By Wynn McDonald
Donald Rand had three simple goals when he started his first podcast, chronicling the weakly feats and foibles of his favorite baseball team: to have fun, get a good grade and improve his media production skills.
“I’m 2-for-2 so far,” said Rand. “The Yankees are something I can sit and talk about all day long, so it came pretty naturally.”
Rand, a junior communication major at Bellarmine, started his podcast while enrolled last semester in the popular radio laboratory class, taught by professors Gary Fogle and Dr. Kyle Barnett. The class allows students to learn not only about the broadcasting industry, but also to step into the booth themselves, getting first-hand experience with one of the most rapidly growing forms of entertainment in the world.
For Rand, the podcast was a home-run opportunity. A longtime podcast listener and die-hard New York Yankees fan since birth, he had little trouble finding things to talk about on air. He enjoyed it so much that he made the bi-weekly assignment into a weekly production for the semester and plans to continue the podcast once the baseball season returns this spring, even though he is no longer enrolled in the class.
He is one of many on campus who have taken advantage of the radio lab to hone their podcasting skills, giving them a leg up in the world of digital media.
“It can prepare them for the job market, because so many businesses now look for people who can do podcasting,” Fogle said. “Businesses have their own podcasts, and if there’s an employee who can put podcasts together for them, it makes them more valuable.”
Junior Jack Sintic, a classmate of Rand’s, had similar thoughts on the class.
“It gave me a new set of skills to work with and start practicing on for my potential career path, if I choose to pursue radio work,” Sintic said. “It made me feel more comfortable talking for longer periods of time about various topics and more confident putting that content out for others to listen to.”
In the last decade, the spread of content through podcasts has climbed at an unprecedented rate.
According to recent research by PodcastHosting.org, there are over 820,000 public podcasts around the world as of February 2020. In the U.S. alone, over half of the population reported to have listened to a podcast, with approximately 16 million (5%) self-identified as “avid podcast fans.” Edison Research reports that 70% of U.S. consumers were familiar with podcasting in 2019, up from 22% in 2006.
“The reason it’s so popular is, just about anybody can do one,” Fogle said. “As long as you know how to produce one, you [can] upload it to the internet and there you are, you exist.”
Also contributing to the rise of podcasts is the feeling of proximity between the speaker and listener, according to Barnett, who has studied trends in radio much of his career and taught podcasting classes at both the undergraduate and graduate levels at Bellarmine.
“I think it’s that personal, close connection,” Barnett said. “It’s not a mass medium. But podcasts engender a devoted following and I’ve learned a lot from them, both in terms of the world around and myself.”
Bellarmine students are no exception to this trend, particularly when it comes to resident sports fans like Rand.
“I think with podcasting, you get better access to real people,” Rand said. “You turn on ESPN, and you’ve got former athletes, millionaires… sometimes they get caught up in the analytics and all that. With podcasting, you can get more of the fan perspective [and] it’s a more down-to-earth form [of media].”
Rand also admitted to drawing inspiration from Fogle, who has his own regular podcast: The Wise Sports Guy, a quick-take opinion show available weekly on Apple Podcasts. Like Fogle, Rand’s episodes are brief, presenting his reactions to the baseball world in easily-digestible five-minute segments.
As he prepares to launch The Bluegrass Yankee Fan podcast in earnest, Rand’s example goes to show that the rise of Bellarmine’s podcasting program has made it easier than ever for students to touch base with a wider audience.