We recently connected with Tina Jaramillo and Hillary Dougherty and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Tina and Hillary, thanks for joining us today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

One of the most meaningful projects we’ve created with the podcast is our Li’l Muck segment. On our weekly show, we cover the mucky world of politics from murder and trafficking to bribery and money laundering. We decided we wanted to offer some positive things happening in the world of politics, which led to Li’l Muck. On Li’l Muck we highlight folks doing good things in the world. We’ve had the honor of interviewing politicians, activists, local leaders and more who have shared their experiences and efforts to make changes in our world.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your background and context?

The Muck Podcast is a weekly conversational podcast that explores the often corrupt and nefarious world of American politics. Our show explores why the stories of salacious civil servants are so provocative. Each week, we dive into the dark, seedy, and just downright weird stories in all levels of government. Our tagline “maladies, madness, mischief, and, murder in American politics” says it all. Since the beginning, we set out to tell outrageous, strange, and sometimes dark stories from the world of politics that people may have forgotten. Through witty conversation and banter, we want to make the listener feel like they’re in the room with us. But we are not a typical political podcast–there’s nothing boring about our show. There’s ranting and raving, crying and laughing–we lay all our feelings on the line each week. At the top of our show, we often chat about current stories or topics–always centered on politics, and then we each cover a story that the other hasn’t heard before. So if you’re looking for a raw, and sometimes audacious approach to political true crime, then we invite you to delve into the muck with us.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being creative in your experience?

For us, one of the most rewarding aspects of being a podcaster is the podcast community. Often, in other creative ventures, it can feel like a solo effort, but in podcasting, we have found a wealth of podcasters who have been supportive of our journey. We have been able to make connections that’s different from the written word alone. There’s a vulnerability in podcasting that not only helps us build our audience but provides us a platform to create content about a topic we are passionate about.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

We’ve been able to build our audience on social media through a multifaceted approach. We decided early on that we wanted to promote the podcast on all social media channels, and we knew that we would have to publish regularly. So we set out a plan to split the week up and offer a mix of audio, video, and written content. We create audiograms where we pull relevant sound bites to offer a teaser of the week’s upcoming episode. Our video clips are often funny moments from the show that we want to highlight, and then we pull quotes to create image graphics once our episode is live. So our best advice would be to post and to post regularly so that your followers know what to expect from you.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://themuckpodcast.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/themuckpodcast
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheMuckPodcast
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/muckpodcast
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCndsxrl-ZzJs0KHghNdlASA

Image Credits
Alfredo Olvera (for all photos except for the podcast cover art, which we designed).