Fall 2024 class launches Season 3 of ‘We Met U When…’ podcast

Now available for download — Season 3 of ‘We Met U When…,’ a podcast produced by final year journalism students in Shari Okeke’s JRN 801/JN8407 class.

This season, the podcast’s student producers go back in time to seek out stories from 2020, a year they said brought the world to a halt.

“There was such a big cultural shift worldwide [in 2020] and there was so much happening at the time from the pandemic to police brutality,” said fourth-year journalism student Alyssa Reid. “It gave us more room to kind of go back and be able to discuss those range of topics and to see how they've changed.”

Yanika Saluja, a fourth-year journalism student who hosts the podcast, agreed. She said so much of the news coverage in 2020 surrounded the pandemic and as a result, many other stories were overlooked. This season brought them back into the spotlight.

This year, the podcast is launching seven episodes — that’s two more than the previous seasons. The first five episodes each touch on a different topic — some which temporarily received media attention, before the cycle turned and some which were not spotlighted at all. The producers got in touch with the people behind the headlines and discovered what happened next. Students said the podcast explores the experiences of people who were in the news and reflects on journalistic practices and the duty of care we have as journalists.

“It was very impactful… to step into [these individual’s] worlds in the past and in the present and just be able to build a story out of that, and to see how journalism has also shifted in the same sense,” Reid said.

Chloe Kim, a second-year masters student, described the podcast as “public interest focused.”

The students behind Season 3 chose to cover individuals including a survivor of police violence, a powwow dancer and community worker, a trans woman who is a sex worker, a COVID-19 survivor’s second act after he was in a coma and a finale episode which documented a microaggression producer Chloe Kim faced during an interview for the podcast.

Kim became the focal point of the season finale after she faced a microaggression from an interviewee. She said producing her episode, “The Call,” was an emotional process. She said the support of her classmates and Professor Okeke helped her bring an important story about microaggressions to light — and create an episode she is proud of.

Gabrielle McMann is mixed Ojbwe from the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation. She's a fourth-year journalism student and she co-produced the second episode, “Let’s Meet at the Powwow.” The episode highlights an Algonquin woman, Isabelle Bailey, who wrote a feature about dancing at powwows to raise people’s spirits when Indigenous communities were not able to gather due to 2020’s lockdown restrictions. McMann and Bailey find out how their stories intertwine in the episode.

“I knew I wanted to do an Indigenous-based story and I wanted it to be positive and have this element of joy to it,” McMann said. “I wanted people to have a smile on their face but also shed a few tears.”

The audience response to the latest season of the podcast has been filled with awe at the effort of the young journalists who created it.

“I showed it to my family and friends and they were like, ‘oh my God, this is so good.’ A couple of them even started crying and I was like, ‘okay, so that means that we actually did something,’” Saluja said.

Season 3 of ‘We Met U When…’ is also releasing two bonus episodes for its listeners. One highlights the experiences of four students who attended the RESONATE Podcast Festival 2024, on a trip funded by The Creative School, the Journalism Research Centre and the School of Journalism. The other takes listeners behind the scenes of the production. (external link) 

“I think the point for [Bonus Episode 2] was just to give ‘an inside the producer's life’ [perspective] because it does take a toll on you,” Saluja said. “You're eating, breathing, sleeping this specific story for three to four months.”

The students behind Season 3 will celebrate the podcast launch with a class listening party and they look forward to seeing their production teams again.

“I'm really proud not just of the episode that I was in, but of the fact that collectively, as a class, we went from having zero material to something that we're all super proud of,” Kim said.

She said the use of audio to tell hard-hitting and well-researched stories is important — and the ‘We Met U When…’ producers understood this responsibility.

“If this audio space is going to become more popular… there should be a space that listeners can trust for journalism,” she said.

The students of JRN 801/JN8407 emphasized the role of their professor, Shari Okeke, in creating the effective newsroom environment which made the podcast possible.

“Shari does really amazing work with her students and we couldn’t do it without her,” McMann said.

For future students who will produce the future seasons of ‘We Met U When…’, Reid had parting advice:

“[The project] does feel a little bit full time, but trust that it’s so rewarding at the end of the day.”

You can find the latest season of ‘We Met U When…’ on Apple Podcasts (external link)  or JRN Radio.