Specialist Journalism Project: The Broken News Podcast

REFLECTIVE COMMENTARY

As the Specialist Journalism module is coming to an end, I am writing this to reflect on what has happened throughout last term to create the project called ‘The Broken News Podcast.’

I didn’t initially take this module since the beginning of the academic year but switched to this module in late January. The reason for the switch was because I wanted to really challenge myself in my final year of this course and discover new mediums of journalism that I wouldn’t be able to try without taking this module.

There was a lot of free rein on what type of journalism I wanted to learn more in depth about. I considered many options, such as: video game journalism, theatre journalism, film reviews… but I wanted to do something that I haven’t done before on the course. I wanted to try and extend my knowledge of multimedia platforms and how I can tell stories or create content on a different scale than writing articles or reviews. So with all those points considered, I decided that my specialism for this assignment would be ‘podcasting’.

After choosing my specialism, I then had to pick my supervisors who would give me advice and feedback throughout my project. I chose both Tim Fenton and Jon Wright to be my supervisors. I picked Tim as he had connections to podcast experts, one being Chris Garrington who oversaw my podcast production in its early stages and gave me valuable advice and calmed my nerves when I was going into a field of journalism I wasn’t familiar with. I picked Jon as he works for BBC Radio Suffolk so I thought his skill set from working in radio and knowledge of audio journalism would help me throughout the module.

In accordance with the assessment brief, I had to make a podcast with an episodic format where there is a smooth flow from one podcast session to the next. I decided that I didn’t just want to make a three episode podcast but really immerse myself and thoroughly understand the podcasting world: why has it become so popular? What is an RSS feed? How long has it been around and its origins. The three multimedia pieces I decided to produce with this project are: two podcast episodes and an article/short essay about the rise of podcasts in recent years.

The next thing to consider was what my podcast was going to be centred about. I wanted to make sure it was engaging, easy to listen to and something I would enjoy producing. I turned to podcasts that I have enjoyed listening to myself such as comedy podcasts like ‘On the Menu’ by James Acaster and Ed Gamble and conversational based podcasts such as ‘David Tennant Does a Podcast..’ and wanted to do a podcast along those lines.

An idea suddenly struck me when I spoke with a friend about doing a ‘Have I Got News for You’ version of a podcast joking about the headlines in the news for that week. It turned into reacting to the most bizarre stories I could find and mocking a TV news report format. To get reassurance that I was going to go ahead with this idea, I turned to podcast expert Chris Garrington and pitched my idea to her and she liked the idea! We were both excited to finally get the ball rolling with the podcast, knowing that I had an expert backing me with my idea gave me the confidence to book the radio studio and start recording.

Next was the name. I had no idea what I wanted to call my podcast but it had to have a ring to it so it would attract people to listen. I was going to call it ‘The Breaking News’ podcast but thought it was a bit too cliché. My boyfriend said why don’t you change it to ‘The Broken News Podcast’ as it was a play on words of ‘Breaking news’ and it stuck. The foundations of a podcast were firmly established. All that was left to do was to create an episode.

‘The Broken News Podcast’: A show where student journalists were about to realise about the weird and wacky industry they’re about to step into by reacting to some of the most bizarre news stories of the week.

The first episode was very trial and error based. I was still unsure about the exact format of the episode. I had no idea what the podcast length was going to be or exactly how many stories to cover but all I thought about while recording was that I wanted to enjoy it as much as possible and go into the very first episode with an enthusiastic vibe and start with a bang. I got fellow journalism student Muna Mahadi to be my first guest and we reacted to around 5 stories which were: A mum who has been banned from Lidl after attempting to buy 100 cucumbers, two workers falling into a vat of chocolate, Kourtney Kardashian’s vagina gummies, a Joe Biden earlobe conspiracy theory and a Twitter Outage.

Muna was a hilarious guest and we naturally bounced off of each other and the episode turned out to be around 45 minutes long. In post production, I used Adobe Audition to edit the raw recording. My boyfriend helped with audio producing and compressing the audio file to make the audio quality sound clearer and minimising hissing noises coming from background noises. I found the theme tune from soundcloud from an artist called David Fesliyan where he made a jingle that was news themed and thought it would make a great opening to the episode. I came up with the idea to make a ‘mini-bulletin’ at the start: announcing my guest and clips from the podcast as a sort of ‘coming up next’ montage.

I then had to pick a distributing service to publish my podcast. I was very unfamiliar with this concept as I’m used to just pressing an upload button and then my work was public. I asked for help and advice from Chris and asked her about RSS feeds and how to expand the growth of my podcast. She referred me to Libsyn.com as it has been the only one she has used but it had a paywall around it. I found that Spotify had partnered up with a distribution service which was free called Anchor.fm and gave the platform a go. On February 22nd, the first episode officially went live.

I sent my podcast to my supervisors for advice and feedback and the main takeaways were: length of podcast and theme tune had to be shorter, stories needed more substance and context to them and to avoid going off topic. I took the advice seriously and applied the feedback for the next episode.

The next episode was difficult to plan. My original guest couldn’t make it last minute so I had to reshuffle and book everything last minute: from the radio studio slots to the guest and the stories as they wouldn’t be as fresh and recent anymore if I recorded any later. As exam week was fast approaching at this time, I couldn’t book any slots for the radio studio and had to do a short session crammed in a radio booth which provided quite a comedic predicament so it played into the episode.

Jude Short, a second year student, joined me for the second episode. It was a toned-down, more chill session and the stories I picked were more relevant in the news like Eurovision and the Big Chill than completely bizarre and obscure stories like the ones covered in the first episode. I also decided to try some ‘audio-magic’ where I simulated being an roving reporter by recording on the streets of Colchester and “cutting back” to myself in the studio as a parody of on-location reports. I only decided to do three stories instead of five to cut down the podcast length and also provided more background information to my stories so the listeners would have more context. In the introductions I made sure to refer back to the previous episodes and connect the two together.

The last piece of multimedia work I chose to do for this project was an article/short essay about the rise of podcasts instead of a podcast episode due to time management being tight and I wanted to learn more about podcasts on a theoretical scale. In the article I made my own charts and graphics using stats I found from studies. (Statista, Exploding Topics)

What I've learned from this experience is that time management is key and to always have a fully fleshed out back up plan just in case everything goes wrong. However, I have really enjoyed this module and it has ignited a passion for audio journalism and podcasting which I will definitely return to in a heartbeat.