When Colby McCaskill moved from suburban Seattle to New York City, he wanted a way to stay connected to his grandparents back in Colorado.
One way he did it was with Dear Papa, a podcast that mixes personal reflections on aging and love with interviews with his grandmother, who is suffering from dementia and cancer, and his grandfather, for whom the podcast is named.
This month, McCaskill became one of three Fordham students whose podcasts earned national recognition in NPR’s fifth annual College Podcast Challenge. All three recorded their seven-minute entries in Audio Reporting and Podcasting, a class taught in the fall and spring last year by Julianne Welby, a senior lecturer in the Department of Communications and Media Studies and former senior news editor at WNYC.
A senior journalism major, McCaskill was named one of 10 finalists and is in the running for the $5,000 grand prize, which will be announced later this month.
Joining him are Sara Morales and Christina Muttavanchery, who were among the 35 recipients of honorable mention recognition in the same contest. Morales, a senior majoring in English and journalism, submitted Straddling Tints: Raised in the Spaces Between, a piece exploring how immigrants and their children see themselves differently. Muttavanchery, a junior journalism major, earned her mention for Classroom Confessions, which features interviews with immigrants who arrived at different stages of childhood.
A Story Worth Telling
McCaskill, a transfer student from The King’s College, recorded Dear Papa during a trip to Colorado last March. He said the collaborative process of workshopping drafts with Welby and his classmates was directly reflected in the finished piece.
“We had multiple times where we would play drafts of the podcast in class, and we had pretty frank conversations. We’d say things like, ‘I don’t know if this pause works,’ or ‘I don’t know if the way that you frame this really hits,'” he said.
“The quality of the piece was a direct result of the care and attention that my professor and my classmates gave it.”
The Discipline of Less
That kind of collaborative environment was something that Welby emphasized a great deal in the class. She said that while technological barriers to podcasting have dropped dramatically—most students recorded their audio on smartphones—the craft of storytelling still demands the ability to identify interview segments that advance the story.
“I give a lot of assignments that seem almost cruel on the surface, like taking a 30 or 40-minute interview and cutting it down to three minutes,” she said.
“It forces you to ask, ‘How much can you say in a little time?’ You need to keep an ear out for where the message you want to convey will come through, and not wait for 30 minutes to get to it.”
Finding the Right Frame
For Morales, the class reshaped how she thought about her podcast’s audience. She initially envisioned using musical notes as the metaphor for the differences between how immigrants and their children see themselves, but she pivoted after receiving feedback in the class.
“I learned that, although the music metaphor resonated with me, it’s not exactly accessible to the general audience,” she said.
“That helped me narrow down the initial idea … to something like shades of colors, which everyone can understand.”
Muttavanchery faced a different challenge — learning to make herself part of the story. As a journalism major, inserting her own perspective didn’t come naturally at first. Through the class, she learned a different approach to storytelling.
“For this project, Professor Welby said we could do something personal because it would open the door to more possibilities. By talking about my own experience, I was able to think of more questions that I wanted to ask people, which made it a better piece.”
