Understand the system behind the show.

Start with four distinct jobs

Map editorial management, website publishing, RSS generation, and audio delivery separately. One service may handle several jobs, but the team should still know where each approved field lives. A player on a page is a presentation element, not evidence that approval, feed management, or preservation has been solved. Write the map in plain language before evaluating tools.

Choose a workflow you can explain

Give each episode a short sequence of states, such as draft, review, approved, and published. Define what evidence allows it to move forward. Keep public copy separate from private production notes. For a small team, a clear owner and a dependable release checklist may matter more than a highly configurable panel that nobody maintains.

Preserve the ability to leave

Ask for an export of a representative episode with its transcript, media reference, and metadata. Check what it preserves, what it omits, and which files must be collected separately. Keep internal identifiers independent of editable titles. A CMS decision should improve the next handoff without making the eventual migration unnecessarily difficult.