Podcasting 101 with (left to right): Terry Bell, Larry Hansen, Dylan Brogan
“Flying cars didn’t happen but your iPod automatically hooks up with your car radio,” said Isthmus staff writer Dylan Brogan, explaining the increasing popularity of audio podcasts.
“Journalists have to meet people where they are,” said Terry Bell, a 15-year Wisconsin Public Radio veteran who now teaches reporting classes at Madison College.
Brogan and Bell were joined in the opening session of the podcast training by Larry Hansen, Madison College journalism instructor. The training session was held at Madison College on Friday, May 6, 2016.
Hansen said the technology is “stupid simple,” and very easy to use for any iPod owner. As he uses podcasts in his teaching he has discovered that students seem to like the intimacy that the podcast offers. And as participants later discovered, creating a podcast is also pretty simple.
James Mills (far left) is the creator of “The Joy Trip Project” podcast. Katie O’Connell is producer and host of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel’s “Behind the Headlines” and “Unsolved” podcasts. Jason Galloway is the Wisconsin State Journal Badgers football beat reporter and host of “The Red Zone” podcast.
Podcasting is taking place in Wisconsin newsrooms. A panel of journalists who produce podcasts gave three perspectives on how they developed their own style, decided on content, determined the length of their podcast, find music for backgrounds, and actually make a living doing podcasts.
Terry Bell demonstrates Garage Band (left). Rebecca Wasielesky, an editor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Barry Adams, a reporter for the Wisconsin State Journal, work on their podcast.
In the final session, Terry Bell led participants through the process of recording audio and then editing the audio in Garage Band, a program that comes with every Apple Mac computer. The produced podcasts were then uploaded to Soundcloud for listening and evaluating.
According to Larry Hansen, 50 million Americans listened to podcasts each month in 2014. The audio of the two morning sessions was recorded and links to those podcasts will be added to this report when the podcasts are available.
