My favorite part of any indy bookstore is the “staff picks” reader advisory shelf. It’s how I’ve discovered some of my absolute favorite books ever. In that spirit, thank you to everyone for the great recommendations. Life Jolt and Media Indigena are excellent, I can tell already. I LOVE The WALKING podcast! Such a great find and I feel like I’ve made a new friend. It’s similar in some ways to framework radio, which is the number one thing that really pushed me toward listening to podcasts primarily as a way to catch the episodes I’d miss on the radio. Then slowly, podcasts replaced radio in minutes of listening per day, I guess.
I’ve always been a radio listener, and many of the podcasts in my feed are just radio broadcasts delivered to me. This week I listened to the final two episodes of This Land, a podcast hosted by journalist Rebecca Nagle. It carefully informs and educates its listeners about legal issues concerning American Indians and if you don’t know it, please check it out.
Though it came out last winter, I just listened start-to-finish to Louder Than A Riot, a National Public Radio short-run series hosted by Rodney Carmichael and Sidney Madden covering the relationships between hip-hop and the mass incarceration of Black Americans. Both of these podcasts are heavily produced and reflect a radio story sensibility. They are akin, I think, to long-form magazine journalism instead of zines. And I guess when I think of podcasts I sort of think of that DIY self-made spirit of the zine as my favorite format.
My favorite interview format podcast, also mentioned by other folks here, is Terry Greene’s Gettin’ Air: The Open Pedagogy Podcast. Terry does such an amazing job, and produces such a huge volume of important interviews that are consistently thoughtful, kind, and inviting. I really want to be in that space and I really want to hear what is being discussed.
Gettin’ Air will always occupy a place in my mind beside the now concluded The Contrafabulists Podcast by Audrey Watters & Kin Lane. While it isn’t on my listening journal this week, Contrafabulists was so tremendously influential for me, and I think it represents the power and reach of self-made media more like zines than the glossy stuff. Each episode is essentially a conversation contextualizing and critiquing hot topics impacting education technology. I don’t imagine there was a lot of post-production, but on the other hand, these episodes came out often and regularly over a long stretch of time. So I think there is something really important in the trade-offs we can make with our own podcasts between timeliness, how often episodes are released, the amount of labor going into pre- and post-production, etc. For its time, in my opinion, there was nothing more informative or timely than The Contrafabulists Podcast.
I find the process of building a podcast to be very rewarding and I want to learn everything I can about it. So my final item from this week’s journal is an episode of HowSound called, “Being Present with a Microphone” which taught me something and really encapsulates my favorite kind of listening. This whole episode is SO AMAZING, but if you want, listen especially around the 9 minute mark through around 11:10. It’s a bit of sound that I think does it all.
That clip is terrific. I used to record lots of field recordings for film work on tape recorders. Background sounds or sounds used for soundscapes have a special place in my heart. When working on film sets we would get everyone to pause at the end of a take if it was the last take in a certain space. Everyone would freeze and the sound recordist would record a minute or two of just the ambient sound in the room. Every actor and crew member had to hold their position so that the ambience would match. That recorded silence would be used as background texture if you had to overdub some audio or just add some space between edits. No space is truly silent, and being present and aware of the sound of the silence in a room is nice skill to have. Thanks for turning me on to How Sound.
I echo Jon’s thank you, here, Tim. This is great!
Really interesting. I think I also started listening to podcasts as a way to catch up on episodes missed on the radio. When I was working on my dissertation I used to take a break almost every day, go for a walk, and listen to Definitely Not the Opera from CBC. It was a great way to clear my head and work my stiff muscles after hunching over a computer all day!