Advisers are often lifetime learners

Every year that passes, I find that I know less than I thought I did.

It is only recently that I decided this is not necessarily a bad thing. Throughout the past few weeks, I’ve stepped far outside of my comfort zone while working with multimedia tools. A month ago, I had never even listened to a podcast, let along attempted making one.

I think that a part of the reason I avoided podcasts, as a listener and a producer, is that I forgot about one of my favorite quotes from Richard Rhodes:

“If you want to write, you can. Fear stops most people from writing, not lack of talent, whatever that is. Who am I? What right have I to speak? Who will listen to me if I do? You’re a human being, with a unique story to tell, and you have every right. If you speak with passion, many of us will listen. We need stories to live, all of us. We live by story. Yours enlarges the circle.”

This doesn’t just apply to the act of writing, but to any creative act. I didn’t think that anyone would want to listen to a podcast about the things that I found interesting. And I struggled mightily with what to base this podcast around.

After speaking with my mentor, I decided I would make this podcast about my own future aspirations, but focus it through the lens of someone who has already done it. After years of being a journalism adviser, Bill Hankins began working for a newspaper and telling human interest stories.

These are the stories I always return to, and enjoy the most. They are the stories I want to tell. So, my podcast became a human interest story about how to tell human interest stories.

The interviewing portion was the easiest part of the assignment. I loved conducting interviews, so it was a real treat to put my former teacher under the lens. Arranging and editing the audio files was another story.

In my first blog post, I wrote about my tendencies to avoid technology. That is mostly out of fear of the unknown. Even though I’ve since worked with a lot of technology that seemed intimidating—including audio editing software—I was still constantly worried I would make a mistake.

It was through the advice of my current instructor that I overcame that, and it was simply by following her advice; save often. Even if you make a mistake—and I made plenty—you can always take a few steps back and try again.

My hope is that, after enough practice and education, I won’t have to take many steps back.

So, I hope that you enjoy my podcast this week. I hope that Hankins’s journey will be my own one day. After years of teaching young folks how to tell stories, I want to attempt to tell some stories of my own.

New challenges bring the anxiety

Apprehension is a common feeling anytime something new is attempted.

I felt that apprehension with this week’s assignment, writing and recording a blog post. I didn’t know the first thing about making recordings and working with audio files. I even had a hard time coming up with a topic and writing a script.

So, I fell back on my training from Reporting for Mass Media. I thought about what was going on in my state of Missouri regarding student and press rights. I remembered reading that the Walter Cronkite New Voices Act had made it through committee, and was set for a vote on the Missouri House floor soon.

What better topic could a guy ask for?

Though I knew about the Act, I didn’t know that it was being sponsored by a Republican, or that there was mostly Republican support for it. This is very different from the situation when I was in high school. Most Republicans opposed the Student Freedom of Expression Bill we were trying to pass then.

Researching the Act made me realize that some of that support is suspicious. I think it may have more to do with getting back at the Concerned Student 1950 protestors on the MU campus than protecting high school journalists. That’s just a feeling I have, and I didn’t want to include that speculation in my recording.

While using Audioboom, I was a bit lost. My first recording was barely audible. I figured it might be because the built-in microphone on my Mac isn’t very good. I borrowed a microphone from our broadcast teacher, and the recording is easier to hear, but is nowhere near loud enough. I tried to play around with the levels on it, but couldn’t get it right.

I suppose one of the things I learned was that I still have a lot to learn regarding audio files.

The delivery in the podcast is a little on the dry side. I tried to vary my voice inflection, and it comes through at times, but for the most part it sounds like an NPR segment, without the volume and compelling background effects. That isn’t what I was trying to do, and I’d like to work with this more to perfect it.

I was surprised at how easy it was to embed the podcast into my blog. One of my first Google searches took me to Audioboom’s own FAQs page, and in just two sentences it perfectly outlined how embed the file. I had trouble loading my slideshow in a previous week, but this was easy. A quick copy and paste function into the HTML side of the blog, and there it was.

We have already had a lesson over how to edit audio files and splice them together, and I’m gearing up to work on that assignment. Though I like the overall topic and theme of my podcast, I’ll be happy to try my hand at something a little more complex.

Here comes all that apprehension, again.