MEDIA INDIGENA SHIFTS TO SUMMER

Hello Friends of MEDIA INDIGENA!

With Solstice 2019 come and gone, we've been busy putting the final touches on our second-ever Summer Series. As we do, we wanted to let you know about some changes coming to the show, changes you may not even notice, but which will definitely make a difference on our end. 

These changes are based on the survey we sent out to patrons like you back in January. (The aggregate results are attached.) The survey, completed by roughly 100 respondents, was a follow-up to a message entitled “Revitalizing MEDIA INDIGENA,” the gist of which was “After 147 consecutive weeks of episodes, we are friggin’ fried.”

What the survey results told us is that patrons support our shift to a more manageable workload and schedule, which not only preserves our mental health, it ensures the program’s long-term viability. (Perhaps ironically, despite the move from three topics to one, we've averaged an episode duration of 39 minutes since we came back from hiatus 18 episodes ago.) 

In fact, the vast majority of you even supported us taking a vacation, be it for the summer and/or a week or two at Christmas. In a sense, we’ve decided to split the difference. Firstly, we’re moving from a strictly weekly schedule (52 weeks = 52 shows) to what you could call a per-month promise of four shows/month (4 shows x 12 months = 48 shows). 

Four fewer episodes a year may not seem like much, but we believe it’ll positively impact how we manage and deliver the show going forward. For one, it offers us some flexibility: for example, we may discover that in some cases delivering all of a month’s shows as a cluster could make the most sense, depending on the topic or where our ever-busy schedules place us. 

This shift to four shows a month starts now, and will include the aforementioned Summer Series, a wide-ranging curation of some of our best discussions, collected under the umbrella of larger, overarching topics. Although it’s meant busting our butts to get the series ready in time (all the while still producing original content), we’ve actually enjoyed re-visiting these older chats; it’s been interesting to hear the effect of how, woven together, these discussions build upon one another to produce a more global perspective on a topic. It’s as if the conversations themselves are in conversation, if that makes sense.  It’s also a chance for newer supporters/listeners to access content they may not have been familiar with.

Here is the line-up for our Summer Series, which will span the latter part of June as well as both July and August:

• History & Heroes
• The Media
• Science
• Reconciliation
• Christianity 
• Children and Families (Pt. 1) 
• Children and Families (Pt. 2) 
• Climate Crisis
• Self-Indigenization

In closing, I wanted to take a moment to mark how far we've come since launching back in March 2016: our show has never attracted more listenership or support. I attribute a big chunk of that to the finalizing of our current line-up—Ken, Kim, Brock, Candis and myself—which only took place some 100 episodes into things, back in March 2018. I feel our rapport as roundtablers has only deepened since that time, giving our show the feeling of a gathering of friends.

And since we're so grateful to you, the abiding friends of MEDIA INDIGENA, we thought you might enjoy the patrons-only podcast above; a compilation of check-ins on our progress at different points in our trajectory, from a mere 18 weeks in, to shortly after the 100-episode mark, to just before our unprecedented break back in mid-January.  

Take care, everyone: have a great summer and let us know what you think of our second series of summer shows! :D

Rick

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Music credits:

"Land" by Benevolent Badger (benevolentbadger.com)

"Odyssey"; "Destiny Day"; "Sincerely"; "Acid Trumpet" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com; https://filmmusic.io)

Licence: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)