I spent the summer as a production fellow for Transmitter Media, helping develop an upcoming podcast series about Fred Rogers for Fatherly, a digital news outlet. Transmitter is a woman-owned, creative podcast company; they work with clients — organizations, publishers, companies like Fatherly — to create highly designed, impactful audio content. “Finding Fred,” the series I worked on, utilizes archival tape, original music composition and over 25 interviews to explore the question, “How can we learn to be better neighbors?” over the course of 10 episodes. I functioned essentially as an associate producer, assisting our four-person team with logistical and editorial tasks — anything from booking recording studio time for the podcast’s host to tracking down and interviewing Fred Rogers’ former minister.

This opportunity came at a critical point in my career. I’d spent two years as a part-time student at the Graduate School of Journalism, balancing classes in multimedia journalism with writing positions at Bustle and Inverse. As graduation neared this spring, I realized I wanted to make the switch from print to audio — but couldn’t afford the majority of internships available. This fellowship allowed me to get a sense of how my skillset worked within an audio production space, while providing more responsibility and financial support than an internship.

By the end of my first day at Transmitter, I’d already started researching archival tape and editing audio clips in ProTools — both skills that I initially learned while at Columbia’s J-School. I’ve since created interview prep docs for the show’s host, conducted “pre-interviews” with guests, managed recording equipment in the field, organized “tape syncs” for long-distance interviews, tracked down long-lost sources and drafted episodes. I went on a reporting trip to Pittsburgh with the executive and associate producers for the show, where we taped eight interviews over a day and a half. I combed social media for people tweeting about Mister Rogers. I transcribed hours of tape. From the outset, I’ve felt prepared for any new task I’m assigned, any new quest I’m sent on, because of my J-School training. I’m writing this in the present tense because my contract at Transmitter has since been extended from 10 weeks to nearly seven months. I’ll be at Transmitter through the end of the project, when the final episode goes live in late December.

The challenges of this fellowship were challenges that any production team faces — organizing an interview between our host, who lives in California, the Transmitter team in Brooklyn, and our guests, many of whom live in Pittsburgh, is time consuming. Difficult, too, was getting used to being the third party between client and host, a social management aspect I hadn’t experienced in my previous, more traditionally journalistic roles.

But ultimately, what this experience has done is solidify, for me, why I want to continue working in audio journalism: Because there are moments, and stories, that shine brighter when you can hear them. Because audio allows for us to flex our creative muscles as well as our reporting ones. And because telling stories is how we learn, how we connect and how we grow.