- Project Title: The “Get Social” Podcast: The NSU Writing and Communication Center’s Social Media Team
- Maker: Julia Kelley and Adit Selvaraj
- Genre: Podcast
- Level: Graduate
- Program: Composition, Rhetoric, and Digital Media
- Course: WRIT 5800: Editing, Layout, and Design
- Instructor: Dr. Eric Mason
- Semester Created: Winter 2022
Description
For the purposes of the podcast project, Emma, Rachel, Adit, and Julia created a podcast “series” centered around the NSU Writing and Communication Center’s social media team (which we are all a part of), to discuss collaboration, teamwork, branding guidelines, and social media trends. We wanted to discuss this topic because we thought that it held relevant and interesting information for an audience, as social media is a highly dependent presence that continues to advance. Therefore, it maintains relatability and invites natural conversation. Adit and Julia developed and executed Episode Two, where we discussed branding guidelines and social media trends specifically. We chose to touch upon these topics because our ideas in the brainstorming phase of the design process had a strong relationship with one another, so we felt that the conversation would flow well as a result of pairing these ideas together. For our episode, we created an outline of our main talking points, wrote scripts to organize the information and prioritize our central ideas, and tested out the Cleanfeed audio system (our recording source). We then recorded the audio, downloaded the file, listened through the track, and edited the recording through the Audacity application software.
Reflection
Julia: For this project, I took the reading “Accessible Podcasting: College students on the margins in the new media classroom” into consideration, as it offered many important and relevant insights into the world of podcast creation and the ways in which we develop and structure podcasts for our audiences. Though we did not execute a written transcript for our own podcast, this was something that I kept in mind, especially for future reference. Throughout the process of developing this project, software navigation was a challenge, as there were some issues with audio quality and connectivity issues. I had only used Audacity once before, so it took a few practice tries to get reacquainted with the tools and features in the software. That being said, the software was fairly intuitive and after exploring the elements, the editing process was manageable. I also had a difficult time connecting with Adit successfully through Cleanfeed’s system, because his audio quality was different from my own, which was not resolved even after attempting to troubleshoot the issue by changing devices. However, I had never used Cleanfeed before, so I felt that this was a great opportunity to learn a new technology, as well as gain more knowledge and experience with recording podcasts, as this was also something I had minimal expertise about prior to this project. Throughout the process of developing this project, I also learned the importance of going into a recording session knowing what main points should be introduced and expanded upon, while also letting the conversation flow naturally by contributing impromptu ideas and questions through the session’s duration. One of my takeaways from this is that maintaining a balance between the two leads to a well-rounded podcast that is informative yet also personable.
Adit: I was thankful for being able to work with someone like Julia for this project, who was very helpful with leading the conversation during the interview process. I think that writing a script was extremely helpful for completing this project, and that personally really helped me answer Julia’s questions. I know that a podcast is supposed to be spontaneous, but as someone who struggles with forming organic thoughts, I appreciated our foresight in preparing a script. The Cleanfeed process was difficult as there was a reverb on my end (which didn’t make it onto the podcast recording), so talking to Julia and hearing myself echo made me distracted. I’d like to think I did a decent job despite everything, though.
