CiTR has received a Radiometres grant from the Canadian Radio Fund of Canada (CRFC) which will allow them to branch into new territory: podcasting.
“You can reach an audience outside of a geographical region [with podcasting],” said Alex de Boer, the current affairs coordinator. “So you can have listeners all over the world.”
While radio is more community-focused, podcasting is individual-oriented with the ability to go into niche subject matter.
“At a community radio station like CiTR, we’re super open to lots of different types of shows and we want to promote people’s weird ideas ... that’s really different and maybe more marginalized in commercial radio,” de Boer added.
CiTR plans to produce three podcasts: the first is a music podcast of live performances followed by live interviews, the second is packaging existing collectives at CiTR into a podcast and the third is called Consider the Alternative.
Consider the Alternative is a series where volunteer production assistants will be working in teams of two to report on local democracy and produce two episodes of narrative storytelling. The episodes will all be connected through the three pillars of local democracy: journalism, activism and government.
Volunteer production assistants will receive proper training on reporting, crafting a narrative story and managing the production and technical aspects of podcasting so that by the end of the school year, they’ll have two highly-produced episodes.
“Our goal is to produce higher quality talk content and tell more immersive stories,” de Boer said. “... I hope to see us continue to pursue podcasting as an integral part of [CiTR] ... and I think that makes a lot of sense with its popularity and importance ... in audio storytelling and news storytelling.”
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