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Podcasters Isabelle Roughol and Suchandrika Chakrabarti in conversation with MA Journalism Course Leader Kate de Pury
Falmouth Journalism students will get a chance to hear how two young podcasters started out and are building their brands, in an industry practitioners interview for the Falmouth Flexible MA Journalism.
MA Course Leader Kate de Pury spoke to podcaster Suchandrika Chakrabarti founder of Freelance Pod and to Isabelle Roughol who has been building a community around her new podcast Borderline, since it launched earlier in 2020.
Chakrabarti decided to strike out on her own after working in mainstream journalism at the Daily Mirror and Associated Press. She admits she was daunted at the start, thinking she didn’t have a tech brain, but pushed herself out of her comfort zone to launch Freelance Pod. Ten thousand downloads and a Lovie Award for Best Host in 2019 later, she says ‘It’s all do-able if you want something enough.’
Roughol worked at LinkedIn for seven years developing an in-house newsroom, before deciding to try something new. Her guests on Borderline embrace an international outlook discussing issues ranging from the crisis in Lebanon to the end of empire in the US, from portable work to how global citizens find an identity. Roughol loves the intimacy and considered pace of the podcast, a form which offers a different kind of journalism, she says.
And both podcasters swear by their journalism, it’s at the base of everything they do – it’s even more important to have the highest editorial standards when you are a lone operator, they say. Without the backing of a big news organisation it’s critical to get the content right.
“… we don’t have the benefit of an editor or someone to bounce ideas off, to gut check and fact check,” says Roughol, “So I am extra paranoid about checking every single fact.”
Join Falmouth Flexible's part-time, online MA Journalism to get more insights from industry practitioners on how to create compelling news content:
