Short abstract:

This paper offers a case study analysis to address the dimensions through which 'Crackdown' the podcast decentralizes power in Canada's war on drugs, re-sounding the body while acting as a sonic archival site of collective reclamation through podcasting as produsage.

Long abstract:

Journalists are often confined to write between the tension of reliability and immediacy. This complex relationship between the economics of objectivity, a preference towards accessible data, the speed of reporting, and the imbalance of power that comes from the sociopolitical and historical contexts of Canadian media, demonstrates that written forms of journalism as distributed via media syndicates are rarely neutral and carry immense power over vulnerable populations. In the case of Canada’s war on drugs, ‘Crackdown’s’ counter-narrative news podcasting has become one way through which individuals have been able to share their stories, embodying facets of journalism through their extensive research, while also producing subjectivity in spaces of affective lived realities

This paper engages in a case study analysis to address the dimensions through which 'Crackdown' the podcast decentralizes power in Canada's war on drugs, re-sounding the docile body that has been constructed through syndicated news reports and policing. Simultaneously, the audio medium acts as a sonic archival site of collective reclamation, examined through the lens of produsage (Bruns, 2007). Applied to podcasting research, the educational value of produsage in its current scholarship presents knowledge sharing and collaborative production “through which [it is possible] to examine the activities and motivations of independent podcasters” (Markman & Sawyer, 2014, p.33). In the context of this paper, the analysis explores the ways in which Crackdown the podcast embodies a collaborative open-sourced audio medium defined through open participation, fluid heterarchy, unfinished artifacts, and common property and individual rewards.