Week 3 Blog

Kristopher McClendon

For my MA Project, I want to do a podcast series on sibling relationships (i.e. twins, step brothers, middle children, etc.) or the effects of mental illnesses. While I’m still figuring out what I want my topic to be, I do know that I want people to want to listen to my podcast. I believe that an important part of a podcast is to get people to want to tune in to what you’re talking about.  The article that caught my attention was “Why People Listen: Motivations and Outcomes of podcast, listening.” This article discusses different ways on how to attract listeners to your podcast, and ways to motivate them to listen. Reading about the potential outcome of podcast listeners and how you can satisfy the listeners basic psychological needs. 

I feel like this article contributes to my project is because I need to give people a reason to want to watch or listen to my podcast. The goal of a podcast is to get the attention of the audience, they should be able to get something out of your podcast, whether your intention was to make the audience laugh, motivate them, or educate them on a certain topic. What I pulled from this article is that when i create my project, I need to make sure people have a reason to listen in, and people can takeaway something from listening to my project.

So far, I haver not begun to do any work on my project. If this is considered work, I’ve been watching some podcasts this week in order to see how they conduct interviews, how they prepare for their episodes, and how they tell a story throughout each episode. I think my goal for this week will be to start reading some more scholarly articles related to creating podcasts and hopefully know the exact topic that I want to do. Also, my goal this week is to try to figure out all of my committee members, so I will be reaching out to one or two more of my old professors to see what they have to say about it. 

Tobin SJ, Guadagno RE (2022) Why people listen: Motivations and outcomes of podcast listening. PLoS ONE 17(4): e0265806. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0265806