Podcasting consultancy, training and production
We’re running some one-to-one podcasting sessions to help people improve their podcasting techniques, production, voice presentation, scripting and interviewing. If you need some podcast mentoring and guidance let us help.
We’ve special rate for NGOs and charities – so if your project is in need of a mentor let us guide you.
A new audio documentary series We Only Want The Earth, produced by the Contemporary Music Centre with support from Athena Media/PodcastingIreland and funding from the Sound and Vision Scheme, CnaM, starts on RTÉ lyric fm, March 17th 6pm . The series, presented by Jonathan Grimes of the Contemporary Music Centre, explores how composers in Ireland are engaging with the climate emergency and telling that story in their work. Grimes, a keen cyclist, took to slow travel to record the series and covered over 1,000kms to chat with composers and hear about how the climate theme and concern for our shared future on the planet is flowing into their work and music. The series is produced by Jonathan Grimes and Helen Shaw – Athena Media.
“The feeling of catastrophe – it’s somewhat louder when you hear it” – Karen Power, composer.
Listen: CMCIreland · We Only Want The Earth – Audio Preview
Read : Journal of Music on We Only Want The Earth
Read: Contemporary Music Centre on We Only Want The Earth
We’re back podcasting and offering podcast mentoring, training and consultancy in 2024 after a break last year while our director Helen Shaw took time out to complete an MSc in Climate Change, Policy, Society and Media. If you’re starting a podcast, or trying to work out how you make your existing one better talk to us and book a session with Helen. Storytelling and storytelling arcs are key to good podcasting, along with sound quality and an engaging host. We’ve been making podcasts for nearly two decades and we were early innovators in podcastingi with a proven track record in audio production and award-winning audio shows. We’re working again with UCD in 2024 on their digital skills module and offering ‘The Art of Podcasting’ and ‘Storytelling Online’ for researchers. Explore our podcasts including the lovely Iceland-Ireland series Mothers Blood, Sister Songs hosted by Irish composer Linda Buckley on www.mothersbloodsistersongs.com
Begin the year by changing your story. We’re a podcasting consultancy agency.
New Year, new storytelling?
Are you thinking of starting a podcast, or do you need to reimagine your communications strategy? Why not talk to us?. Start with a bespoke one to one communications and podcasting consultancy clinic with Podcasting Ireland’s director Helen Shaw. Helen can help you connect your purpose and your storytelling and ensure you connect and engage with people. Let us help you shape the right podcasting strategy to reach your audience and help you find your voice as an audio host.
How the World Begins Again is an RTÉ lyric fm series celebrating women composers and sound artists working in Ireland, presented by singer Elizabeth Hilliard, who meets twenty women -composers and sound artists – connected to the island of Ireland. They share their stories, their inspirations, creativity, work and challenges.
Athena Media · How The World Begins Again E1 ‘A Sense of Place’
In the first episode of How The World Begins Again singer Elizabeth Hilliard meets with composers and sound artists, Jane O’Leary, Natalia Beylis and Jenn Kirby and finds out what place and belonging means to them. She discovers how meeting new people from different backgrounds inspires them in their work and how they’ve explored new beginnings in their lives and brought that into their music and soundcraft.
Athena Media · How The World Begins Again E2 ‘The Space Within’
In episode 2, Elizabeth meets with composers and sound artists, Rhona Clarke, Una Lee and Jennifer Walshe and finds out how they found the imposed solitary life that we all experienced in the pandemic. She learns how this was a time for focussed creativity and work, for discovering new ways of creating music, and it allowed time to reflect on how, as artists, we are all individuals on our own journeys.
How The World Begins Again, produced with Athena Media for RTÉ lyric fm, Fridays at 7pm – listen during the interval of The Lyric Concert, and find out more here
A new Season of The Family of Things with a chart topping episode with broadcaster/singer Ruth Smith and followed up by Berlin based musician and singer Robert John Hope.
The new season is available in all audio platforms and is being distributed to YouTube with closed captions.
It’s an independent podcast, without funding, so if you like The Family of Things do support us on Patreon.
The second new Podcast Is a brand new one with Panti Bliss, called The Panti Personals, and it’s a child of Pantisocracy, our award winning series that ran 2016-2020.
The Panti Personals is a more intimate one-to-one between Panti and a guest and first up for the launch on May 1 is music and mindfulness man ‘Bressie’ Niall Breslin.
You can subscribe to The Panti Personals via the Pantisocracy RSS feed in all podcast places including YouTube. The new podcast is being made with the kind support of Camden Recording Studios in Dublin and HappyScribe, the auto transcription tool, but we’re keenly seeking new sponsorship connections for The Panti Personals – if you’re interested contact us.
What happens when the things you’ve been planning, the projects you have been dreaming of, get postponed, cancelled or become impossible to do? In the first episode of a new season of Pantisocracy, Panti Bliss is hosting a gathering of storytelling and song, with three people who found themselves launching their beloved projects, the results of years of work, in the middle of a global pandemic and lockdown.
With her are writer Mark O’Connell, whose book ‘Notes from An Apocalypse’ – explores our obsession with the end of the world and the Indian-Irish novelist Cauvery Madhavan, whose novel ‘The Tainted’ is a love story set against the background of the Irish soldiers, serving in India with the British army, who mutinied in 1920.
Alongside them is singer/actor Lisa Lambe who will be performing from her new album ‘Juniper’ launched in lockdown, after a couple of years of work, and whose plans to perform it were postponed, cancelled and parked.
A new virtual workshop ‘Telling Your Story Online‘ has been created by Athena Media & Podcasting Ireland to help you tell stories online, using text, pictures, audio or video. This three hour virtual workshop, conducted via Zoom.us aims to enhance your understanding of digital storytelling with strong examples and case studies to give you guidance. The workshop is led by Helen Shaw and John Howard and explores elements of audio and video storytelling online and how social media is an essential part of any storytelling project online.
Find out more and contact us if you are booking for groups and we can offer a group discounts. Small discounts also available for those in receipt of social welfare payments or working for charities.
In this virtual workshop we help you find your story, create your digital storytelling strategy, identify your audience and begin to shape ways of connecting and communicating with your community, clients and audiences online.
Topics in the workshop include :
Join Helen Shaw of Athena Media in this storytelling workshop. Numbers are strictly limited and a storytelling guide with suggested tools and resources will be available to each participant at the end of the workshop.
Quarantine
by Eavan Boland
In the worst hour of the worst season
of the worst year of a whole people
a man set out from the workhouse with his wife.
He was walking — they were both walking — north.
She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up.
He lifted her and put her on his back.
He walked like that west and west and north.
Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.
In the morning they were both found dead.
Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.
But her feet were held against his breastbone.
The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.
Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.
There is no place here for the inexact
praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.
There is only time for this merciless inventory:
Their death together in the winter of 1847.
Also what they suffered. How they lived.
And what there is between a man and woman.
And in which darkness it can best be proved.
apoemforireland.rte.ie/shortlist/quarantine/
Episode 2 of Women and Words [2008] – Eavan Boland. Eavan Boland was one of Ireland’s finest poets and she is considered to be the pioneer who facilitated women’s stories, both domestic and internal, becoming part of the Irish literary tradition. Eavan shared her journey and poetry and her life now divided between Stanford, and its literary freedom, and her family home and life here in Ireland. In this feature Eavan talked about her work and shares it, while commentators, including Professor Gerardine Meaney of UCD, assess the significance of her stature as a poet and the nature of her work.
Eavan Boland died at her home in Dublin, Ireland Monday 27/04/2020
Producer Helen Shaw, Presenter Kay Sheehy
We spent last year working on mothersbloodsistersongs.com and it was invested with love, energy and what creative wit and talent we have. So our work with Linda Buckley and all of the contributing voices has been recognised with a Gold award from the New York Festivals Radio Awards !
If you’d like to catch up on the series – the two part radio documentary and the sister podcast channel are on the site and all podcast apps.
The award is the 8th Gold for Athena Media radio and podcast productions at the international festival. In 2016 Athena Media also won the overall Grand award for its Kinder Letters history documentary. Its music documentary series Vocal Chords with Iarla Ó Lionáird won a total of 3 Golds for separate episodes and 1 silver, while its previous Gold awards started with the history series Death of an Empire (2012), the history/music series Herosongs (2015) and the Irish social history series Citizens:Lockout 1913-2013 (2014), Athena Media has also won two silvers and a bronze for other productions, as well as many finalist awards across the decade.
The New York Festival Radio Awards is judged by audio and radio production peers in the global industry, previous Gold winners are invited to become part of the international jury.
Helen Shaw, Podcasting Ireland & Athena Media’s director & producer, has been an international juror since 2013, obviously jurors can not vote on their own entries and are invited to vote on entries from across the world. Over 30 countries participate in the New York Radio Festival and this year in 2020.