Diving back into the podcast pool

It’s just like riding a bike, except way more technical.

This week, we were assigned the task of creating a podcast to publish on our blogs; this was an assignment I was excited but also nervous about. After all, this would be my first podcast in more than five years. 

What kind of story would I tell? How much has technology changed? How could I possibly contain my story to two minutes?

Needless to say, I was anxious (in both a good and bad way) to get started. 

The idea for my podcast was not one that came easily, and when it did, it came at a rather unexpected time. I happened to be driving past a mail truck and had a flashback to my childhood when I had a toy mailbox. I pretended to be a mail carrier and delivered envelopes stuffed with papers to different rooms of my parents’ house.

Suddenly, it came to me. What did other people want to be when they grew up? What about my kids? What do they want to be?

Then I thought back to a comedy show my wife and I heard last week. The comedian’s standup act consisted almost entirely of jokes about how depressing it is to be an adult.

This gave my idea for a podcast an even more interesting twist. I started thinking about how my children see adulthood, and the idea for my podcast was set.

As I said earlier, I have had some experience producing a regular sports podcast for students who wished to continue practicing journalism after my school had removed the program from the curriculum.

These were really fun, bright kids who were completely self-motivated, and they came fully prepared to put together a 10-15 minute podcast that included interviews with student athletes, round-table discussions, and in-depth reporting. 

When they came to me with the idea, I jumped at the chance. I went out and used my own money to buy a single microphone the four of them had to share. We hung a homemade “on air” sign outside my classroom door and made a dozen or so podcasts before they graduated.

One of the students, who is now in law school, called it his favorite thing he ever did in high school.

Creating the podcast was a re-emersion into Audacity for me, and it took some getting used to again, but I found the remembered the basics pretty quickly, and the links we discovered helped me fill in the holes of my memory and pick up a few new tricks.

Even better is that since I’ve last produced a podcast, Audioboom has come along and allowed the average joe like me to package the podcast quickly and easily with a title, photograph and description. It also gave me a quick code to copy and paste into this very blog to create a way for you all to enjoy the podcast.

So listen in. I hope you enjoy hearing it as much as I’ve enjoyed diving back into the podcast pool.