By the end of this studio, Olivia and I completed a first draft of a podcast on gun violence. We choose gun violence because Olivia and I realized we never hear about people dying from gang violence even if it's just five miles away. We knew that we wanted our podcast to use personal stories and raise awareness on the realities of life in “violent” neighborhoods.

With our podcast’s goal in mind, we began contacting people including Robert DeLeo, the House Speaker, True-See Allah, Tim Crellins, and other advocates. We wanted to interview ex-gang members and victims of gang violence, but no one wanted to talk about their experiences. We traveled to Dorchester District Court to interview Issa Bibbins, who introduced us to Anthony Owens, the Clerk Magistrate; their two voices shaped our entire podcast.

By the end of this studio, Olivia and I completed a first draft of a podcast on gun violence. On the first day the whole podcasting studio brainstormed a huge list of topics, but we managed to narrow it down to three: white washing, drunk driving, and gun control. Gun control is a huge topic and after presenting our ideas to the studio, Ben Snyder helped us narrow the topic down to gun violence in urban neighborhoods. We choose gun violence because Olivia and I realized we never hear about people dying from gang violence even if it's just five miles away. We knew that we wanted our podcast to use personal stories and raise awareness on the realities of life in “violent” neighborhoods.

With our podcast’s goal in mind, we began contacting people including Robert DeLeo, the House Speaker, True-See Allah, Tim Crellins, and other advocates. We wanted to interview ex-gang members and victims of gang violence, but no one wanted to talk about their experiences. Ben Snyder helped us get a hold of Issa Bibbins, who helped shape and voiced most of our podcast. On Friday, Monday, and Tuesday we researched our topic: looking at newspaper articles, statistics, and Boston’s history of gun violence. Our first interview was with Tim Crellin, the Vicar of St Stephens in the South End, where a beloved member of their congregation was shot to death. Even though the interview went well and we got alot of great information, unfortunately due to time none of it made it into the final cut. The next day, we traveled to Dorchester District Court to interview Issa Bibbins. The whole day was a wonderful experience that taught us a lot. Issa Bibbins also went out of his way to introduce us to Anthony Owens, the Clerk Magistrate, and although we improvised this interview, it gave us some of the best commentary.

Thursday was crunch time and we had to edit over 40 minutes of interviews. Olivia and I split the work, so each person went through about forty minutes of content. Next I found breaking news clips all talking about gun violence victims, ranging from school shootings to a five year old boy, to use as our introduction. We also had to record voice overs and transitions to include statistics on gun violence, like that 88% of all teen homicides are gun related.

Our overall experience was wonderful, we just wished that we had more time. We didn’t have any personal connections to our subject, so it was really hard to organize interviews since we were contacting people only a few days in advance. The editing process was also very tiring and time consuming, we had to do work outside of Nuvu to complete our podcast in time. This podcast pushed Olivia and I outside of our comfort zones with talking to grown adults over the phone, organizing interviews in advance, and traveling to Dorchester alone. We also built up more confidence and learned how to present ourselves professional.