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January 7, 2005
Creating a How-To Guide to Podcasting for Citizen Journalists
A few weeks ago, Phil Shapiro set up a new community on the DDN website called Citizen Journalist. The community is about the role that the general public can play as citizen journalists, posting blogs, podcasts and other content on the Internet to add to civic discourse. Parallel to this, Brian Russell of AudioActivism.org and I have been corresponding with each other, thinking about writing a series of DDN articles that could serve as tutorials for newbie citizen journalists on blogging and podcasting. (Dave Warlick also blogged about this yesterday in the context of student podcasting.)
I think the blogging one would be fairly straightforward, since there are lots of blogging tutorials out there, not to mention a lot of good content on what it means to be a citizen journalist. The podcasting one, however, is a bit trickier, as podcasting is still very new and there's no one single recommended process for creating a podcast. (I imagine if you picked two podcasters at random and asked them to explain how they produce a podcast, you'd get two totally different stories, with different software and gadgets being used.)
Brian and I have just started talking about this issue in a DDN discussion thread, which I encourage you to visit. (You'll have to be logged into the DDN website to access it.
In my response to Brian, I said it might be worth talking with a broader group of podcasters to compare each other's podcasting methods (their podcraft, to coin a phrase). That way we could create a tutorial that would guide people based on the tools available to them - PC or make, open source or otherwise, etc.
So here's my question: are there any other podcasters out there who'd be interested in contributing their ideas to this? If so, please go to the Citizen Journalist community, join the group by clicking the join this community link at the center of the page, and let us know what you think. And of course, anyone else interested in this issue should feel free to chime in. Don't forget to register as a DDN member and log in if you're not a member, since membership is required to participate in DDN communities.... -ac
Posted by acarvin at January 7, 2005 9:55 PM
Listen to a computer-generated podcast of this article
