20 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY FEBRUARY 27-MARCH 5, 2025 www.montereycountynow.com Listening to a podcast can feel like having a conversation. It’s a simple and accessible way to get information on a range of topics from news to literature, investigative reporting, health, science, people, the list goes on. And you can listen to them everywhere from your phone, with a podcast host joining you in the car, at the gym, or at home while cooking or making crafts. Lengths vary from a few minutes to over an hour. While podcasts seem relatively new, they’ve been around since the 1980s. Back then they were called audio blogs (they were audio recording files people could download via Really Simple Syndication or RSS feeds). Thanks to new technology, media players like the iPod, listening to audio files, and radio broadcasting, became a possibility in the 2000s. Little by little, new ways of obtaining audio information on your iPod became more popular and in 2004, Ben Hammersley from The Guardian coined the term “podcasting.” It might not seem like much since radio broadcasting has been part of everyday life for over 100 years, but it was a game-changer for consumers because it offered on-demand listening experiences without being tied to a fixed schedule. Nowadays, anyone with a microphone—researchers, journalists, conspiracy theorists, misogynists—can start a podcast. It can be as simple as using a smartphone to record in a closet (for better sound) or anywhere (audio quality may not be the best, but it’s a starting point). According to Podcast Statistics, a website that shares podcast data, as of January of this year, there are about 4.3 million podcasts and 504.9 million listeners worldwide. Of those, about one-fifth are in the United States. And many of them are right here in Monterey County. Big Sur Podcast One of the most popular destinations in California is the subject of a podcast hosted by Magnus Toren, a long-time Big Sur resident and Henry Miller Memorial Library executive director. Since launching during the pandemic in 2021 when the library was closed for events, he’s continued to explore the past, present and future of Big Sur. “The act of trying to preserve this place becomes a very important aspect of my motivation to do the podcast,” Toren says. Toren interviews locals as visitors in long, leisurely conversations, with the goal of creating an “audio archive of history of a very unique place on Earth.” Topics include the Gold Rush, sea creatures, indigenous history of the Esselen Tribe, and material from further afield, like a discussion with a New Yorker journalist who covers Russia and is passing through Big Sur. Each episode is at least an hour long. Salinas Valley Health Ask the Experts Salinas Valley Health takes its outreach one step further beyond doing in-person events. On this podcast, speakers aim to educate listeners about various health topics including mental health, HIV/AIDS, organ donation, heart disease prevention and more. The podcast started during the pandemic to keep people informed about the latest information about the virus. It later evolved and diversified. Now the host Scott Webb talks with a different expert—a physician, a nurse, a nutritionist—for each episode. Some topics are driven by upcoming events like Breast Cancer Awareness Month, others by an increase in cases of certain illnesses—think respiratory viruses during the winter—or by common questions patients are asking their doctors. The podcast is available in English and Spanish, and a different topic is dropped every week. Most episodes are under 20 minutes long. “It allows us to communicate on a number of topics to a wide audience, and in our case, in two languages,” says Claudia Otero, community outreach lead at SVH and podcast’s producer. Sidebar This legal podcast is co-hosted by Jackie Gardina, the dean and chief academic officer at the Santa Barbara and Ventura Colleges of Law, and Mitch Winick, president and dean of Monterey College of Law. They bring on subject matter experts to discuss constitutional and civil rights from different perspectives. Topics include Native American rights, reproductive health, democracy and the Supreme Court, as well as the future of legal training and the legal profession itself. Guests include authors, lawyers, activists and provide advice on how to improve public policy from a local to a global sphere. Winick is retiring after 20 years at MCL, but intends to continue with Sidebar. Arms Control Wonk Aaron Stain is president of the Foreign Policy Research Institute and Jeffrey Lewis is a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey and a researcher at MIIS’ James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. They live and breathe conversations about issues of arms control, nuclear weapons, disarmament and nonproliferation. “There are only a few ways in which you could kill every person on Earth, and nuclear weapons are one of them,” Lewis says. They came up with the idea to share their conversations with a wider audience about a decade ago. Lewis says the idea was to offer a casual conversation like the ones he will have with his friends at a bar or dinner table discussing news about new weapons, missile wars, leaked documents and more. Bonus: Lewis also hosted The Reason We’re All Still Here, a podcast he talked with experts, scientists and journalists about moments in recent history where people from different cultures and backgrounds collaborated to bring projects to fruition despite the antagonism between their nations. Arms Control Wonk is released twice a month and each episode runs about 30 minutes, featuring conversations between Stain and Lewis. SPCA Stories SPCA Monterey County launched its first podcast on Jan. 9. Host Dawn Fenton, education manager at the nonprofit, interviews people who work at different departments at SPCA about their area of specialty. “The people are the magic behind the work that we do,” Fenton says. “It was born out of that inspiration of wanting to reach out and wanting more people to find out about us and what we do, but also to get to know the people that work here.” Her plan is to eventually expand from focusing on people to programs like spay/neuter services, dog training and more. PEAS IN A POD Like podcasts anywhere, local podcasts cover a range of subject matter and styles. By Celia Jiménez To record the weekly podcast SPCA Stories, Dawn Fenton (below left) uses an improvised set-up with two microphones and a music stand where she has a series of questions to drive the conversation. Above, she is shown interviewing Angelica Prado, a community educator at SPCA Monterey County.
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