Students of the ‘Creative Projects Management’ programme launched their own podcast on creative management. They previously created a Telegram channel MANAGER. Yulia Moskvina and Anastasia Poddymova on how they created a new media about culture.
On the project team
The podcast team comprises part of the MANAGER Telegram channel editorial staff (Anastasia Poddymova became a host and producer, Yulia Moskvina became a writer and host, Sofia Vylekzhanina became a writer and PR manager, Yulia Vul became a sound engineer and editor), and we were also joined by our classmate Polina Zabegaeva who became our SMM manager. We are all third-year students of the ‘Creative Projects Management’ programme.
On the MANAGER Telegram channel
The Telegram channel emerged in late November of 2020. We were in our second year, and our programme manager Olga Remnyova suggested we make a student media dedicated to cultural management. Initially, there were only 9 people on the team, and at that point, all of us were second-year students, however, in 2021, we decided to expand and we started working with first and second-year students from our specialisation.
Our primary mission is to talk about creative management in an accessible yet reasonably professional way. We want to show that culture is important, promising, and quite stylish-fashionable-youthful. We would often get ideas for articles and posts when attending classes in MSSES. For example, one of our first articles was a follow-up to our meeting with Alisa Prudnikova organised for the students of our specialisation. A similar meeting with Yulia Pankratova also inspired us to write an article on cultural journalism and blogging. Last autumn, we released a long material on the cultural sites of Kolomna, which was suggested by our teacher Svetlana Zaytseva. Studying in MSSES provides us with ideas for content creation and it helps us view new cultural events from a managerial perspective.
On the origins of the podcast
We came up with an idea to create a podcast almost at the same time as we created the channel, however, we knew that we couldn’t handle developing two formats from scratch simultaneously. Our plan reached complete maturity this spring, in year three, during our ‘Producing Media Projects’ course, when we were told to choose a type of media product and work on it throughout the entire course. Sonya, Nastya, Yulya, and I instantly realised that we need to finally make the MANAGER podcast, and Polina joined us as a new colleague and SMM manager.
The main purpose of the podcast is to dispel the stereotypes about boring jobs in culture and show behind-the-scenes of cultural and creative projects both for those who are just starting their career path and for experienced cultural managers. We decided to dedicate the first episode to the project management approach we are taught in MSSES: where culture serves as a tool for resolving important social issues.
On what comes next
In the future, we plan to explore the specificities of cultural projects development in all kinds of fields - festivals, museums, galleries, etc. MSSES teachers will definitely be featured on the podcast as guests again, however, other representatives of the cultural industry will be invited as experts as well. In one of the upcoming episodes, we’ll be talking to the project manager of the “Chetverg” Foundation.
Since the podcast production turned out to be a more labour-intensive process than we expected, we’ve decided not to set overly ambitious goals: 3 new podcast episodes are planned for the summer. We resumed the publishing of textual materials in our Telegram channel, so we recommend you visit the channel and read our new articles in between the new episodes!
The idea of launching a podcast had been discussed within our team almost since the establishment of the MANAGER Telegram channel. We wanted to try this format because, unlike the textual articles, a live conversation better conveys the vibe in which we study cultural management. Our principal position is to invite guests who are experts and professionals in the field and whom we admire and enjoy listening to ourselves. Thus, the first guest of the podcast was our beloved teacher Tatyana Novosyolova: to us, her course on project management went like a breeze. I tell all my friends, who aren’t related to MSSES in any way, that the MANAGER podcast is an opportunity to “eavesdrop” on our MSSES classes and gain the knowledge, inspiration, and motivation that are shared with us every day.
There was a period of my life when I couldn’t get enough Russian, American, and Spanish podcasts on all kinds of subjects. Back then, I really wanted to try my hand at writing and hosting and figure out how the technical part works. Also, I’ve always loved listening to smart people talking, especially when they’re talking about culture and creative management. It all came together in the MANAGER podcast – we gained great experience and learned a lot in terms of production. We also launched an incredibly awesome project that raises the curtain on the creative world and gives the audience an opportunity to listen to absolutely amazing experts in the field. We really hope that this format will be not only entertaining but also truly helpful.