That’s So Meta: NPR Takes on Analyzing…The Media

On the Media by NPR is my favorite pod­cast. When I’m home wash­ing the dish­es or doing laun­dry, it’s my go back­ground noise. In just under an hour, the pod­cast, host­ed by Brooke Glad­stone and Bob Garfield ana­lyzes the week’s media phe­nom­e­na and mishaps with a sharp, wit­ty tone.

This week, Garfield man­aged to make the eth­i­cal debate around media cov­er­age of ISIS upbeat and inter­est­ing, and their humor­ous ban­ter and quick think­ing imme­di­ate­ly pulled me into the show.

I lis­tened to On the Media this week at the gym, because mul­ti-task­ing is won­der­ful espe­cial­ly when you’re com­plet­ing the mis­er­able chore of stay­ing in shape. Despite the fact the pod­cast car­ried me through my hour-long car­dio ses­sion, the length is one of the down­sides of the show. My atten­tion span tends to be about half-an-hour for lis­ten­ing and I def­i­nite­ly felt the need to refo­cus dur­ing the pod­cast and lis­ten hard­er to fol­low the discussion.

How­ev­er, when I logged onto the podcast’s web­site, I found that you could choose which seg­ments to lis­ten too instead of hav­ing to digest the entire episode. Aside from the length, the pro­duc­tion val­ue was incred­i­ble. The sound qual­i­ty was excel­lent as it felt like I was lis­ten­ing to a clear radio broad­cast. In oth­er words it did­n’t sound like it had been record­ed in some­one’s Grand­ma’s base­ment on an iPhone. Addi­tion­al­ly Garfield, the only host as Glad­stone was on vaca­tion, had arranged an impres­sive line­up of guest speak­ers includ­ing the artist behind Abdul­lah X, a British com­ic art series that dis­cour­ages young men and women from join­ing jihadist move­ments and ISIS. The cre­ator, who chose to stay anony­mous because of his sta­tus as a for­mer jiha­di, spoke the Garfield can­did­ly about his neg­a­tive expe­ri­ences join­ing extrem­ist groups to find reli­gious ful­fill­ment and explain­ing how media can help influ­ence young men and women. This seg­ment gave lots of lis­ten­ers some­thing to tweet about and the “share” but­ton on the pod­cast’s online site facil­i­tat­ed a dis­cus­sion on social media:

Best new word of the day: Jhi-hob­bi­est. @onthemedia

— Ron S (@GoneAFK) Sep­tem­ber 27, 2014

 

In anoth­er inter­est­ing move, I could tell that the pod­cast had been loose­ly edit­ed to retain its orig­i­nal and authen­tic qual­i­ty. For example,one inter­view sub­ject called in from her home and you could hear her two dogs bark­ing and play­ing in the back­ground. Garfield joked about this with her, simul­ta­ne­ous­ly con­nect­ing with the audi­ence and demon­strat­ing that he’s not JUST a jour­nal­ist, but a per­son,  which gave the show a gen­uine feeling.

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To Produce or Not to Produce?

As a jour­nal­ist I think that pod­casts are a good way to get your work and your voice to a larg­er audi­ence. Whether it’s read­ing your sto­ry on a pod­cast or dis­cussing a sub­ject you’ve report­ed on fre­quent­ly, pod­casts can’t do any harm to your jour­nal­is­tic reputation.I don’t know how many media con­sumers lis­ten to pod­casts, but my guess is that the num­bers aren’t incred­i­bly high. For the sake of con­ve­nience, I think that pod­cast must appeal to the “on the go” type of per­son who wants to tune into a show while dri­ving to and from work, work­ing out, trav­el­ing or sim­ply get­ting things done. Pod­casts are a fun alter­na­tive to read­ing a news­pa­per or get­ting infor­ma­tion off a web­site because they allow you to multi-task.