Today, Blue Lab was thrilled to host Lawrence Wu and Anya Steinberg, producers of NPR's Peabody Award-winning podcast Throughline, who led an in-depth audio storytelling production workshop for lab members.
"At Blue Lab, we're experimenting with a range of media and artforms to tell hyperlocal, human-centered stories about large-scale environmental questions and crises," said Professor Allison Carruth, co-founder and PI of Blue Lab and Professor and Director of Princeton's Program in Environmental Studies. "In this first three-year phase of the lab, we've had a strong focus on audio storytelling—with our three original podcast series and several experimental pieces. With an average listenership of half a million people per episode, the hosts and producers of Throughline have cracked the code on translating important, untold histories into stories with broad appeal."
Over 2023 and 2024, Blue Lab has produced three original podcast series: Archival Ecologies (led by Jayme Collins), Carried by Water (led by Mario Soriano) and Mining for the Climate (season 1 led by Nate Otjen and Juan Manuel Rubio, season 2 led by Nate Otjen and Jessica Ng).
"In inviting Lawrence and Anya to develop and lead this new workshop," said Barron Bixler, Blue Lab co-founder and Creative Director, "we wanted our project teams, which include postdoctoral fellows and graduate and undergraduate students, to learn how a hugely successful professional podcasting team develops an episode from pitch to publication. Lawrence and Anya were fantastic. And our teams are already talking about how to incorporate their insights and refine our production process for the new seasons of our own podcasts, which we'll be working on over summer 2024."
Before beginning field reporting on the projects 2023, Blue Lab brought on Philadelphia-based Kouvenda Media to provide hands-on technical and production training to the lab's project teams.
"If we're going to swing for the fences on the reach and impact of our own projects, we want members of the lab to learn from some of the best, most innovative storytellers out there," Carruth concluded.