SoundCloud Voices

SoundCloud Voices

SoundCloud Voices is a weekly Community feature focusing on new spoken word creators found on SoundCloud. It might be a podcast, radio show, audio book, interview, audio messages, a poem, anything! Keep an eye out every Thursday for a new post.

 

 This week we’ve invited Mr Jaime Black to share his thoughts and ideas about using SoundCloud for journalism. Jaime is a journalist based out of Chicago who runs Dynasty Podcast, Chicago’s original music and nightlife culture podcast network.

 

I signed up for SoundCloud in fall of 2010, and I couldn’t have predicted how prominently the site and service would figure into the scope of my digital journalism strategy and execution. Now, in almost 2013, my SoundCloud content has landed me in the New York Times, built a gathering of nearly 44,000 followers, and been heard in over 150 countries worldwide.

Some background on myself: I’ve been in the music and entertainment industries for the last 15 years, predominantly in radio/broadcast and journalism, both in print and on the web. Additionally, I started podcasting seven years ago, launching Dynasty Podcasts, a music and culture interview-based digital network. When I began using SoundCloud for my Dynasty podcasts content, the platform was still predominantly used for and occupied by music. Now, there are journalists, radio stations, podcasters, and other spoken word broadcasters using SoundCloud for their radio shows, interviews, and other journalistic content. But overall, it’s still an emerging, expanding, and evolving portion of the SoundCloud community as a whole.

Just speaking for myself, as an early adapter of SoundCloud for podcast and journalistic content, I’ve seen a number of remarkable advantages and opportunities come from sharing my
spoken sounds. For one thing, as great as text interviews are, tone and delivery can be lost in translation. There’s something about hearing an interview that adds an extra dimension to the
experience and understanding of the discussion. It adds a connection and relationship between the speakers and the listeners.

There’s also the advantage of an expanded range. SoundCloud files can be embedded on web pages, posting platforms like WordPress and Tumblr, and social sites like Facebook and Twitter. That gives spoken content the opportunity to be distributed and even go viral in a way that words can’t. Sure, text content can be copied and pasted – but a SoundCloud file can easily and predominantly be embedded in and displayed on a site, making that content that much more instantly identifiable.

Beyond embedding, SoundCloud content lives as part of a community, at SoundCloud.com and beyond, in groups, meetups, and more. My podcasts, for example, have been heard in over 150 countries, just through SoundCloud. With the majority of my programming hyper-local to Chicago, that brings my local-focused content to listeners from Guam to Sri Lanka, Egypt to Senegal (where, believe it or not, most of my downloads come from, after the US).

At this point in my career, I capture almost all of my content – be it podcast, panel, live
broadcast, or speaking appearance – and post it to my SoundCloud account. It makes my content and sounds social and accessible. And if I can bring my programming to a wider and
more global audience in a new and emerging way, well, that sounds good to me.

If you are interested in trying out SoundCloud as a spoken word podcast platform, you can sign up for via this form. Successful candidates will be emailed with further details.
https://blog.soundcloud.com/2012/11/15/soundcloud-voices-53/
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