News & Updates

A page for the chronically curious

Hey listeners,

We have been successful in getting a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada that will partially cover the production of Rural Routes over the next year. The funding allowed us to hire Sarah Cook, a communications student at Memorial University of Newfoundland. Sarah will be occasionally co-hosting the show with me, working on a couple of exciting stories on her own and we will co-produce a couple of episodes together. Sarah will also promote the show to community and campus radio stations across the country.

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Preparing for an interview with Ivan Emke for Episode 3 or Rural Routes.

Happy New 2016!

A few things happened. We are still on schedule to launch on March 3, 2016. I also decided to try again to do this as a semi academic project and a part of my job as the manager of knowledge mobilization for the Leslie Harris Centre of Regional Policy and Development. We are going to submit our funding application tomorrow and if that works there will be no need at all for a crowdfunding component. If it doesn’t work, I am still going to launch on March 3 and we’ll figure out the rest as we go along.

Episode 0.4 is coming this week so stay tuned.

Talk soon

A quick technical and social media update.

After some consideration, I decided to host the podcast on SoundCloud. It was easy to set up and it plays well with the Podcaster theme which powers this site. SoundCloud also allowed for an easy integration with the iTunes. As of now, you can subscribe to the podcast either through SoundCloud, through iTunes, or through the RSS feed. The Facebook page will go live closer to the launch date of March 3, 2106. As for twitter account, follow me @bojanfurst. Twitter is about real people having real conversations so having a “corporate” account seemed silly. You can also email me and all of it is accessible either at the top of the front page or at the bottom of every page. If you like what you hear and see, you can support me through Patreon.com.

Over the coming weeks, I will keep posting super-short episodes introducing you to some of the people behind the scenes who contributed their creativity and insight so far. It’s also going to be a great way to test some new equipment and various recording set-ups.

Talk soon

A bit of a milestone today. I have completed a fundraising page on the Patreon.com – a platform dedicated to helping people sustain projects such as Rural Routes Podcasts. Patreon is different from other crowdfunding platforms because it allows for monthly subscriptions as low as $1 a month, which provides a steady, long-term support to projects such as this one. Fronting the initial costs for a project like this is a one time cost and it is manageable. It is the continuing cost of creating high-quality content that is difficult to sustain.

At this point, I will not be promoting the fundraising page although it is fully operational (so by all means, feel free to contribute a $1 and test it out). Over the next two months, I plan to develop a bank of content so that I can comfortably launch Episode 1 on March 3, 2016 and continue to publish every Thursday of the week. In the meantime, watch this space for the updates on the project and a couple of few short test pre-episodes as we come closer to the launch date.

Welcome to Rural Routes Podcasts.

RRP is a new venture for me and I hope one you will love as much as I do. Heck, maybe you will love it so much that you will decide to support it.

Rural Routes Podcast (or RRP for short otherwise I’ll develop a carpal tunnel syndrome from typing it) will provide listeners with a weekly podcast featuring an interview with somebody who has something to say about what it means to live rural in the 21st century. I am planning to talk to academic researchers, farmers, artists, entrepreneurs and fishermen. You will hear stories from across Canada and maybe even a bit further afield. We’ll tackle everything from what it’s like to live on a small, rural island, to what are alternative models of financing available to rural communities.

I suspect it’s going to be an occasionally bumpy and always an amazing ride.

Stay tuned!