Today, in between students conferences (if you haven’t done so already, sign up to meet with me now!), I’ve pulled together the text you all drafted in
class this week into what is hopefully a tighter few paragraphs of introduction for the podcast series.

Read through the text below and if you have revisions to make it more polished or flow better, jump into the Google Doc and edit the text. Post a message on Slack letting the class know that you made changes and why, just so we all stay on the same page.

Sometime this weekend, please record yourself reading the bumper text. Try to get pretty good sound quality (avoid recording with a lot of background noise going on and speak directly into your microphone) — you might use your phone to record if the microphone on your computer isn’t great.

Try to speak clearly as you read (I recommend practicing out loud once or twice before you start recording). If you make a mistake just pause for a second, then go back to the beginning of whatever sentence you stumbled on and then just keep reading.

I’ll also be in my office (Callaway N-117C) from about noon until 2:00 with my microphone, so if you’d prefer you can come by and I’ll record you.

Once you’ve got your recording, just drag the mp3 into the Google Drive folder we’re using for podcast planning. I will plan to have those all pulled together into a finished recording before class on Tuesday.

Here’s the bumper text:

Covid. Covid. Covid. That’s all we have heard for the last year and a half, and it’s what we continue to hear every single day. The pandemic has reshaped the world and irreversibly changed the lives of each of us.

This year, classes are back in-person, and things are finally transitioning back to what we used to deem as “normal” or into some sort of “new normal.” The pandemic is not over yet and we’re all still trying to understand what this all means.

However, for all that we have heard and read about these changes, we still need to rethink our narratives and reflect more deeply about our days and nights, losses and gains, tears and smiles during these times. These reflections take time and require careful sifting through our memories, thoughts, and emotions alongside study of data and expert analyses.

We think, and we hope you will too, that analyzing the stories we’re telling about the pandemic is important. Understanding the ways in which different leaders and experts are trying to persuade us to think and behave differently about or because of the pandemic will help to prepare us to face the unpredictable future ahead of us.

So welcome to the Voices through the Mask Podcast, a production by students at Emory University in David Morgen’s New Media Writing class. We may need to speak through our masks to create this podcast, but we think we’ve got useful things to say about where we’ve been and where we are headed.