#CANYOUFATHOMIT?!
November 12, 2019
Fire up the klaxon! Did you hear? We launched a podcast!
As a busy, #hivemind-ing, nimble team we are used to delivering quickly and creatively on client briefs: need an elite force to parachute in and exfiltrate the stress of your event organisation? We’re there. Need someone to pull together that mountain of papers and interviews on your desk into an impactful report or infographic? Doing it. Need a shiny new web presence, but feeling digitally confuzzled? We’re on the case.
But every now and again we spot a gap in #fishcomms landscape, have brilliant ideas, and want to deliver our own, new, projects with meaningful outcomes. The Fathom podcast is just one of those examples. I’ve blogged about #MindfullyGrown projects before – writing about the APPG on Fisheries we launched at the beginning of this year with support from the Fishmonger’s Company. This time around, the podcast idea that veteran #KeenMarine Harriet and I have been nurturing for nearly three years has been brought to life by an incredible cast of collaborators – and made all the stronger for it.
We just *knew* that there would be an audience out there for captivating audio glimpses of coastal life from around the UK. In our day-to-day work at MWC, we’re lucky enough to speak regularly with fishermen and their families – so we know the incredible stories behind fish and fishing which are drawn from whole lifetimes at sea and generational knowledge that is rich, complex and just so embedded in a sense of place and purpose. It’s difficult to describe how impactful some of our conversations with the fishing industry can be, so we’ve been dying to bring them to more people through podcasting.
Great ideas have their time. And when we found ourselves in a meeting with fisheries Animateur Extraordinaire, Chris Ranford, and the CFPO’s CEO Paul Trebilcock, discussing the masses of complex regulatory material that fishermen have to wade through to ensure their businesses are compliant with national and international rules (not to mention all the safety information and marketing data they need to digest), we came to a collective realisation: there had to be a better way.
Co-hosts Paul Trebilcock (Chief Executive of the CFPO), Chris Ranford (Fisheries Animateur) and our own Project Manager Harriet Yates-Smith on a late-night editing session.
So Fathom is designed to do two things. Firstly, to take all those complex rules and digest them, straightforwardly and through conversation, so that any listener can understand which rules apply to their fishing business, how they apply, and what they look like on the water. Think of it as a kind of ‘how to’ for things like staying safe at sea, accessing health and wellbeing resources, staying compliant with environmental rules, and so on.
Secondly: to bring coastal and fishing life to a wider audience by sharing stories from shores, fish markets, beaches, pubs and boat decks across the UK. Each story will tie in to the overall theme of the episode, and we have twelve episodes to bring you!
As an extra bonus, sometimes we’ll just be taking our podcasting mics with us to key events and recording the buzz, capturing coffee-break discussions, and pinning down experts to digest their own presentations or explain their job roles in the sector.
Fathom 1, our first episode, is one of these: we couldn’t miss the chance to take our listeners to the #FutureOfOurInshoreFisheries conference. Why? Because the future of the industry is under discussion and as many fishers as possible should hear directly how those conversations are shaping up.
We owe enormous thanks to the MMO for supporting Fathom through EMFF funding, and to the wonderful team at Seafarer’s UK who got Fathom right away, and have also generously supported season one. THANK YOU!
You can listen to Fathom 1 now here, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Click here for the series teaser.
And you can keep in touch as Fathom evolves here or drop us a line on harriet@mindfullywired.org, with ‘Fathom’ in the subject line.