I chose for this assignment to cover the St Louis Story Stitchers Podcast. The website claims the Story Stitchers collective was founded by eight artists in Old North St Louis. The goal of the podcast is to gain a greater understanding of the needs and desires of the youth as well as giving them an amplified voice to to create and inspire change, as well as reduce crime in youth in the St Louis area.
The project relies entirely on the use of technology to both record and share the podcast. The website states they use state-of-the-art equipment to help record the podcast. The images on the website show them using, laptops, microphones, xlr cables, and live mixers to help bring their production together. They show on the website that their show is available to be streamed from nearly anywhere, but specifically showing episodes on YouTube, Vimeo, and Podbean. The website doesn’t clarify when the podcast was founded and first started, but they continue to upload currently and plan on doing so for a long time to continue discussions and give the youth they talk to a voice to share their stories.
The subject matter discussed and the foundation of this podcast are its clear strength, these are stories that need to be told and have a serious purpose. Everyone thinks they can have a podcast, but end up having nothing to talk about or important to say regardless of if they have a true platform or not. However with the Story Stitchers Podcast they are using the platform to better the area and community, specifically focusing on giving the black youth from the St Louis area a way to amplify their voices and be heard. They also have a wide variety of platforms they have released the episodes on, keeping the show easy to find. I feel there isn’t a major weakness for the project, other than some people just don’t listen to podcasts, so you may not have as wide spread of an audience as you may want. However, that may be contradicted by the use of YouTube in addition to just audio-based podcast apps like PodBean.
This project as a whole has a goal of giving the listeners a new experience to hear about. Giving you an entirely different perspective on the St Louis area that you may not have thought about before. The support for communicating with youth as well as giving them a voice is extremely important.
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