About the Podcast
My podcast is about social media influencers and their positive and negative impacts on their audience. I want to recognize how they use the power they gain through the amount of followers they have.
Podcaster Bio
About the Podcaster Bija– Hi! I’m Bija, and I’m currently a senior at both Freestyle Academy and Mountain View High School. In my free time, I enjoy hiking, swimming, painting or reading. I also really love to travel and one of main goals in life is to visit all 7 continents of the world. After graduating, I hope to attend a four-year university and become an elementary or special education teacher. Since I’ve become concerned with social media’s influence on younger individuals, I’ve thought of becoming a teacher; indeed, it would be important to understand how communication technology affects my students.
Introduction Section
In the last month of our time at Freestyle, we were required to make a podcast in our English class on any topic in order to learn how to effectively deliver a story that others would want to listen to. In this podcast, there would be various factors included that would help to make it more professional, such as background music, sound effects, potential interviews, ads, etc. My inspiration for this project were various podcasts, including Radiolab’s “Driverless Dilema” and “Smarty Plants,” both of which were interview based. I knew coming in I wanted to do a podcast that involved an interview because it would allow the listeners to have a direct perspective on the topic being discussed. I learned that the interaction between my interviewee and me, the host, would help allow for the listener to feel connected with the conversation occurring.
Process Section
In the very beginning of the podcast unit, we were assigned to listen to various podcasts to familiarize ourselves to the style and various factors that go into a single podcast.
After the podcast review, we created a document that was where we would go through the process of picking an idea, going into depth on that idea, etc.
Before my podcast, I created a document where I wrote out the script so I would know what I was saying and the structure of my podcast.
Since I was having a interview in my podcast, I also had to create another document where I had my questions I was gonna ask.
Below is the screenshot of the editing process using Pro Tools for the podcast:
Final Podcast Product
Reflection
From this Podcast Project, I valued the ability to choose a topic of interest and discover different perspectives of it that allows myself to deepen my understanding of it. Especially with the topic of the impact of social media influencers, where I’ve had personal experience of how they have shaped my mentality, I thought seeing others point of view would be a learning experience for my listeners, including myself. Some challenges prior to choosing the topic I did, was deciding which topic I was most interested in taking on. Once I did choose a topic, I experienced a bit of an obstacle finding a way to write a script that would tell the story the best and most unbiased way I could. I also struggled finding a way to make the podcast not boring because this is a topic that has been discussed a bit in recent years. I wanted to make my podcast different from the others. Some tips I’d give first-time podcasters is to choose a topic that you know about but not a lot about because through this podcast you want it to be a learning experience for both you and the listener.
I just wanna give a big shoutout for Lilia Rodriguez being my interviewee. I am so thankful for her speaking in my podcast and providing the insight that helped myself and my audience understand the topic of social media influencers much more!!