trial and error is part of the process — but so is knowing when to call in help.
“The lighting has been trial and error,” Katz said. “Finding the cameras also — you’ve got to find things that you like and things that can really do the USB streaming and don’t shut down on you, don’t overheat, things like that. It’s the lighting and how that lighting works in relationship to the room. The idea of the lighting coming from one side, and softer light coming from the other, so it creates the right amount of shadow. The backlighting is really about experimentation.
“But there are plenty of people — there are a lot of people you could talk to online and videos to check out,” continued Katz. “It’s worth having somebody you can reach out to and paying them the money to say, ‘Ok, how do we light this right?’ Don’t mess around with this. You want this to be your career, put your hands in your pocket.”
That investment, Katz noted, is far more modest than most people assume.
“It’s not going to cost you $50,000,000,” the Tony Katz Today host shared. “It costs a few hundred bucks to have someone help you figure out the lighting. As for the lights to buy, you’ve got to go out there and buy it, but things have become outrageously affordable. And if you can’t right now, you’ve got to save up so you can. If the answer is always ‘I can’t,’ you’re not going to have an attractive-looking set or video piece.”
Katz also acknowledged his current setup is the product of multiple iterations — he’s on his third studio look. That candor is worth taking seriously. Depth, backdrop, and the physical dimensions of a space all matter more than the camera itself.
“From where the camera is to the back corner of the studio, it’s 30 feet, 35 feet,” stated Katz. “So yeah, it’s everything. I have a banner up that blocks the AC unit, so it just looks like I’ve got my name everywhere. Then I have colors in the background, and it’s darker, but you can see that there’s something happening.”
On the camera side, Erickson came from a television background — CNN for three years, Fox for five — and admitted he likely overspent on equipment early on. His takeaway, though, was surprisingly restrained.
“I didn’t need the highest quality camera,” The Erick Erickson Show host shared. “Honestly, if you’ve got a basic camera that could do 4K and you’ve got a good microphone, you’re better set up. You don’t need a multi-camera shot, things like that. There are a lot of people who look at the professional podcasts out there and say, oh, I need this setup, and actually you don’t.”
There’s one infrastructure element both hosts flagged that often gets overlooked entirely — and it has nothing to do with cameras or lights.
“You need HD to 4K for sure,” Erick Erickson said. “You can buy really cheap camera equipment that gives you what you want. The thing that people don’t think about that they need to think about is their internet connection. You’ve got to have a good internet connection to be able to cover it all. That’s not incidental. That’s the priority. Everything else is ancillary, but other than internet connection, the big thing is just do it. You’ll get better over time and more comfortable over time. Don’t get it in your head that it must be perfect out of the gate.”
Katz uses a true digital camera rather than a webcam, pairs it with a Rode Podcaster Pro microphone, and thinks carefully about where his camera sits in relation to his body — and his audience.
“I don’t like playing into the camera,” Katz shared. “I do think it takes away a little bit from the radio, so I’m not always staring at the camera. I’m looking, I’m reading stuff, I’m going over stuff. I’m still acting things out in my head and people are just watching in that regard. Not everything is, but if I play to the camera, I’m not engaging the radio audience as much. And some people are really good at that. I’ve always found that I can’t just stare at a camera. I need to remember who my audience is. My audience is radio.”
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Garrett Searight is Barrett Media’s News Editor, which includes writing daily news stories, features, and opinion columns. He joined Barrett Media in 2022 after a decade leading several radio brands in several formats, as well as a 5-year stint working in local television. In addition to his work with Barrett Media, he is a radio and TV play-by-play broadcaster. Reach out to him at Garrett@BarrettMedia.com.
