S02 E19 — The Radiocaster
Journalist | Radio Producer | Podcaster
This is the un-edited auto-transcribed version of the episode. If you would like to listen to the episode as you read, check out the episode here —
Jess O’Callaghan 0:00
It’s quite an intimate thing interviewing people right? So like often you are in some of the same questions that you would on a date or you would if you’re interested in someone romantically and I think that if because I wasn’t I hadn’t been doing it very long. I mean, I that was literally my first story. So I had no skills in sort of like setting the boundaries of an interview is hog she watch everyone around you, right, like doing all these things that you feel like they’re all they’re all on the path and following their dream and doing things one after the other to get there. And you can kind of paint a really neat path of how other people are doing things from the outside but you like you’d never know enough about someone’s story to know how purposeful any that is, and how like how planned activities and it’s just never as straightforward when you’re inside it. So yeah, I think like just counting like valuing all the skills you’re gathering along the way and all the skills that you’re getting, even if it feels like you’re not moving forward or something like that. It’s easy to look at other people and think they have this neat narrative but It’s it’s pretty certain that they died. And it means you’ve got friends outside of your industry which like for production like for people who sort of deal in stories I think is really essential because otherwise you just start operating in an echo chamber.
Naga Subramanya B B 1:19
Hello and welcome to the Passion People Podcast. You’re listening to season two, Episode 19. The passion people podcast is an endeavor to chronicle and showcase stories of individuals for making their passion manifest in tangible ways. The intent is to inspire, motivate and move. You are listener to action and get you closer to your passion. The stories that you hear, may not be heard anywhere else. These are people are on their journey to success and may not have already reached them. And that’s the point. Learn about people’s struggles. Learn about their failures, learn about how they overcome their shortcomings and get to where they are today. For conversation, I talked to Jessica Callahan, who is the festival manager at audio craft which is an audio creators festival in Australia. This is extremely passionate about creating audio content. And she is the festival manager and a podcast producer for audio craft just is living her passion in a job that pays her to do whatever it is she is passionate about. In today’s episode, we dive into how she reached where she is her winding career path, her moments of uncertainty and the evolution of audio, podcasting and journalism. If you are a podcaster if you are into writing, if you’re a content creator, I would highly encourage you to stay tuned for this episode. I’m sure you’re going to love it. Let’s dive. First off, thank you so much for being The fashion beauty podcast, and I’m so happy to be with you.
Jess O’Callaghan 3:04
Oh, thanks for having me.
Naga Subramanya B B 3:08
This is I guess a good place to start would be like a small introduction of yourself and what you do, and an answer to the question of what’s your passion?
Jess O’Callaghan 3:17
Yeah, so I am a producer and the festival manager or your craft so we’re an Australian podcasting company. And I manage our podcast festival half of the year half of my time. And the other half of the time I’m producing podcasts and my passion is Yeah, creatives audio storytelling, suppose.
Naga Subramanya B B 3:42
Wow. That’s awesome. And so how, how did all of this start?
Jess O’Callaghan 3:49
Um, so I’ve always worked in radio, which, you know, isn’t exactly the same as podcasting, but, you know, has some similar skills involved. So like way back when I was growing up in Port Macquarie, which is like a smallish town, like a regional town in New South Wales in Australia, and I got a job there in commercial radio, which is kind of like the, you know, those like Greatest Hits music stations, sort of playing different songs and then someone will just come in and backing out a song. So what was playing so I had this job, which was like, pressing the buttons for that radio station when I was in high school when I was 15. And it was just like a way to earn money. I didn’t think it was a crazy job at all. I just thought it was like a fun High School job to have. And yeah, that kind of like set me on the path to where I am today. I guess I didn’t know it at the time. I was like real bludger in that job. But it Yeah, that was kind of the start of it all. Okay.
Naga Subramanya B B 4:57
And did you have family that worked in radio?
Jess O’Callaghan 5:01
Yeah, like my, my granddad was on the radio. When I mean, he was on the radio his whole life really like from when he was a teenager until, like a couple of years before he died, like when he was in his 80s he was on the radio. He did breakfast radio in Sydney for like 40 years. And so I think that’s why I didn’t see it as a career. I was like, totally not keen to go into it as a career because you know, it was like the DAG II thing that everyone in my family did. But yeah, like I just saw it as Yes, a way to make some cash. So yeah, my dad was in radio my my granddad was like really big in radio. And, but I really wanted to be a writer, like be a journalist or Yeah, rush, you know, at different points. When I was a teenager I wanted to be like a movie writer, like a screenwriter or be a journalist, which is what I ended up studying was journalism. And I never saw radio related at all, like I saw it as a really different craft and a really different thing. And never thought that there was a way of crossing over the two things like I thought I was earning some cash doing radio. And then I was like studying journalism. And at some point, I just give up radio and, you know, focus on the writing. And I guess this was like, at a time where being a journalist wasn’t very easy like they’re on, it’s still not easy. There are heaps, there aren’t very many jobs in journalism or writing in Australia, or you know, most places at the moment. So yeah, it was just like a lucky coincidence that I decided to work a bit in radio because it ended up like setting me up for a really cool query.
Naga Subramanya B B 6:49
And I guess, even journalism right now is going through the admission rate because we’re seeing this shift from print to digital and Even in history, we’re seeing the transformation from the free news content to subscription based content. That’s what we notice in India, at least you see something similar in Australia as well.
Jess O’Callaghan 7:12
Yeah, totally. And it used to be like, I guess when I was studying journalism, it was when oping there was heaps of layoffs from traditional newspapers. And so, you know, people were used to paying for news paying for newspapers and things like that. And then we went through this real period where no one was paying for anything, and everyone got laid off. And I think that the cool way it’s going now, like with those sort of subscription models and things like that is there’s like a, I mean, there’s still like a real deficit of journalism and like local journalism, it’s really hard to know how to make things viable at a local level, which I’m sure you guys have in India as well. Like it’s really hard here to get people to cover like local councils or local things that are happening because Yeah, like the big subscriptions kind of favor national coverage and things that are going on nationally, or at a state level. So but there is like premium sort of content that’s happening. And like that’s why podcasting has been so exciting because it was this like, opportunity to still tell long form stories and still, like engage in journalism that has made to it and has some like depth to it. And still ride like, but But yeah, like in a totally different way to what I thought writing wasn’t what I thought journalism was when I was imagining, like, I think I had a picture in my mind that I would be like a journalist in a movie from the 70s. And I would be like, you know, typing away at a typewriter and like, really, you know, spending eight hours on one story and getting rotten, you know, that sort of journalism. But it just isn’t I mean, some people still do it, but it’s, it’s not. It also, I kind of discovered, like along the way that it wasn’t really the career for me like, it’s not something that once I put it into practice, that’s the stuff I found really hard and like, the stuff I found, I was drawn to is like producing other people. And, like, I really love producing podcasts and producing radio because you get to boss people around but you don’t often have to do. Like, if I know what the host strength is, I can kind of tell them to play to it and I don’t have to then expose myself in that way. You know, like, Oh, really push this person on this point and, and the host has to do it and and I’m a producer, so I don’t have to get my hands dirty.
Like I enjoy that. So yeah, I didn’t know like, I don’t know, even if journalism was still really viable and being a writer was still a really like fibo Korea to have. I think that maybe I would still be drawn Right here.
Naga Subramanya B B 10:02
And so what happens after your stint at Portland?
Jess O’Callaghan 10:08
Yeah, so I moved to Melbourne for uni. So I moved to Melbourne to study journalism. And while I was there, I thought I’d make some money on the side by working in radio again, still not realizing it was like a career path. And I got this. Like, someone should have told me at some point, like you could just do this and not have to study. But I studied journalism at Melbourne Uni. And yeah, like in so I worked in breakfast radio at a commercial radio station called threa W, which is like talkback radio. So a lot of its political and journalism and then some of its really silly like some of it you get people to call it and talk about all sorts of nonsense like you just tried to think of a you know, you’d have a pet segment or a gardening segment and people would call it an Questions about pet so and ask the experts different questions like I always joke that the happiest time in my life and the happiest job I’ve ever had was producing gardening talk back because all the questions are just like so delightful just talking about like oh my roses have this problem and how do I fix it and the gardening say well you do this and you know is it part time to plant hydrangeas yet and that would just so really sweet cool but uh yeah, it’s like it was quite a week like all the other cool is could often get quite angry like he get quite divisive topics and people calling in and giving their opinions on them. So it’s really liked that guarding show. But yeah, still doing that like and it was a lot of breakfast radio, like you’d wake up at three or four in the morning and I could ride my bike into the station and like set up the show. Go to air and it’s like five or six in the morning. And yeah, you’d produce it through the midday or something and then go have a sleep. And it was all live radio like podcasting. It existed at the time, like it’s been around since 2004. But at that station, we’d use it as like catch up radio. So things that went to air would then be podcast, some some of them that there was no sense of because it was talkback. Like there was no sense of being interactive with the hosts or anything because it was all obviously podcast, they had no mechanism to left. They weren’t thinking about engaging their podcast audience at all. It was just for someone who might have missed the show. Which is like really weird to think about now, like one of my first jobs there was cutting out all of the ads. So that things could be podcast because they were like, Oh, you can’t put the ads in the podcast.
Naga Subramanya B B 12:54
Oh,
Jess O’Callaghan 12:56
Yeah. Which now feels wild because it’s like, well You shouldn’t be putting ads. Like they could have also sold ads for the podcast. But yeah, and I don’t know if they ever would have, like norine Yeah, just like now advertising and podcast. Sydney, Australia is really big and there’s a lot of money kind of in that area now but especially in commercial radio like that sort of catch up podcasting has money that but I always like not take a rat and I just have to sit there and cuddle the ads out.
But yeah, like doing that and then also like,
like archiving all of the tape. So, things that went to air, I’d burn it onto a CD and put it in a cupboard. And that was like, a lot of they thought I was listening to that. The programs that were going to air but it actually was around that time that I started to discover podcasting, so I was listening to a lot of podcasts like I think I listened to every episode of the summer. Life that had been made up until that point just at work, like I had eight hours a day to just listen and no one knew like I have my headphones on and would listen to this American life and radio lab. And some some Australian shows that were just so to be made, like some creative shows that were coming out of the ABC here and out of community radios, so did like a lot of listening. And yeah, that’s kind of like what set me on the path of podcasting. I think it was like around that time that I realized that radio could be creative and like radio could be an outlet for for writing, like you can write and then you can have it appear in someone’s mouth in a podcast and it could be like a really effective way of expressing yourself creatively which until that time, I just hadn’t seen it all. I just thought I could either spend the rest of my life answering phone calls and putting them to air and being like, quite bored or I could try and become a writer. But I didn’t say that there was any overlap in that in that diagram until Yeah, until around I guess it was like 20 2011 and that was when I first started to realize that I could do something that combine those things that I had like a bit of a head start because you always feel like you’re behind and you career you’re behind in, you know, you’re behind everyone else in some way. Like, look at everyone else you like, ah, they’ve been working on this for ages, right? And they’ve got a leg up some old days and especially coming from outside the city and then moving to the city and going like, oh, everyone, he knows someone. Everyone’s got an email and everyone’s been doing things since they were 10 years old or whatever. And I didn’t think I had any of that
Naga Subramanya B B 15:46
to get across the mentor.
Jess O’Callaghan 15:48
Like I went to a I went to a toolkit, Melbourne Writers Festival. So it’s like a, I guess like the john paul Writers Festival like it’s all these writers come together and talk about books but also talk about like ideas and things like that not all the programming is about, about the writing, but the session was something about it was about the future of journalism. And there was this guy who came out from the States named Jay Rosen, who’s a journalism academic. And he writes a lot about the future of journalism and like the transformative nature of digital journalism. And a lot of what was being said at this festival was really scary. Like I was a student of journalism at the time. And a lot of the talk at the festival was about how glom everything was how there were no jobs and things were changing for the worst. But something that he said on this panel that I went to was that some of the best journalism he’d heard in the last 10 years or something like that was giant pools of money, which is a giant pool of money, which is an episode of This American Life. About the global financial crisis, and it was produced along with planet money. And so these two podcasts, so these two radio shows that have a really big podcast audience got together and did some amazing journalism. It’s still one of my favorite pieces of radio. And he played a little clip from it. And he spoke about how they made it and how it was something that wouldn’t have existed in the past. And it just blew my mind. I was like, oh, right here, you can have good journalism. And it doesn’t need to be immediate. Like that was the thing about radio journalism in Australia that I knew about at the time. I mean, now I know about sort of our rich history of journalism on the radio, but the what the stuff I’d been exposed to had all been really immediate and really, like, sort of breaking news happening on the radio and unfolding, whereas this was sort of introducing me to the world of audio documentary and also The way he spoke about it was like this is where it’s at. Like you should be getting into this. Like, if you’re a writer, that’s what you should be interested in. Like, if you’re a journalist or journalism student, you should be skilling up. In audio production, you should be learning how to record interviews and like, tell you should be learning about narrative and learning about story, and how to tell good stories in different ways that are the traditional, like, upside down pyramid of news writing. And yeah, that just blew my mind. And I went, I remember thinking like, oh, I’ve, I’ve got those skills. Like, I can do these things already. Like I do have a leg up. I have been doing this since I was 15. Like, that was really transformative, because all of a sudden, I wasn’t years behind everyone else. I was like head and everyone else was like, Yes, I’ve got a secret power, right. Like it was such a relief. And yeah, like that’s what I started, I’d actually accidentally listened to an episode. Sort of this American left before, and I didn’t realize what it was for you, like it used to play on Australian radio. And there’s an episode called Switched at Birth, which is about to like two children who were Switched at Birth.
And yeah, it’s such a fascinating story. And it’s really gripping. And I had a, I was driving down to the coast with a friend and my dad and we were in the car. We’re just flicking channels, and we heard part of that story and we couldn’t turn it off. And we got to driving down to the coast ate fish and chips. And I remember we got to the fish and chip store. And we were none of us wanted to be the one to go in and order the fish and chips because we wanted to keep listening to this story. And we just sat there in the car like mesmerized the ages because they quite long like it went for almost an hour and yeah, we had to wait till the end of that story. So once I started going through the back catalogue, I went Ah, it’s that story from the few chip shop like I remember this and actually I had heard it before but apart like that was really sort of changed everything just going to that talk to me and yeah, I started like when I was at three A w at at that station archiving and listening to all of those podcasts, it was on purpose like I, I all of a sudden wanted to listen to everything that there was and every podcast that had been made and everything in that sort of narrative, creative audio style, like there was like so coast international audio Festival, which is a lot of where audio craft comes from in Australia. So they’re a, an audio makers festival in Chicago in the states and they’ve been around since the early 2000s. And had been really had come out of that revival of audio documentary stories and the way that people were using the internet to access them. So they they have a podcast and I have two podcasts actually. And one is called race and it was around that time as well, where they take some of the best creative audio from around the world and showcase it on that podcast. And they also have podcast of their conference sessions. So that was something I drove into while I was meant to be working at three W. And I mean, I was doing the job at the same time, but I was not listening to everything I was archiving. I was just burning it, I’ll just say days and putting it in a cupboard. And yeah, listening to listening to this American life listening to Planet money and radio lab, and the backlog of all of these Australian shows as well. So like 360 documentaries, and some new shows that were coming up in a couple of years after that. So radio Tony can soundproof there was this real sort of exciting time for creative audio makers and yeah, Felt exciting. So people kind of point to when cereal happened as when all of when when I like when Apple got the podcast app sort of automatically installed on iPhones is when podcasting really blew up. So that was in 2014. But it did feel exciting like a few years before that I remember there was like a real energy in Melbourne where I wasn’t in Sydney, there was this real energy around it being an exciting place to be and be working. So through that I kind of found this a community around show called all the best here. So it’s a really cool show. And it still exists to it’s still running and doing really cool stuff. There’s a documentary program out of FBI radio in Sydney, and they do narrative storytelling. And that was a really cool community in Melbourne and in Sydney around around that show. And so around that same time, I kind of got involved in all the best Instead of learning how to make this stuff I my first story is really embarrassing now. But it was for all the best like my first on a creative audio story.
It’s so I used to think that to pitch them a story you had to be really, I thought I had to, it had to be the best story you know ever made before I could even think of pitching it to them. So I just was hanging around and not making anything for quite a long time. And then they had this thing called they do every so often like a 24 hour challenge. And they say to everyone, we’re going to pick a day and in these 24 hours you have to find a story and report it out and make it and usually now that I’ve made so it for a while I paid that show and now that I’ve worked on that show, I know it’s kind of a trick to get everyone to make a story out of things that week. But At the time, I was like, Yes, this is my chance like the buzz low adjust enough that I can clear it. And I was catching the train, which is like a an eight hour train trip. Oh god. No, it was Yeah, it would have been. So I would have caught the train from Melbourne to Sydney, which is like 12 hours and then another eight hours up to Port Macquarie and iph just just recording people on that train and interviewing people on that train. And that would I would find the narrative while I was on the train, and they went, yeah, go for it. So I took this train trip, and I just seized up like I couldn’t. I was like, I can’t talk to all these traders on the train like what am I promised, this is going to be terrible. And I just sat there nervously for so long with my recorder. And this guy came and sat down next to me. And he he I didn’t realize so he was I think he was Pakistani. So we had a bit of a language barrier but we could communicate enough like we’re chatting but some Sometimes I would misunderstand what he was saying. And sometimes he’d misunderstand what I was saying. And I asked if I could interview him and, and I did. And I realized when they came around to collect a dinner order that he had been flirting with me the whole time that he was actually like, thought that we were thought that we will like interacting in a romantic way.
And I just thought, I thought, you know, I thought he was worried that the record it was too noisy for the recording, but actually was asking if like, we could have some privacy. It’s just like, totally Anyway, it was really embarrassing. It was all the time. I was like, mortified that like lead on this guy, and I ended up just kind of like, Oh, God, I just Anyway, it was bad. It was all on tape. And then I was like, too nervous to interview anyone else. I got home and I called the editor and I was like a car. It’s not a story and he helped me turn it into a story like he helped me. He goes Well, it seems like it’s got a good beginning and it’s got a good middle, but you just don’t have the ending yet. Like, nothing happened with this train. And so he goes this editor who is Jesse Cox, who has actually passed away now he was kind of a wunderkind of Australian audio. Like did he, like, passed away these early 30s died from Cantonese early 30s lost the start of last year but he he really liked changed Australian audio, change the face of Australian audio and trained so many young people through this radio show all the best. And he was on the phone to me after I’d kind of crashed and burned and he said, Yeah, you’ve got a beginning and any middle and you don’t have an end yet. So just think about it and we’ll come up with an end. And he had me call my best friend Heidi, and talk to her about what had happened. And record that and, like record me talking about my family to get a story. Basically in Yes, it was really great because it suddenly I wasn’t too scared to make something anymore because I’d failed in such a spectacular way. But there was still a story, right? So yeah, kind of made me think because I think until that point, I thought everything had to go to plan for it to be a good story. And what Jesse kind of taught me making that story was that sometimes when it doesn’t go to plan, you get a better story, and you just need to make sure it still satisfies the listener. Like you still get that ending to go like, Ah, that’s what happened. And you know, so, yeah, yeah, you need something there.
You can’t just end with realizing that yet. Sitting next to someone who thinks that you’re on a date on the train!
Naga Subramanya B B 27:57
Is that something that you face as, as a woman, is that a is there a man or a woman kind of thing? Does that happen often?
Jess O’Callaghan 28:05
Yeah, I mean, sometimes when your hands happen a couple of times where you’re just trying to interview someone and then you’re like, Oh, no. You think that no, like that’s not we need to shut this down like this job that I’ve got a microphone it’s not Yeah, that does happen. Yeah, look, not all the time. But it’s a it’s definitely something that like a lot of women journalists face I think you like I’m not interested, like because it’s quite an intimate thing. interviewing people. Right. So like, often you are some of the same questions that you would on a date or you would if you’re interested in someone romantically and I think that if because I wasn’t, I hadn’t been doing it very long. I mean, I that was literally my first story. So I had no skills in sort of like setting the boundaries of an interview. I was just kind of like to be interviewed on this train about What you’re doing on the train, you know, like, I wasn’t like something that I’ve let now is that when you’re interviewing people can be really useful to like use your equipment and like use kind of the trappings of being a radio journalist to signal to everyone that you’re doing a story, like, I’ll have my headphones on, and I’ll have my big wind sock out. And you know, like, you kind of want to look like, you’re not there. Yeah, we’re racing. But at the time, I was like, I’m gonna be as unobtrusive as possible. So I was just like, sitting in the corner with my little record on. Yeah, try not to bother anyone, but also make a story somehow, like, I don’t know what I was expecting. But yeah, like I’ve it would happen less now because of this. I’ve learned how to how to signal to people that I’m there to interview them. But yeah, it was an unfortunate thing to happen straight out straight out of the gate.
Naga Subramanya B B 30:00
Yeah, but it’s interesting that you say that. Because I always felt that, you know, this law firm audio content allows us to dive in deeper and slow down and engage more with topics that we want. Right? And you do it all. You spoke about giant pool of money. And the last one, you mentioned it to me, I just immediately listened to it. And I fell in love with the entire thing, the format of how they had excerpts of people who were the ones who lost their homes and excerpts from people who are in Wall Street actually making of these financial securities and stuff. So, you know, and I believe that as a medium, maybe we’ve just, you know, stumbled upon something that could, that is still something you’re consuming digitally, but it’s still a digital detox because the mind is not continuously engaging with a visual medium, but it’s actually engaging its imaginative. So, you know, you have something that you’re consuming, but at the same time is slowing down. You’re diving deeper. And especially in today’s world, I think it’s very, very relevant.
Jess O’Callaghan 31:10
Yeah, isn’t it clever like I love about that story, something I really still love about it is the way that I’ve because I’ve never, I mean, I obviously care about the global financial crisis, but I never felt emotionally connected to it in any way. And I think that I’d also never understood it. And somehow, in that, in that, you know, one hour of radio, I’m able to care about it and understand it because of the way they told that story. And there’s something about it having Yeah, having those characters and hearing from the voices like hearing the stories in their own voices, people from all who played all sorts of roles in it, and then also like, the way that they use those characters and use those people to teach you about What was involved and why things went wrong and kind of talk about it in ways that I understood as someone who’s not very economically literate. That was like really helpful as well. So, yeah, it’s really clever. And it is like it is a slow down. I think that sometimes, because there are so many podcasts coming out of the moment, it’s like my job to listen to them. I do feel like it can be the opposite. You feel like you kind of flooded with all this information, but kind of remembering that to listen to an hour of content to listen to an hour journalism on any sort of topic is like what a luxury that is. And that’s possible now, whereas it’s really rare that I will spend, I’ll sit down for an hour and read an article or sit down for half an hour and read an article and read it from beginning to end and not be distracted or want to flicking to another tab or Check Twitter or something. Whereas audio it’s letting me do that every day. You know, that’s kind of how I get my a lot of my news. A lot of that long form stuff as well. So it is I mean, it’s better than nothing, which is like maybe, yeah, the alternative. I don’t think I’ve spent that long with a story outside of audio for a really long time. Except for books, I suppose.
Naga Subramanya B B 33:16
You mentioned that your career choices were not deliberate. And so, and you always wanted to be a print journalist, as a takeaway for for people who are tuning in and, you know, they haven’t really found what it is they’re looking for the aren’t really found, that their inclination lays, but are working on, you know, bad projects that were to be a task for them.
Jess O’Callaghan 33:39
I think that sometimes the things that you’re doing, it’s about valuing what you’re doing right now, like there’s always something about what you’re doing right now that’s going to be useful down the track. When you finally kind of fun to fake the career that’s within the realm of your passion. Like I think it can be easy to feel like you’re working in some sort of tangential place that isn’t giving you any skills but whether or not it’s like communication skills or project management skills or like things that I learnt 10 years ago now working at a local council, I’m using now to you know, things about production schedules and funding applications and budgeting, this skills that I’m drawing on now, producing podcasts, like the things that have helped my podcast production because there’s no you’re none of those structures that radio stations have for producing stuff, you kind of have to start from scratch. You know, we’re kind of developing it as we go developing our own ways, our own ways of managing workflow and things like that within podcasting, from the beginning and kind of like drawing on the best of radio and the best of TV and the best of events and things like that. So they’re all skills that like I felt like they were distraction from, from where I wanted to be, but actually, that’s the stuff that’s like, enabled me To do this sort of work, and also I guess being open, open to like, if you have some some sort of goal in your mind, like, being open to it changing is really kind of exciting. Like I, I guess you had like this, I couldn’t have had being a podcast, or doing like journalism, long form narrative podcasts as a goal in my mind when I was you know, 10 years ago because that job just didn’t exist. Like there was a few people doing that in the States, but I didn’t even think I mean podcasting full time. That would have been really rare for someone to be doing when I when I graduated and for me to have that as a goal. So yeah, I think having being open to your goals changing is pretty exciting to like, it’s an exciting thing to think about because, yeah, I guess like you nothing’s a waste of time, and some of the stuff that I felt it The time is hog. She watched everyone around you, right? Like doing all these things that you feel like they’re all they’re all on the path and following their dream and doing things one after the other to get there. And you can kind of paint a really neat path of how other people are doing things from the outside but you like you’d never know enough about someone’s story to know how purposeful any that is, and how, like how planned activities and it’s just never as straightforward when you’re inside it. So yeah, I think like just counting like valuing all the skills you’re gathering along the way and all the skills that you’re getting, even if it feels like you’re not moving forward or something like that.
Naga Subramanya B B 36:40
And I think it’s very, very easy to you know, look at someone and say that, you know, they’re so put together or look at them like they’re an overnight success. But what about the 10 years of work they put in before that?
Jess O’Callaghan 36:54
Totally and I like it’s really easy for me to if I wanted to like paint a nice narrative of my Career, it’s really easy, which like sometimes it’s tempting to do when you’re like trying to impress people, right? So it’s like, if I want to paint the narrative of my career, it’s like, just started in radio when she was 15. And she worked across community radio, and I’m writing a bio, it’s really easy for me to be like, paint this picture. I always knew what I wanted to do, you know, and then she took those skills and became a Podcast Producer, but like, it wasn’t that at all and it kind of like takes out of it. Like the years I spent interning for film festivals and like the times that I liked the way that for like, there was a lot of bad that sort of instant journalism where you’d have to just call and like cold call people, you know, one after the other really quickly, off to something terrible that happened to them. Like I found that really hard and like I know everyone finds that hard, but it wasn’t something that made work enjoyable for me, and it wasn’t something that I could do it like it took me A lot more effort than a lot of other young journalists to do. Like I just couldn’t physically make those calls sometimes. And it would end up in like, it would end up bad for journalism, bad for the news. So like it kind of discounts trying stuff and failing. And it also kind of Yeah, makes invisible, like, all the times that I’ve set on the internet and, you know, googled Master’s courses in disaster management, because I’m like, getting out of the game. So, yeah, like, I think, you know, there was I had my dream job a few years ago, and I spent like three months of like, my hypothetical dream job, which I won’t name because you might hear it, but I’m, like, I spent three months while I was working in that job. Like looking into becoming a landscape architect, which is bizarre. And I think like on paper look like, it could look like you’ve got it all mapped out and you’re doing this thing after this thing after this thing. But yeah, like all that stuff’s hidden away. Like, I’m gonna go try. And I was really happy when I was purchasing that gardening show. So I’m going to become a landscape architect.
Landscape Architects I know make really good money. So yeah, I think it’s like, it’s easy to look at other people and think they have this neat narrative. But it’s, it’s pretty certain that they died. It’s pretty certain that they’ve also, like, had doubts and explored other things and took the long way around to getting there. And maybe that’s good. Like, it probably makes you better at it. And it means you’ve got friends outside of your industry, which like for production, like for people who sort of deal in stories, I think is really essential, because otherwise you just start operating in an echo chamber and, yeah, there’s heaps of good things about it, I think.
Naga Subramanya B B 39:53
Yeah, I mean, not okay. kind of dive into the part where you said that you don’t want to be in an echo chamber. And you always need a little bit of diversity of thought. Because, you know, I think the way that community and people are moving towards these days is that no one can even have a conversation with someone is who they disagree with, or they have an issue with. But, you know, I think it’s so important that, you know, we have this diversity of art and you know, contrarian views so that they’re at least able to appreciate what the other side view is. And as content creators, I think it’ll it’ll help ground us better and you know, tell better stories because we were able to bring in more perspective
Jess O’Callaghan 40:40
Yeah, it’s hard because you like with this sort of fragmented media, I can just I could get away with finally listening to podcasts that I hundred percent agree with and love and, you know, agree with the host on everything right? If I don’t, if I don’t want to consume something that that sort of challenge mean anyway, I could totally get away with that because of how media works now. But yeah, I think I mean, especially in Sydney and Melbourne in Australia, it is really easy to just stick within a small circle of people who do similar things that you do who and it like that community I really value that community like that sort of maker community, but there are sort of other ways to their other communities to engage with that also make your I guess, in this case audio stronger and make your story stronger. And I think it’s really important to have Yeah, like connections outside of outside of audio because it is in Australia, at least it’s made by like, a specific class of people in a lot of ways in a specific Yeah, I guess like it’s, it’s quite an urban thing to make as well. podcasts like there are lots in regional Australia but it’s still something that communities kind of gather within Sydney and Melbourne. So yeah, it’s really hard to kind of wrap Is that as well and to but then I guess on a creative level, like recognize how that’s affecting your storytelling and recognize how it’s affecting the creative stuff that you’re putting out and then that fades into it more. So yeah, like it’s, it’s a weird one, like I really value the connections I have with people from where I’m from, from Port Macquarie and I guess, connections from other parts of my life when, I mean, my partner is a journalist as well. So like a lot of our friends within journalism, but then, you know, having friends who make furniture and, you know, are musicians and things like that as well, just my stories and never going to come from my journalism friends because they’re all holding them for themselves, right? Like, no one’s going to be like this great thing happened to me, you should do a story on it because they want to do it themselves. So for like creative storytelling, like you need to keep keep up those connections and like actively seek out people who look at things in different ways to you and have experiences outside of your own because Otherwise, you’ve just got to make, you know, make content about yourself, about people like you, which is like really boring, or become kind of like we leave voyeuristic and just like jumping in and out of places, which is also not good. So, yeah, there’s like other ways to be part of communities, I think that aren’t, you know, just podcast communities or just journalism communities and talk about other things like going to that Writers Festival was huge for me, like that changed my whole career. But I think that another thing that’s really useful is going to like environmental conferences or going to, you know, getting into disaster management. I’m not about to quit my job and work in disaster management, but like being interested in those other things is, yeah, like, it can be a really useful thing because it just like feeds your creativity more than, you know, writing another book about writing a book.
Naga Subramanya B B 43:52
So we were discussing about how you know, when you make podcast the art when we do anything creative, the expectation that we have from ourselves. Even with clients, if you’re working with clients is that something comes up really quickly. But the truth is that, you know, you kind of need to do something to get your creative juices flowing. And that creative work is typically slow. So what do you think of that?
Jess O’Callaghan 44:15
Yeah, totally. Like, sorry, there’s always this part. And I guess it’s really it’s true in every project, but like, it’s particularly true when it’s just noticeable when we’re working with clients, because you have to map out your project along like a timeline. And, you know, say this, this will take this long, and this will take this long. And I think it’s really you always allocate time for like, I guess, coming up with the ideas and there are different processes used to, to like, force the ideas out, right, but yeah, I think there’s just no way to, there’s just no way to guarantee like, some days you’ll wake up and I’ll just pop out and i’ll come on the page. Like it’ll come right out and be like, yep, there we are. That’s the idea. But other times like you need to go for a walk in the bush and all you need to, like go for a swim or something like that. And that’s where the idea is going to occur to you. And I think that it’s really easy not to leave space, like it’s really hard to leave that space in your life. Especially when you’ve got all these timelines that say, you know, this is your day for coming up with the idea of whatever it’s really hard to allow that space and not just like sit at a computer screen and freak out. And like, yeah, it’s a big part of the creative life is trying to create time to think without like, without letting yourself off the hook like that giving yourself too much time right and then going like, all right, I’ve just procrastinated or distracted myself. And it’s hard like we’ve I find it really hard with I have my phone with me all the time. And that’s where like all the articles I haven’t read her on and all the podcasts I haven’t listened to a sitting on them things like that. So you know where all my friends leave because I can text them and you know, message them at any time and talk to them about you know, where I do my grocery shopping so there’s always something to do like with my phone right there. And or something I haven’t done and so to find ways to like, come up with ideas or another one is like writing like when you when you’ve got a blank page that’s a script needs to turn into a podcast episode and a lot of the stuff that I’m working on it audio craft is sort of scripted podcasting. And so you’ve got a it’s usually that first bit that takes like the creative juice out of you, which is kind of breaking the back of the story like getting the story beats down on the page and working out the order to tell things in and moving the interviews you’ve got around so that they easy to listen to and people kind of push people through the story and that stuff. Like take some thinking time and it’s really hard to it can feel wrong to like justify it to yourself even to go like you look at what you’ve got. At the end of the day and you’re written like five words or something, but it’s not it’s not wasted time it’s like time that you feel that you’ve spent percolating on those ideas and yeah, it’s like a real challenge for me because a lot of the festival part of my work is like go go go and then to switch gears and go like there’s also really big creative parts of of that work and then to switch gears and try and do that like generating new ideas and generating beautiful writing or, you know, good creative audio editing. Like that’s the stuff that happens at like a weekly different pace so yeah, it’s a challenge I don’t think I’ve like nailed it yet. Like I still feel quite guilty when I you know, I’m gonna go for a bush walk to think like that feels really indulgent to do even if it is technically work like it’s technically. Yeah, I’m doing it for work, right.
Naga Subramanya B B 47:55
Absolutely. Yeah. So, this as we come to the end of the episode, I just wanted to ask you, how it was to be on the Passion People Podcast. If you had any closing thoughts..
Jess O’Callaghan 48:12
It’s really nice. It’s nice. I love talking to you. And it’s always it always makes me think about, I guess about like my own process and kind of because we all kind of tell us all this lies about how we work as well. Talking about it really like forces you to think about like yeah, how do I, you know, how do I do this? And how is it you know, how do I do? This is my job and business. I don’t know having a passion turned into a job is a really weird thing. Like it’s a really weird privilege and a really like, a night. It’s hard because it’s a job, but it’s also like the thing that I love doing most right. So yeah, it’s really cool to talk about it and like, reflect on Yeah on like, Why? The whys and the how’s of it right. And yeah, it’s kind of like creatively fulfilling in itself just talking about that stuff. So, yeah, it’s been really great.
Naga Subramanya B B 49:13
And thank you so much for being so honest with this story and giving our listeners a real perspective into, you know how to go about things and how and running us through your journey. It’s, it’s been a great economy.
Jess O’Callaghan 49:29
Thanks for having me on.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
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Jess O’Callaghan
Check out Audiocraft — https://www.audiocraft.com.au/
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Podcast Information:-
Interview by: Naga Subramanya B B
Recorded on: AudioTechnica ATR 2100
Recorded using: Audacity for Windows 10
Jingle Credits: Shankar from Writer and Geek, Edited by Naga Subramanya
Recorded online: Zencastr
Photo and Logo Edited on: Canva
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