In this discussion, we interview professional producers to learn about the art and business of being a media producer. Topics include: -What do audio and video producers do? -What differentiates a great from an average producer? -Lessons that senior producers wished they knew when they were in school -Advice for those interested in professional production Our guests will be Jamie Cohen (Media Studies, Queens College) author of Producing New and Digital Media (2020, Routledge)

okay i think we’re getting close to starting um uh jason and anthony uh uh you’re welcome to come uh join us uh for the introduction for do the big reveal of our guests hold on and i have to start recording so hold on all right welcome to the second installment of uh the queen’s podcast lab learning series uh i am joined by my colleagues jason tuga jason good to see you hi joe great to be here thank you i’m very excited that anika and jamie are here oh it’s a great i’m i’m super stoked uh and anthony bareilly always a pleasure sir thanks for having me as always very excited so welcome everybody my name is joseph cohen i’m a professor in the sociology department here at queen’s college in the city university of new york new york city’s public university and this is the next installment of the queen’s podcast lab learning series it’s a series where uh we explore topics that are of interest to podcasters and other digital content creators we got a great uh session uh for uh all of you today uh but before we begin i have a couple uh announcements uh anthony and jason i made you co-host if you can uh keep your eye on the uh on the waiting room in case anybody wants to join that be super all right so just a couple items of promo before we get started today um later this month please join us at the The Queens Podcast Lab queen’s podcast lab lunchtime series we’re going to talk about content creation for faculty if you’re a professor an academic a graduate student or uh you know a scholarly creator who’s ever thought about dabbling in youtube or social media podcasts or any type of digital content creation please come join us on friday september 24th for uh a discussion this will be a zoom based discussion it won’t be broadcast to youtube live if you’d like to join please write me an email at joseph.com at qc.cuny.edu also on october 1st those of you who are conceiving content franchises interested in starting your own podcasts or content creation enterprise might want to join us for conceiving content franchises this is an instructional seminar where we talk about the decisions that uh are involved in uh planning and preparing to launch a new uh content series or franchise you can catch the discussion on the queen’s podcast labs youtube channel and if you’d like to join us on the zoom uh rsvp to me at joseph.cohan qc.cuny.edu Queens Podcast Live uh join us or please check out our website queenspodcastlive.org events for uh more uh installments of our series we’re going to be running them through the fall we have some more great guests uh coming up in the works uh uh so please join us Guest Introductions today uh we have here let me get let me stop sharing and bring in the talking heads today we have a very very uh special uh uh special topic not just because it’s a topic that interests so many of the people who come into contact with the lab but because we get to meet two great people who uh i’m very happy uh to have here oh well now three because amy herzog is here amy wonderful to see you thanks for hosting this i’m so excited all right so i would like to introduce you to our first guest i’m going to start off with anika chowdhury anika is a production coordinator at dreamworks a media studies alumnus the first intern at the queen’s podcast lab she is partly responsible for everything we’ve done here and just a real dynamo uh so anika welcome it’s great to see you first of all thank you so much for hosting this and i am so fangirling of seeing my old professors amy herzog and mara einstein um i am just humbled to be here because i was in many of these student shoes not very long ago only graduated in 2018 and i’m excited to talk about production for sure and our second guest is a new addition to the media studies faculty jamie cohen is here professor jamie cohen uh welcome do you want to introduce yourself yeah thank you so much for having me and thank you for hosting this this is really an honor to be part of and i’m really honored to be part of the queen’s college faculty this is a really fun place and i’ve been having a good time so far so thank you so much looking forward to the conversation and thank you again awesome now a lot of our a lot of uh the people who engage our our programming uh a lot of the students who get involved are media studies students they are students who have some type of interest in a career in media and some type of passion for uh multimedia production and because so many students are interested in it and we have people who are part of our group who are new to the university community freshmen and sophomores who never really thought about media production as a as a field uh to pursue i thought it would be great to have you know just sort of a basic introduction and we’re very lucky to have some media studies professors uh amy herzog and mara einstein please feel free to chime in if you have something to add uh we we we’re we’re happy to hear from you and so today i just wanted to talk about the basics of this field what’s involved in media production what makes people you know what differentiates a good and a bad producer if somebody is interested in this kind of stuff you know where do you go how do you get started in a career like that so let me change the speaker view so we don’t have a hundred people so i want to start off with uh a question for both uh anika and and and What is Multimedia Production jamie uh maybe i’ll start off with jamie because i’m sure you got a a a a nice answer prepared in your class what is multimedia production like what do you guys do that’s a great question multimedia happened to be um the buzzword of the 90s and it’s come back to you to really be with us now um it is in terms of how it’s applied it really depends just before coming to queen’s college i was a multimedia producer senior manager in multimedia production for a publishing company and it was really doing remote media production and what that really meant a multimedia producer today to me is more advanced than a new media producer it’s someone who really has a hands-on approach to multiple types of tech everything from microphones for podcasts to zoom productions to small form factor camera production and then really i think a lot of multimedia production is if you’re not an editor at least in knowledge of how editing operates and that means everything from sound editing which is smoothing the cuts to video editing which is learning how to lay b-roll on top of the primary footage so it’s multimedia is an expansive field and it is kind of nice that it’s free it’s re-emerged in the present but in a applicable way rather than the the conceptual way of just that was like cd-roms that’s not what it is anymore it is very much a production forward hands-on pragmatic thing but i think one of the most important things and to tie in the media studies is that it has to engage with theory pretty much the whole way through because you have to kind of know how the audience interacts with it who you’re talking to what stories you’re telling anika on a day-to-day like how how is the life of a producer Life of a Producer experience right like on a high level we know that they engage in production but like what does that mean in terms of nuts and bolts when you check in like what’s your day going to be filled with in this line of work that’s a great question and i think that really varies depending on what project you’re working on and what kind of producer you are right there’s a line producer and you’re dealing with budget and numbers are you a creative producer or as what jamie was saying being uh involved in a project that has multimedia you’re looking at a project from cradle to grave so it’s really great too to know if you have a background in tech or if you have a background in some of the production positions it allows you to look at the big picture but also understand the day-to-day tasks that your team if you’re you’re going to be leading a team that your team is doing um and i think part of those those day-to-day is like you’re managing your team you’re checking in with the people that’s that are uh are working for you and also making sure that you’re meeting your day goals your week goals your month goals and if you have a year goal um so that’s really really important i think um uh in terms of what what that looks like uh it really really is so versatile i mean on the project that i’m working on currently it’s a mixed live-action animation show right so it there are multiple producers there’s a producer just for live action that deals with um figuring out how to shoot and especially like how to shoot during a pandemic um it was it was insane um but i give a lot of kudos to those folks who are producers because of the fact that they have to manage so much and being a good communicator is so important and managing the relationships um from you know down to the pa to the client whoever you’re answering to that’s so so important and so part of what i think is so important about a producer is confidence is key and positivity is key because that really is what your team is going to be feeding off of um and even if like things are on fire it’s your job to make sure that your team feels confident and that we are able to get over whatever this fire is um you know we’ve had shoots where during hurricane ida we had a flood during a shoot you know so those were things that were immediately needed to be figured out and it’s part of the producer’s job to to see how you know first of all maintain everyone’s safety but um there’s just there’s just no predictability and you could have as much of a plan as you want but there will always be things that won’t go your way so being able to be versatile adaptable and being able to be resilient is really important so i have this understanding and correctly with that wrong so like basically the job of a producer is What is Production somewhere between the person who’s imagining some vague idea and the actual finished product the tv show you watch the you know the podcast you listen to or whatever there’s all sorts of uh of like tasks or jobs that need to get done you gotta corral the actors you gotta work out how things are gonna be staged and then you gotta go over the film and it’s like production my understanding and correct me if i’m wrong so is it that production is like about all of the tasks that you have to do to organize the performers and the and the footage and whatever you’re working on to to take that imagination that idea and bring it to reality that script and make it something that can be directly experienced is that what it’s about basically or i mean yeah this i once thought of i once heard i was i wanted to be a producer for a long time when i went to college for tv production and um i i ended up producing reality tv shows and like stuff from tv so it did it was pretty accurate what they were telling me they said at the time a producer is someone who’s a writer who knows how to edit and i think that’s a really simplified version of exactly what it is and i didn’t really make sense of that until later which is that you have to work with the storyteller to envision the future you have to figure it out like if it’s it’s done you have to know you have to control the outcome and so it’s a producer is someone who can see or at least have in the imagination of the finished product so it’s the writing to the editing and so that’s really what they meant it wasn’t a writer who knew how to do it was just that they could see the cuts the footage being cut or the sound being edited on a timeline they could hear the edits as they were going they could listen and hear the bites and i think the biggest takeaway that i learned from from a producing standpoint is listening like that was like if you could listen to the teammates around you like if that if you could get a conceptual comprehensive idea of what somebody’s trying to deliver and you could carry that from your mind to the many many moving parts like in this many parts like all the guests the talent and then to the crew to the editors the assistant editors if everybody can if you were there to to do that then that’s a producer i mean sometimes producers sometimes feel as if they’re sometimes too mechanical for that type of thing but at the same time it’s it is a fairly creative job because you have to see it it’s it’s one of the few people that has the imagination the future in your mind i’m sure dreamworks this is like way more intense too it’s like the the the peak of where production kind of at the where storytelling producing has really been the top level of what we actually watch now yeah well i mean i definitely can’t speak um you know from a producer’s uh standpoint but as someone as a coordinator it’s really interesting to see how important um and how quick creative decisions need to be made um and i think that was the most surprising thing because there are decisions that could affect story that could affect how someone edits a story that could affect our storyboards i mean there’s so many moving parts and they work with a lot of third-party vendors and so a producer really has to have all of those moving components in mind on top of you know what will make the best story and what will engage the audience the most uh so yeah it’s it’s it’s it’s really interesting i i do feel like that you can always aim to want to be a producer you know it’s funny i never thought in in my wildest dreams that that’s something that i would ever want to do because of how difficult it is but um i really think that that’s something that you can only know you’re you’re good at if by trying to do it and whether it’s working at somewhere like dreamworks or making your own project like that’s how that’s how you know and that’s how people i think especially at queen’s college like i was able to have that opportunity to make stuff and that’s that’s where it comes from make your own stuff you know you could make any idea whether and whatever medium that you’re comfortable with um and it was really great in terms of queens college that we got to have the theory we got to have the video production we got to have some of the audio production and thank you to joe for riding on the wave and creating this massive now kind of like ecology of podcasting that didn’t exist you know when i was around and i just i i hope more students take a part of the actual production part um of it so what what skills do you need like let’s say a young person is thinking oh you know i i Questions to Ask Yourself like making videos i like making my tick tocks i like working on garageband maybe this is something that i could do professionally what types of questions should somebody ask themselves to figure out whether or not this is like a gainful you know line of work for them or gainful field for them to pursue i mean i think anika hit it there which is the passion the the it’s it’s less to me skills are the desire like you have to like want to you know it’s like if you want to do it then you do it like it’s to like maybe yeah anika maybe you could go you go further with this because i like the way you respond to that with this with how that works no i mean look i i came from a a background where my parents were immigrants and their main focus for me was you know get a job that has security and like since i the age of five when i started watching movies and like dancing to bollywood movies and and watching american movies and learning english from from you know children’s programs like mr rogers and and blues clues um i would say like i want to be like on tv and i didn’t know what that meant but that scared the living hell out of them because it’s just so true i mean it’s so not a linear path this entertainment industry no matter and no matter where you think you’re going to end up or or and where you end up are actually very different i’m i mean you know again like i graduated in 2018 i could never have seen my career path come here and i think that’s part of the beauty about it but that unpredictability is the reason why i was sort of in my circles told not to pursue it and i was just constantly rebelling against that and so when i got to college i took my first media studies course and i was in the middle of oh maybe i should just be a lawyer and i love politics maybe i should just go into politics and and then i kind of saw how and it’s true like if you have passions you know whether it’s cooking whether it’s law whether it’s politics media is this really beautiful like melting pot of you are able to talk about those topics and engage in them but you don’t necessarily have to be the host you could be a part of a production that you know leads that passion somewhere else and so i made up my mind and i realized well i have no technical skills whatsoever like what am i gonna do and i think part of that was i was trying to convince myself like if i you know know how to edit if i know how to sound at it um if i can give you know gain more skills so that i can be more attractive to people who will hire me for so-called these jobs then maybe it’ll all work out um it was a very naive way of thinking things and what ended up happening on my journey of taking these classes was i was so excited to first of all you know learn how to hold a camera learn shots watch these older you know movies that i’ve never seen that you know my parents never watched and seeing them from a different angle and understanding how how people in from the very beginning were just experimenting with things they didn’t know and ended up making some sort of magic and the best part of queen’s college for me was that you didn’t need a lot of money or resources the way that you might have been told you needed in another school and so a lot of those classes were just me literally finding classmates that cared about the course that was big and then after they cared about the course it was like okay well here’s this project let’s do something cool about it like what are you into and that collaboration is where i learned so much and so i feel like you know my experience of like knowing nothing and just having passion is just an example of all you need to i think succeed in in this industry because it will take you so far and take you so many places and um you know so whether that’s collaborating with your friends whether that’s also talking to your teachers i mean those pro i mean my professors amy herzog mara they’ve been in the industry they’ve written theory they understand things that i you know did not understand so just talking to them reaching out to them asking questions was really important i mean mara is the reason that i learned about center for communication which is a i highly recommend as a student to check out it is a non-profit industry that basically um connects students to like the best minds of media and just putting them in the same space and that was a game changer for me because you know just being in the presence of i don’t know the the president of discovery and hearing you know her as a woman explain her journey and being in that same space was like oh like this is attainable right like that was that was huge for me i mean it built my confidence and i hope that virtually it’s allowing more people to be able to be in those same rooms you know because you’re not worrying about cost you’re not worrying about how am i going to get there if you have a job like hopefully that i i hope kind of lowers the various barriers to entry because it does feel so high but i hope that sort of answers the question and i didn’t go on a tangent Creating Creators i i mean you might have gone on a tangent but it was a very productive tangent and it was great to hear that i i noticed i just picked out two things you said earlier and now that are that lead to an amazing story so earlier you mentioned that you’re working with the creator of blues clues and then you just said you partly learned english from watching blues clues i mean that’s an incredible trajectory and the kind of thing i think we hope for so many of our students and and it and to kind of put it in the terms that i would talk about with my students i think that we as college faculty in 2021 have a huge responsibility to help students become creators of the pieces of the media media environment that so dominate their lives so that they’re not just passive consumers but they’re creators they’re makers and they know how to do things and i guess i would be curious from both you and jamie to hear about what difference that makes when you know how things work from the inside rather than just you know kind of scrolling through the media that we’re that we’re all dominated by every day i i guess i’ll go i have a very interesting take on this i i previous to my last institution i founded a new media degree and it was based on based on create creators like and i think that gen z the upcoming gen z and jenna alpha following that there it’s a creator world everything is just creation i think um it isn’t i think transparency is really important to late millennials in gen z i think it’s really understanding how the systems work is going to be uh foremost because i think the it’s not about trying to take it over or like see all the ways in which it’s broken but rather make better material but make better content and i i’m not i’m not even a big fan of the term content because i think it’s better that’s just calling out better stories but i think when we understand like how to do it or even just the pieces we don’t have to like like we don’t have to go out and get like eight like 80 000 cameras and put them on heavy sticks i’ve seen stories told with just a simple usb microphone and an iphone just walking around and telling it if you could tell those stories it’s your mind the tool has always been in your mind and so if you could see how the systems are actually operating we’re at a very fortunate period in the 2020s where finally resolution that’s my audio and resolution have caught up to the brain space of creation and now we we know that if you know how to get something on youtube and you can conceptualize the idea and you have a good set of friends and a good set of professors and the opportunity to experiment to go off what anika was saying before college is where you make mistakes you know it’s like it’s the time to really experiment and if you could figure those experiments out then you could actually like make better stories like tell better stories and i think everybody is in a creator space they just need to given the the opportunity and the passion to do that anthony did you have a question um i just i had comments earlier but we’re so far past it but i did i did want to say um uh listening to anika talk about um her path and her journey somebody who also grew up watching blues clues and learning how to i mean obviously uh english was my first language but i did learn a lot of words and uh i learned a lot through television growing up i was in front of a tv like my whole life and um learning about culture and context clues to television shows uh is such a big thing but what i really uh i wanted to say that that is really cool that you get to uh work for dreamworks and deal with all that but it’s it’s incredible how far you’ve come from that just like i want to do something in tv i want to be on tv that’s a mindset that i had a lot as a child i want to do something in entertainment and i didn’t know what that meant and sometimes i still don’t you know you don’t always know even in school even when you’re a senior it doesn’t matter how far in you are you could be into your career what you really want to do what what’s gonna fit for you personally and it may take your whole life to find that um but just in media and specifically from my experience even though i’m not out there yet i found that uh like you were saying before wanting to get a little bit of everything knowing how to hold a boom knowing how to uh hold a camera just being behind a uh being behind the scenes in front of the scenes having a little bit of experience in everything is how you’re going to figure out what you really like what you don’t like and what you want to do but more importantly it’s going to give you the context and understanding when you’re working in a team or in like with other people it’s not just good for leadership but it’s also good because then you understand where everybody else is coming from it’s good for communication and um when i was at my old school my community college they had a decent television department in the studio class we each had to create our own show and i had to run my show pick all the hosts it was like a little studio show i did one for netflix it was called and chill and it was uh just a few friends of mine who i had sit down and they talked about shows and i’d run clips while they were talking about them like top five dramas top five comedies that kind of thing and i had somebody on the video effects who would water talk and queue up all of the scenes and they were missing their cues and they were making me angry and i realized as a leader uh how i got frustrated with them but it was my fault because i didn’t communicate how i wanted it to the best of my abilities you know you have to be able to be critical of other people and yourself at the same time and understand not everything is going to be as easy or go the way you want it the first time and that’s okay because mistakes are going to get made and that’s how you learn and that’s how you grow so my point is on my little tangent communication and understanding knowing where everybody else on your team is coming from and knowing that you’re not the only one here looking to find out what they want to do you know and making connections with all these other people like everybody here right now it’s incredible to see all these people watching right now and that are going to be watching later like you’re you are pursuing what you want to do and you’re looking for ways to learn more outside of like class and that’s awesome and i thank you for everybody that’s here and thank you for the guests as well Chaos in Production can can i piggyback on one of uh uh of anthony’s comments here i’m getting the sense you know i i teach statistics and to some degree you know it’s it it’s very they’re very s clear and simple operations to do the job correctly you’re like you do this then you do this then you do this i’m getting the sense from you guys that like there’s a certain chaos to production where it’s like you’re just trying to make something happen and it’s like nobody’s quite sure how to do it you don’t know how it works but it seems a lot less definite than i imagined am i wrong about that or [Music] is it a highly chaotic sort of uh job what’s the it’s it’s anthony’s right it’s about communication it i think being open-minded to change especially at a coordinator’s level like that it’s coordination is exactly that it’s somebody who is flexible to change like it things you there everybody wants to envision a perfect project everybody does everybody who thinks that it’s going to go smoothly but you never know how somebody’s mood is on any given day you never know how i mean the pandemic changed a lot of how we’re going to be doing production just in general i think now we’re a lot more open-minded toward the feelings and stressors that come with work in general and labor and i think if we are at least open-minded to it we have to be flexible to anything that can shift in real time i think a producer is the communicator it’s somebody who translates it is somebody who translates a creative idea whether podcasts or visual into uh skills so who’s doing what and when and then reversing that and translating upward backward time who can help out who could do certain things and then um make it work because in the end a lot of production is based on deadlines so you still have to hit it you know you’ve got to make sure it’s there but it is a lot of figuring out how many different pieces are are necessary to to do that and um i give a lot of credit to the coordinators out there because i think that’s that’s the position that really sits in between the two ends of like making things happen if you don’t mind jumping in here um you know this was one of the reasons why many years ago i created a class called the business of media because i think that there’s a a whole swath of jobs that exists that students are just not aware of across the media spectrum so you know it’s everything like you could be a lawyer in entertainment you could be an accountant in entertainment you can be an account executive you know so you can bring sort of businessy skills um to the work of doing production and it was funny listening to this conversation what it made me think of as the last commercial i ever worked on was one uh when i was working on miller lite and um it was one called football wives and when i was working on light it used to be that it was all the football players right and so they decided okay we’ll do something with the football wives because they wanted to see if they could bring women into drinking more beer and so while i’m on the shoot now i’m an account executive i’m not a producer but i’m standing next to the producer and i hear one of the wives saying she’s pregnant you can’t have a pregnant woman in an alcohol commercial so this is what i mean you know you know so being able to pivot on the spot is the kind of thing that you need to know how to do as a producer so of course we shot the we’d already spent you know half a million dollars creating the set because we were down in florida we had everybody you know all of this kind of stuff we shot the commercial we had to shoot it in such a way is to hide the woman who was pregnant and then we took the film back to new york and re-cut it so that she was out of the spot but those are the you know the the thing that you need to know as a producer totally what jamie said it’s about writing it’s about communicating about what anika said which i’m so proud of you like failing over here um said about um you know keeping the happy face on it making sure everyone stays calm all of that and and and and and knowing that you’ve got to be thinking down the road what are the things that could possibly go wrong and how am i going to be able to pivot if they do anthony got away from me again oh okay well we could go back we could go back to you yeah it happens let me let me ask a question and professors uh What differentiates a producer from a great producer uh uh einstein herzog please uh join in as well as professor cohen and uh what differentiates an average producer from a truly great producer like if someone says listen i want i want to really be something special like what is that how do you be excellent like what what what is it that all of you recognize in the producers you’re like oh that one that person’s a star that person’s great what qualities are there well i mean from from my perspective just really quick is positivity it’s um Carry positivity i think anika said it earlier it’s like that you have to kind of carry that it’s it’s it’s um if you are able to carry positivity then it’s it doesn’t mean always smiling it doesn’t always mean things aren’t bad it doesn’t mean things are going smooth it just means knowing full well that there’s a way of moving it forward energy is a big part of producing and so if you are a dark cloud and you’re carrying that it actually is not a really great way to produce so it’s um producing is a lot of uh of that type of thought that’s my my two cents i was gonna add um in addition to Adaptability the pivoting people have been talking about being able to maintain within that adaptability a sense of both the micro and the macro um the the producers who remember what it’s like to be a pa or a production coordinator who um aren’t exploitative but like have it have a sense of um because you also then have a sense of what can go wrong if you’ve like driven the truck like all the things that can go wrong that you can um anticipate that a little bit on the front end but then not lose a sense of like the bigger picture or producers who are willing to be like oh wait a minute depending on the scale of the project and the deadline um to be like wait a minute this isn’t the story i thought it was um and being able to kind of pivot um as a writer or being being able to with a longer form production maybe kind of shift where you’re where you’re going um because you’re kind of able to think on your feet intuitively about the material something like a podcast especially or other kinds of um storytelling where you have more wiggle room there but yeah not losing a sight of the the big picture and being able to pivot on multiple pivot points or axes simultaneously Creator vs Producer can i interject because i i it’s like answering my own question i’m so sorry but i do want to tell uh a nice anecdote because as as a creator who’s not a producer uh i’ll tell you and what was very special about anika and was that as a creator i came to rely on her as a co-creator she would tell me when things aren’t working well she would give me ideas on what to change and when i was pushing the franchise in a direction that just wasn’t working anika also knew my audience also knew the show also knew the format and she was just a full you know rather than someone who just you know uh combines audio and takes out the vocal tics and cleans up the sound she was like a genuine co-creator and uh you know and when when she wasn’t there uh when she had to graduate you know it was it was it was tough at the beginning because you come to rely on her and so i wonder if that if that’s you know part of what makes a great great producer like somebody who’s just really part of the team like really is someone who the whole team relies on to uh make something great i feel like i need to interject real quick with all of those comments that i think what’s so important about that our relationship in particular making the podcast was that you allowed that sort of environment for me to be able to to speak up and say and and give my opinions and be able to collaborate with you and i think that also i i don’t i’m surprised you don’t call yourself a producer because that’s part of like what a producer does too because you know when you’re working with a team and you’re allowing that sort of openness to have that communication um that means that you’re being open to you know things that you might think are going really well but from other folks perspectives it actually may not be or they may be seeing things that you’re not seeing and i’m just a product of of my professors and their advice and what they have told me too of like how to act during a production or like or explaining you know in in in our case you know you allowed me to look up potential guests for the show like that wasn’t at all what i was supposed to do i was just supposed to learn audacity which was free and edit like edit that was all my job was so i you know i i’m a product of of that relationship and you allowing me to to be able to do that i just wanted to throw that out there that’s kind of you to say and just for those of you listening by the time anika left we were a top 20 social science podcast in the united states we were a top 25 science podcast in the united states so anthony yeah i just want to piggyback off of Advice for New Students that a little um for those students who are newer at the school or to the program want to be more involved talk to the professors get to know everybody in the program find the people that are the most passionate about it i like working with joe so far because he’s so excited about everything he’s doing um positivity like jamie said is so important chemistry is so important it doesn’t matter if you like or know a lot about what you’re working on as long as you have somebody who’s gonna get you excited to work on it that’s how you learn and grow you find something that maybe you didn’t know a lot about and now you’re excited to find people in that field and like anika did bring them on as a guest for the show you know find people ex like do more than you have to but don’t stretch yourself too thin and that’s why i’m here i had great a great high school teacher mr evanson back in jersey who went out of his way to get funding for the program he when i was a freshman he was a year into our television program in my high school and he built it from the ground up got grants funding everything his passion to teach it and have people learn it at a younger age like freshmen to seniors is the reason i’m here today at my community college my professors brooke maya and jay varga also for the radio and television programs and the media programs we had there were so influential on me they taught me so much and were so passionate found the internships found me things to do you know when you’re in their face they will give you things to do to get you out of their face and have you working and have you learning and that’s why i’m at queen’s now doing everything that i’m doing and putting myself as much into the program and into my field as possible before i get out there because one the more you have on your resume the more chances you’re gonna get a job and two the more you love what you’re doing the more somebody’s gonna wanna hire you because they see that you want to grow and you want to grow with them or at their company in their program so definitely and when you come back to school like anika is right now and you see your old professors and you just have so much to say and thank them for it’s nice because they get to see that they had an impact and then you had an impact on everybody else you’re talking to jason did you have your hand up are any any responses any follow-ups jason are you still there you fell off my screen i’m here sorry am i back on your screen yeah you’re back you’re back okay i i just want to Finding the Story emphasize something or pull out something from what anika was saying about her working relationship with you i’m currently teaching a podcasting course in the english department that’s part of our new writing minor and sometimes people are like why is that a writing class and it comes back to what pretty much everybody’s been saying it’s about storytelling like whether whether a student’s working on a narrative piece or an interview piece or a conversation piece in each case what they’re trying to do is find the story right and the editing is so key in building the story and i i would just hypothesize that if anika had just been like strictly given the task of being an editor and working in audacity and not thinking in a bigger way she would have learned very little and it probably would have been really boring too right like the the technical you know the softwares and and the equipment that you need to tell your story are important but they only are meaningful in relation to the story i just well i just i you know it’s it’s Editing is Storytelling funny that you say that i think that uh it’s just my passion for i had interest in seeing it in the bigger picture but i think an editor is super important and sometimes i mean maybe not necessarily in my capacity for the sociology podcast i wasn’t really editing this story but in many ways the editor can change what this outcome ends up being and i think that there are so many folks who are technically like uh really uh have really great technical skills may not have maybe necessarily the best people skills but those people are just as as important right so um i don’t know if it would mean less but in in my case i wasn’t uh just as great of an audio editor as i hoped to be i’ll jump in here just to say i think editing in post-production is storytelling and is writing um uh and it’s just as important and everything else so maybe if i was reading jason correctly that um it’s one thing to like learn how the software works is another thing to use that software with inspiration and take that material and shape it um shape it into something and you were able to do that because um professor cohen gave you the space to be a real collaborator and not just um a passive technician yeah thank you amy you really explained what i meant very well i i certainly didn’t mean to downplay the the role or the power of an editor just that editors are part of story creation right and and they’re doing powerful work yeah they really they really are and you can tell the difference when you work with someone who gives you more than what you brought to it you know on a lot of podcasting platforms there’s just a button that says like produce your podcast and it just smacks together the two tracks and puts it out and so you know there’s if you’re going to be a human doing that and you’re going to be better than like a computer that just smashes tracks together and gets gets rid of the ticks you know you have you have to take part authorship of the piece if you don’t let me add to that i had a freelance gig for square and square was doing this podcast called talking squarely and i was hired as their coordinator and editor and i had never i’d edited podcasts but i never edited the way they wanted it to they were recording hour-long recordings sometimes an hour and a half of five or six guests but they wanted a 20-minute piece like that was their podcast and it was extremely technical editing to where they were cutting they were basically putting reality bytes together constructing sentences from across the whole timeline and i was like i didn’t really sign up for this but it was it was one of those things where it wasn’t it had less to do with my technical acuity because i i was never really an audio person but more about hearing it like me telling like buying hearing it over and over again and playing with it and experimenting and changing the tracks and it is different than hitting that button that’s produced and just smashing all five tracks together it was it was pieces it was like playing with legos to the point where it was like like the millennium falcon not just building like the little ones like it was really an exquisite form of producing and i think that’s if you if you hear it and you you given a good script from somebody or a good story you you will do it i mean you can make it happen it’s it’s really kind of like fun to do that it was fun for me to learn it and i think that’s something that i think everybody’s been saying too is that if you like what you’re doing you’re learning at all times it’s just it’s constantly learning and school doesn’t really stop i think that’s the big like secret that nobody wants to talk about as soon as you’re done it just keeps on going and you’re like whoa that’s crazy but if you didn’t have the education like there’d be no way to have your mind open to learning more so i think that’s that’s an important factor that anika brought up too is that what you learn in school sets the scaffolding for future learning so we’re coming up on an hour and i What Can I Learn wanted to be sure that we would fit in some information to direct students who are joining our community who don’t know about media studies don’t know anything and they they want to know well if this sounds appealing they love the idea of creating movies creating podcasts what can i study at queen’s college what can i do and maybe i’ll start off with what can like what what’s going on at media studies what do you learn like what can what can i learn at media studies if i join the department maybe that’s a good amy’s here take it Different Tracks amy pretty much so much i think what i love about our department um is that we have a lot of different kind of tracks or paths that student students can take but because we’re a fairly small program with a small number of faculty we’re a little bit scrappy and that gives students room to room to experiment a little bit so it’s not like maybe some of the bigger programs where you only do production and are kind of locked into a track and you can certainly do and we have concentrations and tracks or double majors and film studies we have a brand new program in advertising and marketing uh critical advertising and marketing that mara can tell us about but um we really encourage students to experiment um and hopefully do so in close conversation with a mentor advisor but kind of try out these different aspects of learning about how media impacts culture how to read films how to write a screenplay i’m really excited about the new class on media writing um that mera had helped to develop but that we’re now going to cross list with the new minor in writing in english you can also kind of take these ideas and ideally integrate that with work in sociology and data analytics with writing with journalism to kind of try out different different approaches or take what you learn from maybe a film history class and be exposed to modes of storytelling that you might not have discovered otherwise um i’m a bit more of a historian and i’m really interested in exposing students to like look at this crazy thing that happened in 1920 and it’s completely relevant um matt i just had in class we were talking about um uh minstrel z and blackface and um we ended up like pivoting from thomas edison to like we spent the whole class talking about little nas x and what he was um doing um making those kind of uh historical leaps and finding something relevant in the present um yeah i guess i see our program is creating those openings for learning broadly testing out some of these skills and then yeah knowing you’re going to have to keep learning as you go the other thing i would just jump on there with is um we there is now a Media Arts certificate in media arts which is not something that we have we something that was only started in the last couple of years because we were finding that students were discovering the production part of the department at sort of toward the end of their college careers and so now there’s a series of classes that students can take that they can build their their production skills um over a couple of semesters and uh you know because some students come to us who are more interested in in broader based understandings of media and its implications and so on uh but there are students who also want to be able to to have those hand more of those hands-on kinds of skills so there is the capability for that and hopefully with the new art school it may not come into fruition quick enough for people who are here but we’re hoping to kind of uh develop those production classes again across departmental lines and and also in addition to that i know jason you’re Writing Minor you have a a minor in the english department and you know but the journalism uh you know sort of seen here at queen’s college can you maybe just tell us a little bit about it sure the writing minor is brand new we just launched it this semester and uh there are three tracks in the mighty minor writing minor you can choose to study primarily creative writing professional writing or theories and practice of writing uh although in any of those tracks you get experience with the others and we definitely we are conceiving writing very broadly so we may have a student who wants to be a novelist and is studying creative writing but that student is if if you’re an aspiring novelist you need a web presence right so you need to be able to know how to write within a web environment and do web development um maybe you want to branch out or your first book’s out and your publisher or your agent is like i want i think you should make a trailer for this book right you need some video production skills so we think of writing pretty broadly and we really really recommend students to take media studies courses as part of the writing minor and there are a few that that count toward it including the media writing course that amy just mentioned so that’s exciting it’s brand new it’s only going to grow um we are bringing and visiting journalists people may know that currently the journalism minor at queen’s college is on hiatus there are various um [Music] there are various conversations about ways to bring it back and slash update it um in the writing minor we also highly encourage students to do internships so we’ve had students do internships with literary agencies with publishers with media companies and with media studies and with joe we’ve been working with this organization called media makers which is partly funded by the mayor’s media office which gives students career training and places them in interviews and gives them i mean in internships and then gives them money to do the internships which is very very important to us and then finally i’m the i’m the faculty advisor for the knight news so um i work with an amazing group of students very talented who it’s student run and i’m there to help them along but we’re currently really growing the paper in multimedia directions the way that all newspapers have been in the last few years and we have an internship program we have reporters we have people on staff and uh it’s possible to get in involved at just about any of those levels and then the final final thing i’ll say related to that is the college’s is building in the student union or renovating what used to be wqmc which was the radio station and i believe amy amy you were the faculty advisor right Radio like more than 15 years ago yeah and it was great yeah it was fantastic we have such good radio alumni here at queens yeah i mean we have people who did the radio Studio club who work in news radio professionally now and are doing great um so that club lapsed for a little while the college is building studios for various kinds of digital content creation so you could go in there and make youtube videos or you could do podcasting there’s going to be recording it’s going to be possible to record live music in a main room and so i would encourage everybody go ahead i was going to say can stream if you want to have a game streaming channel totally all sorts of stuff yeah Content so i wouldn’t i i i asked people to put your email in the chat if you’re interested in that anthony’s gonna be heading up the application for the club but jamie made me think you know i really don’t like the word content either it just always sounds so it’s like corporate desperation we need content to fill up our thing or whatever i wonder if we should change the name should it be like the digital storytelling the digital media story i just always think of content farms and i don’t Storytelling really like the idea of content farms i like like actual material it’s a like actual storytelling actually an important part of producing is knowing who’s going to give you money to Money do it and what name is going to encourage them to give you money so maybe if you say content they’ll give you money and then you very quietly that’s a very that’s a very good point so maybe did you say media creation club or or yeah creators club of america you know what we’ll have to save this for uh a philosophical session uh before we leave just a couple of uh additional items um in addition to all this great uh formal curricular programming uh know that we at the the queen’s podcast lab we have internships we’re running clubs this learning seminar we’re doing everything that we can to create a community of creators here at the college if you’re interested in joining us check us out on our website queenspodcastlab or you can write to me joseph.com qc.cuny.edu visit us on the web sign up for our email list and and just be around and hopefully when campus opens up we’ll all be able to get together in real life and uh and and and create together uh one final word uh uh these free editional educational resources on digital media creation are brought to you by the state and city of new york these are your tax dollars at work our work creates free public resources non-commercial scholarly media content original research on content creation entrepreneurship and great educational experiences for young new yorkers who aspire to careers in fields like marketing media communication entertainment culture the arts and information if you wish to support the kind of work we do whether it’s online learning our podcasts like the annex and the qc pod or these internships please visit our site queenspodcastlab.org click on donate and your tax deductible donation to our project through the department of sociology at queen’s college in the city university of new york not only helps us create these things but it communicates to our colleagues at the university that people value what we are doing and with that let’s do the gallery for the final montage of everybody who was here it was okay uh jamie and anika it was great to learn about media for you jamie we’re so excited to have you uh here on faculty with us we hope to be seeing you all all year long and collaborating uh anika you’re our golden child we always we’re we’re so proud of who you are and all you do we always uh hold you up as an example for the kids and it’s always just it it always makes me so happy to see you and uh get a reminder of all your success your well-deserved success all right so um oh yeah on behalf of my colleagues jason tuga and anthony bareilly thank you for joining us join us in a couple fridays when we will talk about content creation for faculty thank you thank you all right the