Podcasting Finds Its Voice at DePauw

From new courses to new spaces, DePauw is equipping its students with the most up-to-date tools for innovation and success. One specific expression of this priority is a growing emphasis on podcasting and other forms of digital media.

"Back around 2015, the Pulliam Center still had three or four working wet dark rooms that were just filled with stuff and no one was using," recalls Jonathan Nichols-Pethick, professor of communication and theatre. "We had recently received some money to do some work, so we decided to build a podcast studio. Immediately we started trying to get students interested in it."

At that point, podcasting was still relatively new to the media landscape. Groundbreaking shows like This American Life and Serial were captivating millions, new podcasting apps were vying for a growing number of listeners, and advertisers were starting to recognize the potential for unprecedented engagement with niche audiences.

Nichols-Pethick and his colleagues at the Pulliam Center saw this as an ideal opportunity to begin educating students about this emerging medium and preparing them to leverage the power of podcasting in their own creative pursuits.

"I developed a winter term class called Podcasting: Craft and Culture," he explains. "I wanted to combine training on how to actually do this with a sense of the history of the form and some of the critical ideas starting to circulate in academia about how to think about podcasting as a critical object."

After two iterations as a winter term class, Nichols-Pethick took what he had learned from those experiences and expanded the course into a full semester-long format. It was a shift inspired by the launch of the Creative School as well as the transformation of DePauw's film studies program into film and media arts - a move made to accommodate forms of non-film media, podcasting being one of them.

In the fall of 2024, Nichols-Pethick taught the expanded course for the first time. "It went pretty well," he says. "We had some ringers in there who were really skilled, and we also had some people who'd never touched a microphone before. But they all ended up having a pretty good time."