This American Life: Candid Tape Recordings from Inside The Fed.

Chart­ed at num­ber two on iTunes’ list of “top pod­casts”, This Amer­i­can Life presents Car­men Segar­ra’s ill-fat­ed expe­ri­ence work­ing inside The Fed­er­al Reserve bank in New York City. This pod­cast, host­ed and pro­duced by Ira Glass, is a 69 minute sto­ry dis­cussing Segar­ra’s per­son­al account with shady busi­ness deci­sions and cor­rup­tion inside The Fed. Not only does the pod­cast fea­ture her oral descrip­tion of what hap­pened, but her secret­ly-taped record­ings from inside The Fed as well.

As my lap­top and I set­tled down on the couch in front of the Eagles-49ers game, I was pre­pared to lis­ten to the pod­cast as back­ground noise while I ful­filled my Sun­day night foot­ball rou­tine. How­ev­er, After the first five min­utes had passed, I real­ized that the sto­ry required more atten­tion than I pre­dict­ed, and I quick­ly turned off the dis­tract­ing TV. I found the sto­ry to be engag­ing since it was told in a voice that was easy to fol­low and it sim­pli­fied finan­cial terms and con­cepts so that it was eas­i­ly under­stood by an aver­age audi­ence. Jake Bern­stein was the fea­tured inves­tiga­tive reporter who told much of the sto­ry itself, and it was obvi­ous his work was very thor­ough and well-done. What I liked most about it was that Segar­ra’s inter­view was fea­tured quite fre­quent­ly through­out the pod­cast as well, which height­ened my inter­est because I was hear­ing from the pri­ma­ry source of the secret­ly-taped record­ings. She dis­cussed the lack of reg­u­la­tion done by The Fed and the fear employ­ees had of speak­ing up against their supe­ri­ors. The tape record­ings were able to back up every­thing Segar­ra described and make a real­i­ty of what she experienced.

Although I found the sto­ry itself to be inter­est­ing, I feel that as a mod­ern-day jour­nal­ist, there are bet­ter, more appeal­ing ways to get a view­er’s atten­tion. It was extreme­ly dif­fi­cult for me to stay focused on the pod­cast which was over an hour long and did not pro­vide any visu­al aid or inter­ac­tive links to go along with it. I feel that the length of the pod­cast def­i­nite­ly could have been short­ened since it was sole­ly some­thing to lis­ten to. I, myself tend to get dis­tract­ed a lot, and I feel that unless it played while I was dri­ving or doing anoth­er task, I would nev­er nor­mal­ly lis­ten to the entire length of the pod­cast. In my opin­ion, this sto­ry would have been bet­ter being told through a doc­u­men­tary, with video footage of Segar­ra’s inter­view and var­i­ous pic­tures through­out. Since it takes a lot, usu­al­ly some­thing visu­al, to cap­ture some­one’s atten­tion these days, I feel that pod­casts are an out­dat­ed method of media com­mu­ni­ca­tion, at least for my generation.