Podcast Assignment

For the podcast assignment I chose to listen to the Slow Burn podcast season about the deaths of Tupac and Biggie, and the Missing Richard Simmons podcast. In my opinion both of the podcasts were really interesting to listen to. I listened to each of them in one sitting, and often found myself glancing over to the computer as if I was watching a video of it. It could be good to be able to see some of the people’s facial expressions as they talk so the viewer can see their body language. There were many points in the Slow Burn podcast when I would pause to go look up the video that they were referencing such as the scenes of the different shootings discussed, and other things they talk about in the podcast. All the stories they discuss draw your attention just when you hear the names of all the different artists who share a room with each other. I thought it was important for them to frame the 90s the way they did by discussing how police interacted with communities to help understand why the crimes were not investigated. I liked how they organized the podcast by asking three or four overlying questions at the beginning of the episode which makes you start to think about it. There was a question or two that talked about something that I hadn’t even thought of to that point. The podcasts differed from each other in that the Tupac, Biggie story has been told many times, and the Richard Simmons was an ongoing investigative podcast that the interviewer did not know the end result when starting the series. The interviewer in Slow Burn relied mostly on achieved tapes and interviews whereas in the Richard Simmons podcast the interviewer was conducting one on one interviews with people in real time. The Richard Simmons podcast was much more interesting than I thought it would be beforehand. It provides insight to somebody that gets referenced a lot but I knew very little about. However, I did find the ending of the podcast to be sort of a let down after they spent episodes suggesting that something worse than what really happened was going on. It isn’t the interviewers fault because he was just trying to follow the answers he was getting, but the ex masseuse seems like an unreliable source to begin with. It was an interesting question to ask for a podcast with an interesting possible answer, but the answer just turned out to be less controversial than anticipated which can happen. Overall they were both good at keeping you listening and wanting to hear more for the next episode. The fact that most episodes were about 30minutes each in both series was also good because it allowed them to go in depth but did not drag on too long.