Episodes of “Florida in Depth” are available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Photo courtesy of Elliot Wiser.
By Alisha Durosier
The Tampa Bay Times has partnered with the University of South Florida St. Petersburg to launch “Florida in Depth,” a podcast that explores Florida issues through stories written by Tampa Bay Times’ reporters. The podcast, doubling as a course offered at USF St. Petersburg, is hosted by USF St. Petersburg professor Elliott Wiser and produced by students Kelsey Foresta, Jordan Kalajian and Alexander Logue.
The conception of the podcast followed a meeting that occurred earlier in the year between Wiser and Tampa Bay Times executives. “We wanted to have a closer working relationship between our department in the Tampa Bay Times. So, we agreed to do three things,” Wiser said. They agreed to set up two internships, one with Tampa Bay Times and one with a weekly Tampa Bay newspaper, and lastly create a podcast that would be produced by students at USF St. Petersburg.
“The goal with the podcast is really twofold,” Wiser said. “[The podcast] is obviously to inform folks on different topics and to give the Tampa Bay Times exposure to people that don’t just read the newspaper. But I think more importantly for us, it’s to give our students real world experience in doing a podcast and to interact with full time reporters and to me and to our department, that’s probably the most important thing.
Episodes of the podcast are taped three at a time, and three taping sessions have taken place across the semester. As producers, each student was assigned three reporters and topics. They are responsible for contacting and communicating with the reporters, creating and finalizing questions, and getting the reporters to the taping on time. Producers were also involved in the production aspect of the podcast.
“A lot of times what they’re doing is they’re handling the audio component, making sure that the audio is good. So literally, I’m sitting at a table talking to the reporter and the producer is literally right next to me checking audio and making sure things are going correctly,” Wiser said.
Foresta, Kalajian and Logue were the first group of students to take the course and become the podcast’s producers.
“I’ve gotten to speak with actual journalists,” Kalajian said. “… So I got a little bit more of an insight on how they get the information that they work with and how they formulate stories and where they get the ideas from and it’s been really interesting getting to learn the behind the scenes of the stories.”
The topics of each episode have ranged from climate change and flesh-eating bacteria to Tropicana field redevelopment.
“You get to work with actual journalists, one on one, where you’re coming up with questions for them to answer. And so, you’re drafting the questions, meeting with the reporters, getting feedback. So, you really get into that insight of learning what questions and how to phrase questions and how to come up with questions for certain subjects or stories, especially ones that they’ve already written,” Foresta said.
“When meeting with the reporters, like my most recent one that I worked with was Juan Carlos Chavez, when I was talking to him about his story on immigration, I loved seeing his face light up and how passionate he was about his story,” Logue said. “And it was also cool doing the questions to help tell the story to someone who has never even read it before or even knew what the subject was.”
As the first class, the producers had a learning curve, working around topic and content changes, constant email exchanges, deadlines, bouts of miscommunication and the busy schedules of Tampa Bay Times reporters.
“I feel like since we’re the first group to go the expectations weren’t exactly the clearest in the beginning,” Kalajian said.
As producers, the students were given the responsibility of finding a good direction to take the podcast in.
“So trying to figure out a start point sometimes could be difficult, like figuring out which questions to ask. But then once you get going and once I started talking to the reporter, it became a lot easier and by the second episode, it felt a lot more comfortable. And by the third, I felt like I had it under my belt pretty well,” Kalajian said.
“We were thrown in there with very little to go off of and [we were] figuring things out,” Logue said.
But despite their challenges, the producers delighted in being a part of the podcast.
“It was a great experience,” Foresta said. “It was a great opportunity and I’m so glad that we were able to do it and I’m excited for the next semester for those students because I think it’ll be set up better.”
“I’m also very grateful for the experience because it’s my first actual internship and actually learning the professional field in this major because it was so difficult to get that in general and finding an internship,” Logue said.
“I thought it was a really great experience and it really did help with navigating the professional world,” Kalajian said.
Episodes of “Florida in Depth,” are released on Mondays and are available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
