The Round Table: A YVote Podcast

The Round Table: A YVote Podcast

By YVoteNewsNews Commentary
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The Round Table: A YVote Podcast episodes

  • Maybe we need emojis for in person conversations
    Madeline shared her recommendation that people take time to understand their emotions when heading into heated conversations--which can be really hard when you’re feeling a lot of things all at once! But if we make an effort to be aware of our feelings, we can make more of an effort to really listen to another person.
    She noted how right now, we can express our feelings in so many different ways in different mediums. We’ve become “spoiled” by being able to use emojis to demonstrate a very specific way we’re feeling in a text or an email (Madeline is partial to the laughing emoji, and to the crying emoji.) But when you’re just speaking with another person, you can’t easily express what you’re feeling visually, or know what the other person is feeling--at least until some tech company figures out how to create emojis in spoken conversation, which some are probably working on right now… Until then, listening for feelings--your own and other people’s--could really help.
    1 min
  • Hard conversations are necessary
    Isaiah noted that talking with people you don’t agree with is never easy but it IS important. A first step is recognizing that you’re speaking with someone who sees things differently than you and not attacking them or being belligerent. Isaiah underscored that hard conversations ARE necessary for growth. One can’t ONLY speak with people one sees eye to eye with and if you are, that’s limiting since we learn so much by conversing with people from opposite standpoints. Isaiah cited his involvement in Next Gen Politics and YVote as providing productive contexts for expanding political awareness and understanding. As a conservative in New York City, Isaiah noted that he is often in dialogue with people who see things differently and learns a great deal through it.
    1 min
  • Building a platform that brings people together
    O ur podcast guest Jordan Soufian is fascinated by what it takes to have healthy, productive conversations online with people we don’t know
    Coming out of business school, he realized he wanted to have experience with consumer software platforms. So he helped cofounder a platform called Public Sphere, built upon the premise of matching strangers to have conversations about deep issues, grounding the dialogue in norms established at the front end, and using prompts to create common ground right away.
    This was BEFORE the pandemic but it sounds particularly appealing NOW, doesn’t it??
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    Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/nextgenpolitics/message
    1 min
  • Better Conversations with Strangers

    At this week's Round Table, Madeline, Olivia, and I spoke with Jordan Soufian, who works for a neobank startup based in NYC focused on helping Americans build a financial safety net by making saving money fun through gamification. Our conversation focused on what it takes to have healthy, productive conversations online with people we don’t know.  Unfortunately, social media often ISN’T conducive to this. Jordan was part of a startup called Public Sphere built upon the premise of matching strangers with common interests for conversations about deep issues, grounding discourse in norms established at the front end, and using prompts to create common ground. He shared his conception of conversations as a vehicle to think, to open up and connect with other people, and to stumble upon ideas and truths we wouldn’t be able to come up with on our own--a conception we share. I think we can all agree that our country and world would be a better place if we could figure out how to have better conversations across differences and divides, so we hope you’ll enjoy this conversation. Thanks for joining us!

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    Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/nextgenpolitics/message
    34 min
  • The personable charm of local radio
    Madeline spoke reverently of the “personable charm” of local coverage. She talked about the comfort of seeing a face or hearing a voice and connecting it to another human being, which doesn’t happen in the same way through an article or social media.
    She noted that if we slowed things down and took more time to pay attention to other human beings, listen to the radio, watch the local news, it could have a unifying impact and could help move our country in a very positive direction in terms of countering partisanship.
    1 min
  • Local news plays a vital role in our democracy
    John talked about the shift in our nation’s politics, which he feels is actually rooted at the local level. Although people tend to talk about what’s happening in The Senate and Congress, it’s really at the grassroots where a lot of these tectonic changes are happening. Without a press to observe and report on political parties and individuals, it doesn’t take a lot to gain undue power. It creates a dangerous breeding ground for polarization and misinformation.
    Local news doesn’t get the attention it deserves but plays a vital role in our democracy
    1 min
  • We have an incredible responsibility to get the news right
    John Davidow underscored the incredible responsibility public media has to get the story right AND to get it out to where people are. Social media helps amplify and extend radio’s ability to do that.
    He also noted that COVID is a quintessential local news story (as well as, of course, being a global news story.) People really cared what was going on and public radio leaned into being needed, doing things like creating a daily newsletter that went to 25,000 people’s homes every morning. Figuring out how to get your message out is both fun and vital.
    1 min
  • The question for public media should be “how well are we meeting the demands of the public”
    John Davidow shared his assessment of the biggest questions facing digital public media today: “How well are we meeting the demands of the public? How do our newsrooms reflect the values of our increasingly diverse audience?”
    He noted that recent years have led to a moral and ethical reckoning for leaders in journalism to grapple with questions like, “are we meeting the needs of our audiences? What biases are we bringing? Who are the voices in the newsroom who are making the editorial decisions? What has informed their lives?” While these are the challenges journalism has always faced, they are ever more pressing today
    1 min
  • Digital media is many different things
    John Davidow talked about the pros and cons of digital media, noting that it’s very broad and affects people in different ways. There are a million ways to tap into an audience and a million ways for them to be engaged. In some ways, it’s very empowering since once can listen to it when and how you want. It can be a much more layered and deeper OR it can be a quick hit, Buzzfeed Top 5 ways to do whatever. Of the many things that it can be, he notes that the most dynamic and creative and the one that’s getting the most energy now is telling stories across platforms.
    1 min
  • It’s Off to Venus
    This week we were fortunate to interview John Davidow, who has spent his career in broadcast news, until recently running digital for WBUR public radio for the last dozen years. He shared with us that there’s a phrase in television, “it’s off to Venus”: you put it in the air and it dissolves into electrons. There’s no true historical record. John noted that news is a disposable commodity--people don’t tend to go back to look at yesterday’s news. It’s good in the moment but calorically not very fulfilling.
    1 min

About The Round Table: A YVote Podcast

From the publisher's feed

The Round Table provides a platform for conversation and engagement of civically-minded young people from different parts of the country. We strive to model civil dialogue across various divides--socioeconomic, racial, ethnic, political, and regional. We aim to challenge norms and represent all kinds of diversity--especially of perspective and ideas--enabling listeners to “hear” our thinking.