Film/Digital Media students create unique platforms
The transition to a new year brings excitement about new forms of media. From new music to new movies to new books, one other form of media has steadily grown in popularity among college students: podcasts.
While some Wofford students, namely former student Jacorie McCall and current student Coleman Bryant ’21, have ventured into the realm of politics and have striven to make local politics more accessible to younger audiences, other students, such as Jack Fanning ’21 and Maggie Royce ’22, have decided to create their own unique platforms to educate and to inspire whomever tunes in.
Royce, a native of Raleigh, NC majoring in English with a concentration in Film and Digital Media studies, took a class away from Wofford about the basics of podcasting during Jan. 2021. She now runs a podcast called, “The Confetti Club,” a play on the widespread idea that business and entrepreneurship are “a boy’s club,” while acknowledging her personal label as the human form of confetti.
Her podcast seeks to set itself apart from its “girl boss” contemporaries as Royce described, a genre characterized by large social media followings, but not as much substance in Royce’s eyes.
“During the summer quarantine months,” Royce said, “I struggled to find resources for women in entrepreneurship and business that were not ‘girl boss’ but contained substance. When I decided to do my capstone project as a junior, it was a natural progression of content creation, which I know and love while also meeting a need for substantial women’s entrepreneurship content.”
For now, the podcast is an experiment for Royce, but certainly something that she would be open to continuing. She uploads episodes to Spotify later in the same week that she originally records them and follows a weekly upload schedule. She currently has three episodes, but is hoping to complete more than ten.
Royce aims for an audience between the ages of 18 and 25, but noted that her podcast reaches women even beyond those parameters. Nevertheless, her goal remains the same: to change the narrative surrounding women in business.
“I hope to interview a wide variety of female entrepreneurs,” she said, “both on Wofford’s campus and across the country, to gain insight and knowledge as well as inspire other women.”
Anyone interested in following the Confetti Club on social media can find it on Instagram @the.confetticlub or subscribe on Spotify.
For prospective listeners looking to blend a love of sports with an interest in the history that surrounds it, Jack Fanning’s currently untitled podcast may be one of interest.
Fanning, who is from Myrtle Beach and who also majors in English with a concentration in Film and Digital Media, has podcasting experience stemming from a personal podcast that he started in March 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. It was something he had been wanting to do for a long time, and the summer quarantine months proved to be a blessing in disguise.
“It’s been an aspiration of mine ever since freshman year coming to Wofford,” Fanning said. “So, I never really set aside the time to do so, and when we got sent home, I said, ‘you know what? I gotta start doing this. … I bought some equipment, figured it out as I went, and I’m still doing it today.”
Fanning’s personal podcast is a completely separate entity from his capstone project, which does a deep dive into sports scandals throughout history, something that Fanning had been wanting to put time into for a long time.
“As much as I loved doing this podcast with other people and all that,” he said, “I wanted to do a show where it’s just myself and really research-based and really diving into the things that I find super interesting.”
Aiming for 6 to 8 episodes, Fanning is currently working on researching and explaining to both casual and dedicated sports audiences the historical context and nuances of infamous scandals from the steroids era in baseball to more recent happenings such as the SMU football death penalty or the Houston Astros’ dugout scandal.
Like Royce, Fanning is using his project as an experiment to sharpen his podcasting skills and to put more time into a topic that he particularly enjoys. One of his biggest goals, however, is to make the information as accessible as possible for anyone who chooses to listen.
“I kinda wanna paint the picture at first,” Fanning said. “For every episode, the plan is to set the stage of what was happening in the current time of this particular sport or this particular team and kind of really let the listener understand why this is so important first before I start getting into crazy numbers or specific names of players and stuff like that.”
Unlike Royce, who uploads her episodes one at a time as they come out, Fanning plans to release all of his episodes on Spotify and Apple Podcasts at once after he has figured out a title, done appropriate editing, and is satisfied with his final product. The best way for people to support Fanning’s project? Just listen.
“Listening to it is the amount of support I would need for that,” he said. “It’s not necessarily something that I’m going to get a grade off of for listening, but anything is appreciated.”