Breaking the Grid the Podcast: Episode 2: The Snowball Effect

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.

Students to adviser: 'We are bored with the same old Catalyst'

S. Mark Davidson

Catalyst editors MacKenzie Glass and Lindsey Toth review story assignments with reporters Ben Morse and Maria Gershultz for February's issue of the student publication.

Teaching multimedia might make me a math person after all.

When I consider what I have learned by investigating the initial readings of the course, I know that my perception of what multimedia is has changed. Because I now understand that multimedia is not simply the retelling of a news story in different formats, I also realize that I will need to draw on synthesizing skills in order to present an audience with a quality, media-rich experience.

Integral to this revised definition is the idea that good stories are multi-faceted, and multimedia is not only a way to highlight unique aspects of a story, but it is also a medium to draw an audience that may not be attracted to a traditional print story. The story is told in parts, and the journalist must give a good deal of thought before covering a story.

According to Thoughts on Journalism, a blog by Mindy McAdams, the journalist must decide what story parts fit with each type of medium’s strengths. The goal for the journalist is for each of the story’s elements to compliment one another, and to avoid redundancy.

S. Mark Davidson

Photography editor Gillian Martin rolls an old

issue of The Catalyst as part of a team-building 

activity during the first week of school. The two
journalism staffs at Southview High School were
challenged to build a free-standing shelter from 
newspapers and masking tape without speaking.

Video must be short, informational, and show the subject in action. Audio must be high quality. Photographs must be impactful enough to replace parts of the text, set the mood for it, or tell a story without text. Graphics ultimately should be interactive, illustrate and deconstruct a complicated idea or process and be easy to understand. This requires the journalist to have a vision for all different aspects of the story, and be able to put them together in a non-linear way that is easy to navigate.

It seems daunting, but it does not have to be. Case-in-point: The Feather is considered one of the “best online high school newspapers” in the country and is featured on thetoptens.com. One of ways it includes multimedia is a simple audio interview with a source. This is a common method in providing readers with another facet of the story.

This is where the adviser can help the student journalist.

In my current position, multimedia journalism plays a very small role. My student publications are limited solely to print versions at this time–something I hope to rectify in the next three to five years. One of my goals is to expand to a news website that will allow my students to incorporate multimedia into the journalism curriculum.

In the future, I want my students to be able to create a news site that incorporates all aspects of media: photographs, audio, video, graphics and print in order to tell their stories. Not only will this give the student journalist a more real-world experience, but it will better suit the needs of today’s scholastic audience.

In order to provide this kind of experience, I hope to gain practical and easy-to-learn ideas. I want to become proficient with these mediums myself so I feel confident teaching them to my students. I want to be able to excite them with the possibilities. And I want to inspire them to pass along that sense of excitement to their audiences.

S. Mark Davidson

Meridian staff members Monet Cavanaugh, Cati Ide, Allie Hider, Sydney Davis, John Walasinski and Hannah Butler were the only team able to successfully build their newspaper tower. Butler is the yearbook editor, and the other students are on Team Magenta, one of the four teams that cover weekly news.