Changing the Narrative: media, podcasting, storytelling. What’s your story?

When we think about access to media, news, radio, and broadcasting, we often think of white, heteronormative thoughts, ideologies and voices put together to formulate our society’s collective voice. This is not representative of marginalized voices; voices who have fought and spoken up about equity, peace, justice, and democracy for centuries. Voices who have fought for our freedom and liberty.

Which is why it’s so important, no, why it’s so necessary, for us to raise our own voices.

When we launched Parkdale Centre, we were seeking to create a community space for individuals whose talents have been historically been pushed to the side and ignored to have a safe space to empower themselves through economic and professional development opportunities. Starting a business, believe it or not, is one of the most empowering thing a disadvantaged person could do. You are empowering yourself not to work within the confines of a system that chooses to marginalize you, not recognize your accomplishments, or worse, discriminates against you.

We all know how important and rather crucial social media plays a part in everyday amplification of information that often is not representative of everyone. So it was a vital component for us to build our own platform where we could share our thoughts, opinions, ideas and work with the rest of the world without having to rely on other traditional publications, radio and news outlets to share our stories.

Parkdale Centre launched the Media Arts & Journalism program last Spring, with a cohort of 40 creatives and professionals looking to start and launch a media project successfully. There was a huge demand for podcasting, audio and video production, and freelance writing & reporting.

I decided to join the podcasting program this winter. I’ve been thinking about podcasting for a bit now, but of course the encouragement came from seeing all the creative people around me working on really inspiring projects.

I thought to myself, how many amazing people do I meet everyday and they’re sharing their stories that are so powerful, others need to hear them to.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B8hIk2PhnwX/

So far, I learned how to hook up the mic to the audio input and the computer. I downloaded Garageband, and learned about adding different tracks according to the structure of your podcast.
You need to structure your podcast, in order to understand what will happen next. Just as if you’re writing an essay outline, beginning, middle, end. This structure will be the same and duplicated for all of your episodes. So right now, I’m going to figure out what the structure would look like for the podcast.

I won’t do an episode longer than 20 minutes. It’s probably a good time frame to keep people listening and engaged, without losing their interest. Even 12 – 17 minutes is ideal. Kind of like a TED talk.

Above is myself and Kathy practicing our first interviews with each other. We stuck to our timeframes, 7 minutes per interview. We prepared our questions beforehand, and our answers came naturally. At first, we were both nervous to hear the interview played back. But when we did, we both realized that we were actually pretty good!

It was our first try, and we could use better intonation, pacing, etc, but overall it wasn’t that bad.

The title for the podcast has yet to be announced, and I will do that shortly. I just need to make sure I have completed some of the program’s milestones before I put anything out here. The program is holding me accountable to work on my introduction, record myself and practice doing that, as well, create a schedule of guests/ themes etc!

I’m looking forward to growing my list of guest speakers on the podcast *and* announcing the title! If you have any suggestions for a guest speaker, or you yourself would like to join as a guest, feel free to send me an email at rusul@parkdaleinnovates.org.