Rivet teaches students to take part in radio revolution
By Leah Johnson
The sight of Rivet Radio isn’t much to write home about. It’s a small newsroom, so small, in fact, that you can see just about every wall from the front door without going hardly anywhere. Reporters sit in a cozy station with a popcorn machine and Mac computers where it looks like they file their stories.
There isn’t much to see, but they’re shaking some things up.
Rivet Radio is a radio broadcasting startup capitalizing on the podcast generation. Founded in 2012, Rivet’s goal is to transform the way listeners experience and access their content. The station’s app hit the market in 2013. Now, Rivet is reporting some of its highest numbers yet.
Charlie Meyerson, Rivet’s vice president of editorial and development, described them as a “scrappy, pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps” organization.
It’s that drive and tenacity that is making what they do work.
“We’re teachers. We go out into the world and learn something we didn’t know, and then we bring it back and teach it to our audience,” Meyerson added.
Sheila Soloman, formerly of the Chicago Tribune, hosted us. The switch to radio broadcasting came at just the right time, she said. Her career transition seemed to come right along with the digitalization of media. Now, with Rivet, the work she is doing is on the cusp of the podcasting bubble.
That was the consensus among everyone we spoke to at Rivet. The staff truly believes that what they are doing and the content they’re producing is changing the game. Rivet does what hasn’t been done before when they put radio news into people’s ears who weren’t listening before.
We just had been told to join the radio revolution when James VanOsdol, the vice president of Rivet’s Audio Lab, gave us a new piece of advice. What he says are the three things any journalist should take to heart throughout their career.
According to VanOsdol, the three goals that any journalist should take to heart in their career are to “go out there and kick butt, have fun and follow your passion.”