Michael O&#039 - Turn Up the Volume: A Down and Dirty Guide to Podcasting

Figure 0.1 Michael OConnell is the co-host of Its All Journalism and the author of Turn Up the Volume.

As it had altered nearly every aspect of daily life, the arrival of the internet triggered a huge upheaval in newsrooms across the country.

Readers suddenly had access to an unlimited stream of news, which, on the surface, was not a bad thing. You could get up-to-the-minute scores from your favorite baseball team or read in-depth reports about the latest happenings on Capitol Hill.

There were even citizen journalistsnew, free voices, unaffiliated with any news outletssharing their fresh perspectives with an online audience.

Dont get me wrong. More information for more people coming from more voices is a good thing. In fact, its a great, positive thing for a democratic society.

The problem was that digital technology gutted the economic structures that propped up legacy news outlets.

People didnt need to purchase a classified ad to sell their old mattress and box springs. They could list it for free on Craigslist. Why should a furniture store pay so much for a display ad in a weekly newspaper when it could run the ad on its own website?

Suddenly, the press, the traditional gatekeepers of the news, faced a dilemma. On one hand, the internet solved the costly distribution problem. Rather than wait for a publisher to report, write, edit, print and ship a physical product to their doorsteps, readers could access a newspapers content online.

But, although all that content was available at everybodys fingertips 24 hours a day, seven days a week, readers proved less inclined to monetarily support the news outlets or their advertisers. Sure, there were online ads and paywalls, but why pay for access to a website when you could follow a social media link that gives you a backdoor to the story or read a similar or aggregated story elsewhere for free?

And online ads? Ad blockers will keep those pesky things out of your face altogether.

The media industry, by and large, failed to act quickly enough to offset this upheaval. With media revenue streams drying up, cities that were once two-paper towns became one-paper orworseno-paper towns. Across the U.S., between 2003 and 2013, newspaper newsrooms cut their staffs by nearly one-third. Journalists, many with decades of experience, were out of work.

The second disruption occurred with the recession of 2008. Now it wasnt just newspapers that were struggling; all segments of the economy were hit. People lost their homes. Companies went out of business. Families everywhere suffered.

In that environment, two years later, when I was contemplating how much I hated my job, I had to count my blessings.

At least I had a job when many journalists did not. We owned our home. My wife worked for a government contractor, and we lived in the nearly recession-proof Washington, DC, area.

The news company that I worked for, a chain of local weeklies, was survivingbarely. Small advertisers still needed an outlet for their ads, but even those mom-and-pop shops spent less and less money.

To offset the shrinking revenue, the company cut wages and staff, stopped filling positions as people left, and even shrank the page size and page count of the papers themselves. Editions that once boasted 48 pages of local news every week now published 16 or 12 pages of content, some of which was repurposed over multiple communities.

The result of this hang-on-at-any-cost approach created an uncomfortable environment, where I was working harder than I ever had on a product with which I was becoming progressively less satisfied.

I hated it, in fact. I felt trapped.

At this point, at age 49, I did something Id never done before. I asked myself, Where do you want to be in five years?