To listen to the podcast, click here.
On Friday, Dec. 6, Kingswood Oxford released their first ever podcast, “The Wyvern Rundown”. Two KO students, senior Ishaa Sohail and junior Madeline Arcaro, took initiative to create a new form of news in the community as the co-executive producers and directors for “The Wyvern Rundown” . “Madeline and I wanted to start a podcast because we wanted another form of spreading news on campus,” Ishaa said. “We already were a part of the KO News and this was another project that we wanted to begin.” Madeline added on to the reasoning behind starting the podcast. “After taking journalism during my freshman year, I really fell in love with journalism,” Madeline said. “I wanted to do more than just print work, which is all I had been exposed to.”
The pair eventually decided to create a podcast as their new way of participating in the spread of news at KO. “I had done some work with broadcast as well, and I really became interested in podcasts,” Madeline said. “I realized KO isn’t the place for a TV news station like lots of bigger schools have, and I thought a podcast would be much more fitting for our school.” Once the pair set upon creating a podcast, they had to decide what topics and stories they would cover. “Ishaa and I are both writers for the KO News, which is becoming increasingly serious,” Madeline said. “A lot of people have expressed that they liked (and miss) the funny articles in the paper, and we wanted to have another form of humor that isn’t in the news.”
Ishaa agreed, adding how the pair put together a staff and established their style of podcast. “We brainstormed ideas about what would be the most efficient way to go about creating a podcast, and we created a list of staff members that we thought were important,” Ishaa said. “That’s also when we created the application for the podcast and because this is still new and fresh, we’re still trying to figure out how we want the style. We love having comedic bits, but we also want to talk about important topics that are relevant today.”
Currently, “The Wyvern Rundown” intends to have a variety of different hosts for each podcast. The first ever pilot podcast was hosted by juniors Christina Lu and Emma Henry, who introduced segments like the “bruh moment of the week,” “what the heck was going on,” and “most embarrassing thing to happen at KO.”
On the next episode, co-creators Ishaa and Madeline will be the co-hosts. “The next episode will be Ishaa and I hosting, and we’re talking about the musical, and a lot of the controversies that have come along with it,” Madeline said. “We’re going to talk about it through a KO lens and what it means for us to do it, rather than a Broadway or professional production. This episode is going to take a lot more work than the first one did, and we’re taking on a lot, but I think our staff is extremely qualified, and we can definitely handle it.”
The staff hopes that in the future, “The Wyvern Rundown” will grow and have a long-lasting impact on KO. “As of right now, I am one of two seniors on the staff and I would love to see “The Wyvern Rundown” keep growing even after I graduate,” Ishaa said. “I think that this can be something really huge.”
