No Time To Read - Why a podcast?

As days become month and months become year, the way of communication evolves. This is no different for the science communication. I started blogging almost 10 years back as an undergrad and wrote random things about science interesting to me back then. As I progressed through career, I became more focused and started this plant biology blog in 2015.  Over the time, I grew and developed myself along with the blog. 

Although I like communicating science through blog posts, over the years I have realized that blog is not the most popular means of communication. People do not read much blog these days. The better means of communication is audible and visual materials. From a personal point of view, lot of my hours of reading physical materials has been replaced by podcast and audio books. 

If evolution teaches us something, we should consider that if we want to survive, we need to know how to adapt. After realizing the declining popularity of  blog, I started to think to move into a new platform. I found podcast can be a great way of communicating science. Do not get me wrong, I am not leaving behind my blog. 

In the current scenario, I have decided to start a podcast. And, the idea of this podcast is to invite either a first author or corresponding author of a recently published plant biology paper. Author will describe what they discovered in this paper and some inside stories related to this work. In that case, if you tune in to the podcast episode, you will know the story or findings of the paper from a very informal discussion. I call the podcast - No Time To Read


You probably like the idea of the podcast, but wondering about the name. No, it is not inspired by recent James Bond movie, No Time To Die. Actually, the way papers are coming out everyday in several journals, it is tough for a scientist to keep up with all the recent papers. Although, we are really interested to read recent articles, but there is no time to read. Here, as simple as this. We do not have enough time to read, so we will listen the podcast, and it will help us on catching up recent articles in a way. 

I can assume the concept is great and it will help lot of us in the community. As a guest, if you appear in the podcast, you can add the link of podcast episode in your cv, next to your article. It will certainly broader your horizon during job search and undoubtedly, more people will know about your work due to the podcast. As an audience, if you subscribe to the podcast, at the end of the year you will come to know the story of 20-30 papers of this year, which is typically very difficult to catch up for a busy individual researcher after all the experiment hours in the lab. As a host, I will have lot of fun, interaction, and discussion with amazing scientists. 

Life is an experiment. Now, let us talk about the technicalities of producing a podcast. This is not a commercially produced podcast. So, the sound quality, art work, promotion, description of each episodes, and other related things will not be anywhere near to a commercial podcast. It is new for me and more precisely, an experiment. I will learn over the time how to improve sound quality and create better podcast episode. So, your support and patience are most important to me and for the success of this podcast. 

Podcast is available on Spotify, Google Podcast, Apple Podcast, and other platforms as well. If you are interested to share your story from the recently published paper, email me: arif.ashraf.opu@gmail.com

Comments

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  2. Wow, excellent post. I'd like to draft like this too - taking time and extremely hard work to make a great article. Visit all garden needs home delivery. This post has inspired me to write some posts that I am going to write soon.

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