ICView Magazine

Before he founded Amplifi in 2015, Goldstein was a founding partner of Saga Communications, a publicly traded radio company in markets all over the country — including Ithaca. It was there, he said, that he started to notice a shift: radio was shrinking, and streaming platforms were growing.

“I started seeing the change in how people were consuming content, certainly on the TV side,” he said. “Watching Netflix and ‘House of Cards’ on demand is very different than watching ‘Grey's Anatomy’ at eight o'clock on Thursday night.”

Goldstein said his experiences and connections from his time at IC, particularly the college’s award-winning radio station WICB, was an excellent foundation. When he began working at WVOX, a commercial radio station in his hometown of New Rochelle, New York, several of the staff members were IC alumni.

“The ability to try things at the college radio station and the exposure to key people in the business was absolutely the essential platform for what I believe is my success and for many people who graduated around the same time,” he said.

This career path is a significant departure for Umbro, who was a writing major who wanted to pursue book publishing before he broke into podcasting. His first stint in audio was “Writers Who Don’t Write,” a podcast he created with classmate Kyle Craner ’10 that featured interviews with authors about their careers.

“I was doing it because it was a lot of fun,” Umbro said of this initial endeavor. “It was an excuse to talk to these authors who I love. But I really started to see the utility and the business appeal of it.”

He took a networking approach to creating The Podglomerate — a space for smaller creators that developed quickly. The Podglomerate executes audience growth campaigns, works with clients like the Lit Hub, Andreessen Horowitz, Expedia, and CVS, and sells ads on behalf of the shows it represents.

As Umbro’s experience shows, for current students looking to break into the audio industry, adaptability is key. As it grows, the podcast industry has new tools, publishers, and audience trends to explore every day. Information and tools that might not have been available to you just a few years ago might now be at your fingertips.

Umbro urges students to be trend-setters, rather than followers.

“My advice would be to pinpoint where you see a need in the market and spend your time there,” he said. “It's entirely about creating a community that you want to be a part of.  Be a sponge and absorb whatever you can.”

The unique concept for the show caught the attention of the mainstream media when it was named an honorable mention in NPR’s College Edition of its 2021 Student Podcast Challenge.

The 6-minute, 38-second episode tackled the origin of famous phrases, such as “Close but no cigar”  which, as Ashe explained came from mid 20th-century fairground stalls that used to give out cigars as prizes; “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush,” a proverb that, according to Ettinger, dates back to the medieval practice of falconry; and “Take with a grain of salt,” which Berger said has references back to 77 A.D., possibly in an antidote to a poison.

The origin of the podcast itself was more straightforward: it was a final project in the trio’s Topics in Media Technology course, which they worked on with two other students. After completing the project, the three of them decided to continue to produce episodes.

“It’s crazy because usually you start something and you’re trying to decide ‘Where is it going to go?’ and then it’s become bigger than we all thought it would be,” said Ashe, who is currently a production assistant for the National Football League.

And though the group dealt with challenges as the course went from in-person to virtual due to the coronavirus pandemic, they also found that, with people more isolated, their show, along with the medium in general, gained in popularity.