THUNDER BAY – According to a communications person with the City of Thunder Bay, the city’s new podcast will give residents another way to keep up to date with council.
The City of Thunder Bay launched its new podcast “The Minutes” following the first council meeting of the year last week, to provide residents with another way to access information about council meetings.
“Important decisions are made every week and we wanted to give an opportunity in sort of a digestible format, a summarized format,” said Stacey Levanen, communications supervisor with the City of Thunder Bay.
“This will help members of the community understand what decisions are being made with their tax dollars.”
The concept of a municipal government producing its own podcast to connect to residents is still fairly new, according to Levanen, who said that a lot of research went into the project leading up to the launch and will continue as the podcast gets on its feet.
“We’re going to continually analyze, collect feedback open to the public, to listeners, to let us know what they think,” Levanen said. “We also prepared with focus groups before we actually moved fully forward with this initiative."
The podcast is hosted by former CBC Radio host Jeff Walters, who now works for the city's communications department. The show is coming out every Wednesday after a council meeting, including interviews with city councillors and staff.
Levanen ensured the public that the podcast will focus on education around council decisions and not opinions.
“It’s simply going to be a recap of what happened. Here’s what happened and there’s a lot of complicated stuff that happens at council,” she said.
“So, that’s why the second part of this podcast will have a member of administration to be able to break down that complicated part for us. We don’t intend for this to be politically motivated in any way. We will be sticking to having it administration led, but, we are not providing opinion and we are not creating stories.”
You can download and listen to episodes on any podcast app.
