Long before podcasting became a crowded media category, Christina recognized the limitations of analog tape recordings having to be hand-transcribed, then typed into a desktop computer. The jump from analog to digital began with a conversation on an airplane ride home from a film festival. She was sparked and transformed into a Tech Chick cobbling a sensibly-priced RadioShack digital recorder, a USB connection to the Mac, two lavalier microphones, and a splitter for onsite recordings—or sometimes the snowball “Blue” mic that looked a little like an alien. She figured out how to make the pieces work together. And how to make the person she was speaking with comfortable and open in conversation. Thus, the Art of Listening begot the Art of Conversation. She recorded, transferred, edited, and merged the tracks on a Mac, creating a workable two-person conversation from tools that were never necessarily designed as a podcasting system. But recording was only the beginning.
There were downloads to create, RSS feeds to build, podcast directories to navigate, and podcatchers to understand. WordPress websites were little more than blogs. CSS, Open Source, HTML code intersected the articles, writing and editing, festival highlights, and snippets of the film festival experience. The technology and terminology were still evolving. There was no well-worn podcast playbook to follow. Christina was learning the emerging ecosystem as she built it—connecting production, editing, publishing, distribution, and discovery. She was making podcasts before anyone knew what a podcast was.
That experimentation led to a New Year’s Eve show into 2006 New Year’s Day resolution and Film Festival reViews was born– an independent film podcast and editorial platform connecting audiences with filmmakers, festivals, and the world of independent cinema. It became an early expression of a larger editorial instinct: find the people with something worth saying, create the space for a meaningful conversation, and get that conversation into the hands—and ears—of an audience. This road took many twists and turns from her start as Managing Editor for Film Festival Reporter into the centric and peripheral forces of independent and art house film, filmmakers from all over the world, music in film, and new technology changing the way we make and watch the stories screened at film festivals that become an integral part of local, national and international economics.
From there came First Online With Fran, the long-running podcast hosted by Frances McGarry. Produced and edited by Christina, the series expanded that same instinct into the Arts, featuring artists, actors, advocates, educators, and extraordinary people doing meaningful work. The technology evolved. The distribution became seamless. Podcasting became an industry. The instinct remained the same.
