|            BY THOMSON FOUNDATION

Podcasting: The Big Idea

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Whether they’re eight or 80, people want to hear stories and increasingly they’re listening to them via podcasts. This course, the first in our two-part Guide to Podcasting series, will guide you through the building blocks to making a successful podcast of your own.

Course Contents

About
Outcomes
Course Experts
Organisations
A podcast is something your audience can carry with them. It’s portable. It’s intimate. Their life carries on while they enter someone else’s world. This Guide to Podcasting is divided into two courses. This first course will help you target that person; to know and appreciate what it is they want to listen to and when they want to listen to it.
You can then move onto the second course, Podcasting: Making It, when you will learn how to produce and promote the podcast. So sit back, relax and we’ll begin to tell you the story of how to make a podcast.

There is one other course available in this series available on Journalism Now:
Podcasting: Making It
By the end of this course you will: 

  • Know what is meant by podcasting
  • Recognise the importance of podcasting as a medium for storytelling
  • Know the elements needed to make a podcast
  • Be able to identify and engage your audience
  • Be aware of the different formats and genres in podcasting
  • Know key questions to ask around structure

Catherine Mackie -
Thomson Foundation

Catherine Mackie is the training and communications editor for Thomson Foundation and the course instructor. She’s a former BBC senior journalist with almost 30 years' experience in front of and behind the camera. She’s a recipient of a Knight-Wallace Journalism Fellowship at the University of Michigan.

Dr. Louisa Lim - 
University of Melbourne 

Louisa is an associate professor at the University of Melbourne teaching audio journalism and podcasting. Louisa is an award-winning journalist, who reported from China for a decade for NPR and the BBC. Her book The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize and the Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism.

James Smart -
Nation Media Group 

James is the managing editor of Broadcast and New Media at Nation Media Group, the largest independent media house in east and central Africa where he was previously podcast editor. James has extensive experience in the audio world and has been part of the transition of radio documentaries production to online audio distribution and content creation in Africa.

DVL Padma Priya –
Suno India  

Padma is the co-founder and editorial lead at Suno India where she has hosted multiple podcasts on underreported stories such as Dear Pari,  India’s first narrative podcast on child adoption and the award-winning Pinjra Tod Kar on female empowerment. Padma is an independent journalist who has also written for The Hindu and The Wire.

Paul McNally -
Develop Audio 

Paul is the founder of Develop Audio and produced Africa’s first investigative podcast, the award-winning series Alibi. In 2023 he also founded Develop AI, to train people globally on how to use AI responsibly. Paul is a former Visiting Nieman Fellow at Harvard where he researched how community radio can use technology to evolve its news output.

John Shields -
The Economist 

John is the director of podcasts for The Economist, the renowned international weekly journal which is published in magazine-format and digitally. Previously, he was a senior editor at the BBC where he created Beyond Today, an award-winning daily news podcast. He was awarded the Knight-Wallace Fellowship at the University of Michigan in 2017.

This course was created in partnership with The Centre for Advancing Journalism at the University of Melbourne.