Valley teens can learn how to produce podcasts
By JEFF STITT
jstitt@yourmvi.com
Whether it be listening to a soothing voice telling us fantastical stories, a celebrity discussing their life or hot topics, an investigator talk ing about crime, comedians having casual chats or a host of other themes, listening to podcasts while working, exercising, commuting or just laying around has become a popular pastime in America.
And with modern technology at our fingertips, it’s possible for anyone with an internet connection and a smartphone to produce a podcast.
Young people in the Mon Valley, thanks to Point Park University’s McKeesport Community Newsroom, are being offered a chance to hone their podcasting skills.
“Voices from the Valley” is a free weekly workshop open to Mon Valley teenagers who want to learn how to develop audio and interviewing skills to make their own podcast.
For those unfamiliar with podcasts, they’re like a talk radio show on the web.
It’s a broadcast made available on the internet or applications on electronic devices such as cell phones and iPads that can be streamed or downloaded and is typically available as a series, new installments of which can be received by subscribers automatically.
Community Newsroom project manager Martha Rial said the virtual workshop is sponsored by the Community Newsroom, Write Pittsburgh and the Boys & Girls Club of Western Pennsylvania Career Works. Some of the youths who participate in Career Works programming at the Tube City Center in McKeesport are participating in “Voices from the Valley,” according to Rial.
Teens will learn to interview members in their community in order to tell underreported stories, while also becoming versed in the use of audio applications like Audacity.
The five-week workshop will be held 3:30 to 5:30 Thursday afternoons beginning this week. Participants will get a chance to create a narrative with recorded interviews, scripts, music and “world-building sounds,” according to a release from the Community Newsroom.
The workshop’s leader, Brittany Hailer, an award-winning freelance reporter, educator, author and poet, said she stumbled upon her love of community teaching by instructing creative writing classes at the Allegheny County Jail and Sojourner House as part of Chatham University’s Words Without Walls program.
She now teaches digital storytelling and podcasting at the University of Pittsburgh.
Hailer, who has done her own radio and podcast work, is excited to give youths from McKeesport and the Mon Valley the skills they need to tell stories about or from within their own community.
“Something really magical happens when a student learns how to interview, how to use sound and learns how to create that relationship with a source,” Hailer said.
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