Another podcast, another gold award for Siobhan McHugh.
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University of Wollongong's Honorary Associate Professor recently won her seventh gold award at the New York Radio Festival for The Greatest Menace podcast she co-produced.
The eight-part original series that investigates a 'gay prison' experiment, took out gold in the Best Social Justice Podcast category and bronze for Best Narrative Documentary Podcast and Best Serialized Podcast, during the awards announced on April 26.
Produced over three years by journalists Patrick Abboud and Simon Cunich, The Greatest Menace examines a tiny Australian town with a dark secret - that it was once home to the world's only "gay prison".
The podcast also explores Patrick's personal story of coming out as a gay man in a homophobic Arab-Australian culture.
An internationally recognised expert in podcasting, Professor McHugh, from NSW's Illawarra region, was the consulting producer on The Greatest Menace.
"My role involved a mixture of story editor and adviser on script and storytelling through sound," she said.
"For this podcast I collaborated with really strong journalists who just happen to be fairly new to the audio medium. It was my job to add that extra layer of expertise and awareness and we become more than the sum of our parts. It was a great collaborative process."
Prof McHugh said the team were delighted to have such an important and groundbreaking piece of work celebrated on an international level.
"I am incredibly proud of The Greatest Menace, and of the team who brought this horrifying story to life. It is a story of profound darkness but Patrick infuses it with such humour and heart. It is a story that must be told.
"Collaboration is fundamental to this type of project, and it was a real team effort to bring the story of The Greatest Menace into the light. I am thrilled to have had the opportunity to work alongside investigative journalists and producers of this calibre."
Prof McHugh has enjoyed plenty of success at the New York Radio Festival. In previous years she has been recognised for Gertie's Law, The Last Voyage of the Pong Su, Phoebe's Fall, Wrong Skin and Heart of Artness, among other projects.
The veteran audio journalist and storyteller said it was great being a part of podcast industry which is expected to be a $4 billion industry in the US this year.
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The former lecturer in University of Wollongong's School of the Arts, English and Media, added podcasts range from vanity projects which have two dozen listeners to huge hits like Joe Rogan with his 100 million followers and The Daily from the New York Times.
"What I really specialise in is story-telling podcasts, the ones that have high levels of craft involved," she said.
"A lot of people mistakenly think that making an audio storytelling podcast is easy because it is just audio. But it isn't, it has actually got it's own art, and it's own rules and you have to know them to do them well otherwise you will sound draggy and rambling and boring."
Prof McHugh has published extensively on audio storytelling and podcasting. Her book, The Power of Podcasting: Telling Stories Through Sound, was published earlier this year.