College Presidents Land a New Gig: Podcasting

As it turned out, the president’s office made for a terrible recording studio. Air conditioning whirred. The floors of the building, dedicated in 1898, creaked. And the walls were thin enough to hear noises from surrounding rooms.

So Scott L. Wyatt, Southern Utah University’s president, moved the makeshift podcast studio to a “small, junky” bedroom in a midcentury house adjacent to the campus, in Cedar City. Nobody was around. He could turn off the fan.

And, for a short while, he could have a quiet conversation with a coworker about everything from campus diversity to a degree’s value, with several hundred listeners.

Wyatt and Steven Meredith, assistant to the president for planning and effectiveness, are finishing their first year of producing a weekly higher-education podcast. They’ve covered buzzy issues like rankings and free speech on the show, which is less than a half-hour long. They’ve also started a virtual book club, discussing 1984 and The Ghost Map.

In some ways, podcasts are a natural way to expand a president’s communications. The interviews, between staff members or alumni and presidents, aren’t confrontational, and the colleges have total control of a multimedia message that in many respects appears like a traditional radio segment. They’re less expensive to produce than short videos but can capture the cadence of a voice, unlike news releases and emails.

“In higher education, we’re always struggling with communication and getting the message out and just becoming familiar with each other,” Wyatt said. “I love to write, but I think it’s a lot easier to communicate verbally than in writing. Because you can laugh, and do all of those kinds of voice inflections that add meaning that go beyond just the words.”

Other college presidents, too, are stepping into the podcast studio. Linda A. Livingstone, Baylor University’s president, has made a few appearances on its Baylor Connections podcast, which has also highlighted faculty research. Inside Mizzou will feature conversations between Alexander N. Cartwright, chancellor of the University of Missouri at Columbia, and students, faculty, staff, and alumni.

Podcasts’ rising popularity encouraged Mizzou to experiment with the medium, which is part of a weekly outreach campaign that includes email newsletters, said Gordon Sauer, the show’s creative director. Edison Research reported in April that 44 percent of people over the age of 12 had listened to a podcast, up from 18 percent in 2008.

The firm estimated that nearly 50 million people listened to a podcast in the previous week, and the mean amount of time listeners had tuned in was more than 6.5 hours.

Branding Effort

Though the first episode of Inside Mizzou, released in early August, was less than 15 minutes long, Sauer said it can take 20 to 25 hours to produce a single episode. Cartwright’s podcast will be emailed to students, faculty, and staff every other week.

That work, he said, is worthwhile to reach a major demographic of podcast listeners — 18- to 35-year-olds. About 250 people listened to the first episode, which was about anniversaries. Sauer said he hopes eventually for several thousand.

In that first episode, Cartwright and Jonathon Potochnic, a rising sophomore, answered a few easy questions about what it meant to mark their first anniversaries at the university. Their responses mixed the micro — the student’s family life, his extracurriculars — and the macro — the university’s finances. Sauer identified Potochnic by emailing department chairs and asking if they knew of any standout rising sophomores.

“Have you seen the university evolve within this first year that you’ve been here?” asked the moderator. Cartwright said that when he arrived he saw Mizzou as “optimistic for the future” but fighting declining enrollment.

“This coming fall we’ll have 4,700 students coming in,” he said. “That’s a big increase over last year. The financial situation, you know we’ve been thinking about that as a two- to three-year challenge, and we see that going away in the next couple of years.”

Mizzou officials are working to reverse an enrollment slide after racial unrest and large-scale protests roiled the Columbia campus three years ago.

Part of that effort is an attempt to more purposefully tell the story of their campus, staff members have said, and Sauer called the podcast “one more tool” to connect with listeners, on campus and off. He said it’s worth the time and expense, even with a small audience.

Decorum on the Air

Staff members at Southern Utah have to squeeze recording and editing sessions into a packed schedule. Meredith will email Wyatt at 1 a.m. or 2 a.m. after long nights of editing.

That’s a lot of effort for a medium whose audience Southern Utah had to build from zero. Wyatt said, however, that the regular recording sessions are a good change of pace from the typical day of an administrator.

Without making time, he said, “we could be caught in our office answering emails … and solving budget problems, and dealing with HR issues all day, every day.”

Meredith and Wyatt review their audience every six months, assessing how many people are listening and from where. Meredith said he expects “there would be a point” at which the audience would be too small to justify the work.

“I don’t know that number,” he added. “For the time being, I’m really proud of what we’re doing.”

Podcasts are popular with traditional-age students, but Meredith said he thinks the faculty and staff audience is wider.

In part, podcasts’ popularity stems from the banter between hosts and their guests, with deeply personal reflections, some profanities, and conversations as if between friends. Live shows draw sometimes-rowdy audiences.

But even with their recording studio moved out of the president’s office, don’t expect Wyatt or Meredith to give in to the casual vibe. In a photo captured at an early recording, both men wear suits, not T-shirts.

“My body,” the president said, “doesn’t look good in a T-shirt.”

Lindsay Ellis is a staff reporter. Follow her on Twitter @lindsayaellis, or email her at lindsay.ellis@chronicle.com.