Podcasting is a digital media that
has only recently come about. With the
advent and popularity of the original iPods a new medium to spread news and
stories was created. Podcasts, in their
simplest form, are prerecorded episodes of shows or other content that tried to
tell a story. The best way to think
about them is to think of podcasting as the modern-day equivalent to radio
shows and radio serials. In fact, it was
a podcast that took its name from old radio serials that really broke open the
medium. In Fall 2014, the podcast Serial was released, and with it the
podcast craze took off. According to a
CNN story, Serial is the fastest
podcast ever to reach 5 Million downloads and has an estimated 40 Million
downloads by the end of 2014 and with the series second and third season, in
2015 and 2018 respectively, that number has only grown.[1]
I started
listening to the show in the fall of 2016, and from that moment on I have been
glued to the feed of not just Serial, but
also the hundreds of other podcasts that available to listen to. It was while I was listening to a podcast one
day I started to think about how I could get involved, have my own podcast and
what I would talk about. Eventually I
came up the idea to launch a show dedicated to the Hyannis Harbor Hawks, the
collegiate summer league team I interned with this summer and in the fall of
2017, I pitched them the idea. After
several months of waiting to hear back, I got some good news. The team had signed off on the idea, we were
a go. And thus, my internship for the
summer of 2018 really began in January.
When you are
starting a podcast there are a handful of things you have to think about, like
how will I record this? What equipment do I need? Where can I get it and how
much will it cost? How do you get your podcast listed online? And perhaps the biggest one I faced, how do I
do this? Like most people of my
generation was my stop was Google, and that turned out to be very helpful as
there are dozens of guides on how to get started and what equipment you would
need. Most of the guides said something
different, but they all agreed on one thing, to host a show and to do it well
you had to get your show listed on iTunes, and to do that it cost money. In my initial pitch to the Harbor Hawks I had
made the point that starting a podcast did not cost any money, therefore there
was no reason not to try it. Now I had
to go back to the team and tell them I need almost $200 just to get the show
off the ground. Now $200 may not sound
like a lot of money, but the Harbor Hawks are nonprofit business that has
tighter profit margins that one would think for one of the best summer league
teams in the country, so I was worried.
This is a similar position that a lot of public history and history
related organizations find themselves in, ideas knocking at the door but all
requiring money, and some, like my show, with little chance of making it
back. Now in early May, I went back to
the team and pitched them on the idea for the second time, this time asking for
the money, and to my shock and surprise they handed it over no problem and the
show was rushed into production.
One of the other
big problems I ran into when starting the show was coming up with a name, and
then once you do come up with a name how do you create a logo and get people to
listen to the show? The original name we
had for the show was “Hawk Talk the Podcast”, named after another YouTube show
the team already produced, but after doing some research and talking to other
people that proved to be way to confusing so we were back to step one. Eventually, and after months of thinking
inspiration struck, the show was now named “Birds the Word” after the Harbor
Hawk bird mascot, and I was finally able to move onto the next problem, how do
I create a logo for the show? The answer
for this came from my mother, who used a site called Canva to create the
graphic design work she does for her volunteer position with the local youth
baseball league. With Canva and mouse in
hand I was able to create a professional looking logo for the show in as little
as five minutes and finally I was able to move onto the very last problem.
I had managed to
find the equipment needed for the show, raise the money needed to fund the
show, and had a name and cool logo, but now I had to focus on the hardest part;
what exactly was I going to talk about and how would I get people to come on
the show? Upon reaching this point in
the process I reached out one of my professors at UMBC Shady Grove, Dr. Melissa
Blair, who had taught my public history class that was a key experience that
led to the podcast idea. Dr. Blair
advised me to do two things, go back and read an article she had presented in
class written by noted oral historian Donald Richie about how to do oral history,
and to research the Oral History Association (OHA) and follow their guidelines
for interviewing and creating the show, which relied almost exclusively on oral
history. Not only did I follow this
advice (I have my deeply annotated copy of the article to prove it) but I also
became a student member of the OHA and developed my interviewing craft around
the guidelines I found therein.
The podcast and
the interviews therein are far from perfect, not every interview had a
historical bend to it or told a story just how I thought it would, but each
interview was unique, and in the end created an oral history was previously
there was none. There are now oral
records available for public consumption about the Harbor Hawks 2018 season,
the personal stories of those I interviewed and how they ended up with the
team, and commentary about what exactly this team and the Cape Cod Baseball
League in general mean to those on the Cape, those who play in it, and who get
their start there. Birds the Word is
available wherever podcasts can be found and has just recently been approved
for three more seasons, starting this spring, to take a deeper dive into the
history of the team that we were unable to cover this summer.
[1] CNN,
By Amy Roberts. “The ‘Serial’ Podcast: By the Numbers.” CNN. Accessed October
31, 2018.
https://www.cnn.com/2014/12/18/showbiz/feat-serial-podcast-btn/index.html.
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