Our Crowdfunding Groups
We are journalists who love podcasts. We drink our morning coffee listening to Michael Barbaro, the host of "The Daily" podcast from The New York Times. Our lunch hours are aligned with the airing of our favorite podcasts.
In the fall of 2018, longtime journalist and UT professor Robert Quigley hatched a plan to put our podcast-obsessed journalism students to work. Long-form narrative audio stories, like WBEZ’s “Serial” or Wondery’s “Dr. Death,” require a lot of time and effort to produce. Quigley realized that smaller news stations might not have these podcasting resources readily available. That’s where The Drag comes in.
Through partnerships with news organizations, The Drag gives top students hands-on experience in building long-form podcasts just like “Serial.” These top students collaborate with a capstone class within the Moody College that serves as our audio newsroom. The students in the class are doing the reporting and production work. They are coming up with marketing plans. The next big audio story won’t be coming from a national podcasting powerhouse. It will come from The Drag.
But our team of podcasters needs your help. We have the time and dedication to produce amazing stories, but we are running out of funding. We want to keep paying our students for their efforts. For us to keep green-lighting amazing ideas, we need equipment, travel funds and mentors. With your donation, you will give students and recent alums an opportunity to be professional audio journalists. You can help create a home in the Moody College for the best podcast storytelling in the world.
Take an exclusive look into our upcoming podcasts:
The Orange Tree:
This podcast takes us back fifteen years ago. We will tell the story of the murder of 21-year-old Jennifer Cave that shook the city of Austin. Two top University of Texas students went to prison. Three families’ lives were changed forever. In partnership with KUT, Austin’s NPR Station. Spring 2020.
American Bloodline:
Join us on a road trip through all of Interstate 35, from Laredo, Texas to Duluth, Minnesota. We tell the stories of the communities that live along the highway. We cover hard topics like immigration, segregation and drug trafficking, but we also show off Americana through the nation’s heartland. In partnership with Austin American Statesman and Gatehouse Media. Spring 2021.
Crooked Power:
In 2011, Ecuador’s president Rafael Correa had a stand-off with the police, and 20 officers were killed. In the aftermath, Correa orchestrated a media blackout and charged newspaper El Universo. The son of the newspaper’s owner tells the story of how his family fought for press freedoms — and won. In partnership with El Universo. Fall 2021.
Through Their Texas Eyes:
UT has more than 30 legendary Pulitzer-Prize winners. Each of them reported on stories that change the way we view the world. This podcast recounts the award-winning stories produced by reporters that started their careers in the classrooms that current journalism students sit in every day.
In January of 2019, we created The Drag, our audio production house. In honor of this momentous year, your donation of $20.19 keeps The Drag up and running. Please support more student experiential learning - which means outlining episode ideas on our office’s wall-sized whiteboard - and more groundbreaking audio stories.
By the time we publish our first true-crime podcast episode, we will have worked for 66 weeks. Over those weeks, we spent hours in the audio booth to record our narration and sources, and we can’t keep doing it without your support.
Our scripts for some of our podcasts are as long as a novel. We will have each been a member of The Drag for 11,088 hours by the time we release our first true-crime podcast episode. With a donation at this level, we’ll spend a few hours with you. You’ll get an exclusive invite to our launch party in the spring - and we’ll add your name to our sponsor wall on our website.
Support students journalists and their 462 days of work. There are many days to go to produce our high-end podcasts, and we make sure each day counts. We need your support to keep our number of days growing. To say thank you, we will invite you to our launch party to meet our journalists, and we’ll add your name to our silver sponsors list on our website.
When we publish our first episode in May 2020, we are going to walk 1,056 steps to our favorite coffee shop to celebrate all the time and effort we put into The Drag. Help us reach our publishing goal by donating, and we will invite you to meet our launch party. You’ll also get your name on the gold sponsors section of our website.
Every year The Drag wants to publish a new story, which means that when one podcast is published, the next one needs to be pitched. All of our student audio directors work about 25 hours a week on their podcasts. With your donation of $2500, you can help the Drag hire more student audiophiles with amazing stories to tell.
We want the Moody College of Communication to be known as the podcast hub of academia. Our students have the ideas, the voices, the editing skills and the determination to make masterful audio stories. Help us reach our $10,000 goal by donating $5,000 and making the fundraising part effortless.
