Elsa Kelmendi’s Podcast Project
Have you ever listened to a podcast? If yes, then you’re quite familiar with this new medium, that is simply described as an audio file that you can download or stream onto your portable devices and listen on the go. The word “podcast” is a portmanteau, which combines the words “IPod” and “Broadcast” and dates back to 2006 when Apple added podcasting to the Apple store to bring content for the IPod. According to Professor Jason Murphy, who teaches classes in Digital storytelling, Podcasting and Sound editing, podcasting is a way of telling stories and communicating through modernizing a very old practice. “If you want to go back to 500 years ago, people would gather around the fire, come to each other’s houses and tell each other stories, so it’s definitely not new.”
There are currently over 660,000 podcast shows and the most popular podcasting genre is comedy, followed by education and news. In the US, over 50 percent of people have listened to a podcast and around 32 percent of the population listen to podcasts on a regular basis. “Those who are regular listeners, listen to about seven a week, and that’s a lot,” says Professor Murphy.
So, why has listening to podcasts become so popular? It’s pretty obvious, people’s media consumption habits have changed from listening to radio and watching TV at broadcast time, to doing that “on demand”. The best examples of this are on-demand video streaming platforms like Netflix and Hulu, and the podcasts themselves, which you can find on many platforms like Spotify and SoundCloud. “Podcasting is part of that media environment, in which you’ve got more choice, more flexibility about what you want to listen to and when you want to listen to it.” says Professor Murphy.
Unlike film, television or music, there’s a low barrier to entry in the podcasting world: All you need is a microphone and someone to speak into it. So, when Elsa Kelmendi, a JMC major at AUBG, first found out about her passion for audio, she immediately turned to podcasting to express her talent. “I knew I could write. Video editing and photography were not my thing. But when I was given the assignment to record and edit my interview for one of my JMC classes, I finally found my talent.” She then took the “Writing for the Ear” course with Professor Kelly, where she gained the skills and knowledge to publish her first podcasting project called “Echo”, in which she and two other students recorded their personal stories and combined them into a series.
Now, Elsa is onto her next podcasting project — “The people of Blagoevgrad”. “The project is going to combine five stories about the people who I walk by every day, and never really get to hear their story,” Elsa says. She adds that journalism is not just shocking news, and stories about famous celebrities, to which you cannot relate. It is also stories about the small people, the ones you pass by on your everyday path and you greet, but never really get to know them. Her podcasts will include a narrative about the people’s lives and interviews with each one of them in Bulgarian with a corresponding voice-over in English. The reason she chose to tell their stories is that they are part of why she felt at home in a place that was not her home.“When I first came to Blagoevgrad, I felt as if I’m never going to be at home. Everything felt so different and I was scared,” Elsa says, “but now after almost four years of being here, AUBG has become my second home, and the people who I meet around the campus every day have also become a part of it.”
After AUBG, Elsa says she is planning to search for an internship that involves podcasting and would be more than happy to do it in her home country — Kosovo. She adds that people in Kosovo are still consuming media traditionally, which is a good thing, but when it comes to implementing more modern media like the podcast, she would have to target the younger generations.” Older people don’t really want to listen when you try to talk about new technology or modern ways of doing things, and podcasting is a niche industry in which the target is the younger generation.”
