Paperwork
Podcast production, from first idea to published episode.
Paperwork is a production pipeline for independent podcasts. It handles the work that sits between finishing a recording and having it live — ingesting the files, drafting the episode copy, rendering artwork, and publishing to YouTube and the web once a human has approved it.
Built and operated by Cairnworks. Today it runs on hardware we own and produces one show — Fine on Paper, a Thriving Proof podcast.
What it does
Finished recording in. Published episode out.
Plan
Every episode starts as a record — a working title, a guest, a recording date, a publication date. The planning view is a calendar, and the same record carries the episode all the way through.
Ingest
Finished recordings land in a watched folder — master video, audio, transcript. Paperwork files them into a permanent archive and mirrors it offsite. Nothing is ingested twice; a half-finished transfer resumes where it stopped.
Draft
From the transcript, Paperwork drafts the copy: title options, a description with chapter timestamps, show notes, a blog post, short-form captions. Regenerating a title never overwrites prose someone has already edited.
Check
Generated copy is scanned before anyone reads it — for missing disclaimers, outcome claims, the phrasings a health-adjacent show has to be careful about. It reports what it found, and what it cannot catch.
Approve
Nothing publishes without a person approving it. Approval is the only path to publication — no automatic release, no scheduled bypass, no way for a draft to reach an audience because a job ran unattended.
Publish
On approval, the video is uploaded to YouTube with its captions, thumbnail and chapters, and the written version is filed to the blog as a draft. Every step records what it did, so a failure resumes instead of starting over.
Measure
Once an episode is out, its performance is collected in one place — so the question "did that one land?" has an answer that isn't a guess.
How Paperwork uses YouTube
Only the channel that authorized it — nothing else.
Paperwork uses the YouTube Data API to publish episodes to a channel its operator owns and has explicitly authorized. On behalf of that channel, it can:
- upload an episode's video file
- attach the episode's caption track
- set the episode's thumbnail
- set the video's title, description and chapters
- set a scheduled publication time, leaving the video private until then
- read a video's publication status, to record when it went live
It does not browse, search, collect, or analyse anyone else's YouTube data. It acts only on the channel that authorized it, only on videos it uploaded, and only after a person has approved that episode for publication.
Authorization can be withdrawn at any time from Google Account permissions, which immediately ends Paperwork's access to the channel.
Principles
How it's built.
A human approves everything
The pipeline drafts, checks, renders and prepares. It does not decide that something is ready.
Retries never duplicate
Publishing records what it has done before it does it, so a network failure or restart resumes rather than repeats. A second attempt updates the video it already uploaded.
Failures are legible
When something goes wrong, the episode says so in plain language, on the page where the work happens, with the option to try again.
The archive is the source of truth
Media is filed once, kept, and mirrored offsite. The database describes the work; it never becomes the only copy of it.
Where this is going
Built for one show. Not built to stay that way.
The parts that would have to be true for Paperwork to produce someone else's show have been true from the first version: episodes belong to a show rather than to the system, each show carries its own brand and publishing destinations, and the code that publishes has never assumed there is only one of anything. What's missing is the part that has to be got right rather than merely built — separating one producer's work from another's, safely, in a way that holds up when it matters.
That's the next thing we're working on. We're not taking sign-ups, and we'd rather say so plainly than collect addresses against a date we haven't earned. If you produce an independent show and the work between "finished recording" and "published episode" is the part you dread, we'd genuinely like to hear how you do it now.
About Cairnworks. Cairnworks builds and operates small, durable software for independent media production. Paperwork is our production pipeline.
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Paperwork is operated by Cairnworks and is not yet open for registration.