{"id":15840,"date":"2021-11-23T10:42:09","date_gmt":"2021-11-23T15:42:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ncseagrant.ncsu.edu\/coastwatch\/?page_id=15840"},"modified":"2021-12-09T14:23:59","modified_gmt":"2021-12-09T19:23:59","slug":"podcasting-a-wide-net","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/ncseagrant.ncsu.edu\/coastwatch\/current-issue\/winter-2021\/podcasting-a-wide-net\/","title":{"rendered":"Podcasting a Wide Net"},"content":{"rendered":"
BY LEE CANNON<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cHi. I\u2019m Hollyn Petrock. I\u2019m 15 years old and live in Jacksonville, North Carolina. This is \u2018Climate Stories, <\/em>Youth Report,\u2019 a podcast by Coastal Youth Media and NC Health News, exploring how climate change is shaping our neighbors\u2019 lives in unexpected ways. I\u2019m your host. This podcast is produced by eight youth producers living in rural, coastal North Carolina. Our region is one of the earliest places in the U.S. to be impacted by climate change. After training with professional North Carolina journalists, we embarked as reporters ourselves.\u201d<\/p>\n This is Youth Climate Voices<\/em>, a series of podcasts that is the fruit of a whole village\u2019s labors \u2014 including contributions from high school students and teachers, journalists, multi-media storytellers, subject matter experts, and other supporters who saw the promise of the project.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was such an honor to be selected for it,\u201d Hollyn Petrock says of being chosen to narrate the introduction and conclusion of each podcast. \u201cI was a little nervous at first, but once I got the hang of it, I felt pretty confident.\u201d<\/p>\n Petrock was far from a seasoned student journalist when the program began. \u201cI had never really thought about journalism before the project started,\u201d she says. \u201cIt 100 percent made me interested in it, so much so I could see myself actually doing it as a career.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n \u201cYoung people are interested in storytelling these days,\u201d says Rose Hoban, who founded North Carolina Health News, the online newspaper dedicated to health, healthcare, and health policy news. Hoban originally conceived Youth Climate Voices to focus on teens in smaller communities. \u201cThese kids don\u2019t see as many opportunities as kids in big cities do, so they are really excited.\u201d<\/p>\n After Hurricane Florence, Hoban discovered a Working Narratives\/Coastal Youth Media project called \u201cStorm Stories,\u201d which highlighted North Carolinians\u2019 responses to the storm.<\/p>\n She also saw a need for more general reporting from the coast \u2014 and student reporters offered a solution.<\/p>\n <\/a>With initial support from the Local News Lab, a partnership was born. The core team training team consisted of Hoban, Anne Blythe \u2014 also with North Carolina Health News \u2014 and Sarah Sloan of Working Narratives\/Coastal Youth Media.<\/p>\n Through workshops, Hoban taught the students reporting skills. Blythe, also a journalist, helped the students shape their own story ideas, coached them through how to find people to interview, then helped the students pull everything together.<\/p>\n The students in these workshops never fail to impress me,\u201d says Blythe. \u201cThey are enthusiastic, curious, creative, and bring a youthful and fresh perspective.\u201d<\/p>\n Sloan, a documentary producer based in Morehead City, helped the students not only with their stories, but also with the technology involved. She often trains people in coastal communities to tell their stories using video, photography, and podcasting, so she had experience guiding people through the process.<\/p>\n \u201cWe use the community media-making model,\u201d Sloan explains, \u201cwhere the teacher is the student is the teacher.\u201d Her work, she adds, develops leadership skills in communities and helps forge strong community bonds, because people come to understand where they live better.<\/p>\n <\/a>Midway through the Youth Climate Voices project, once they had a model they liked, the team received a key boost from the Community Collaborative Research Grant Program. North Carolina Sea Grant, the Water Resources Research Institute, and the Kenan Institute for Engineering, Technology, and Science (KIETS) offer the CCRG program to strengthen research and outreach partnerships between communities and universities.<\/p>\n \u201cThe focus on engaging youth voices is a compelling way to build capacity at the local level for the pressing environmental issues that these students face now and in the future,” says John Fear, deputy director of North Carolina\u2019s Sea Grant and the Water Resources Research Institute.<\/p>\n KIETS associate director Raj Narayan says the project is a good fit with his institute\u2019s goals.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Youth Climate Voices project is a really wonderful collaboration, amplifying the voices of young climate leaders as they investigate the impacts of climate change in areas of interest personally meaningful to them,\u201d Narayan says. \u201cTheir stories were very informative and well done. KIETS is very focused on the topic of climate change, and we remain grateful to support these diverse voices, as they share their insightful stories about the impacts of climate change within their communities.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n Each time the Youth Climate Voices team opened the program for recruitment, it filled quickly, proving to Hoban, Blythe, and Sloan they were onto something.<\/p>\n The team aimed to attract students from coastal counties, like Carteret, Onslow, and Craven. The COVID-19 pandemic precluded in-person workshops, though, and it also sent the North Carolina Health News office into overdrive. This could have blighted Youth Climate Voices for a season, or for good \u2014 but instead of postponing or abandoning the project, the team adopted a fully online format.<\/p>\n \u201cCOVID took away the opportunity to do live workshops,\u201d says Hoban, \u201cbut it did make the workshops more accessible to the students.\u201d Many of the students they wanted to reach live in rural areas, which would have presented difficulties for in-person engagement anyway. However, the age of video conferencing means that many remote students had just as much access as students in the heart of the cities.<\/p>\n During the online sessions, the team led the students through training on the art of the interview, introducing them to common questions and showing them different interview styles.<\/p>\n \u201cThe students were very engaged,\u201d Hoban says, adding that they came up with excellent questions.<\/p>\nAFTER FLORENCE<\/strong><\/h3>\n
PODCASTING IN A PANDEMIC<\/strong><\/h3>\n