By, Balqis Radzi & Qistina Azreen
GOMBAK, 27 May 2025: The first day of Communication Festival 2025 started successfully with a podcast session as one of the exciting sessions of the event. The podcast titled, ‘Broadcasters in the Age of Social Media’ was presented to Communication students through IIUMTV’s LIVE YouTube channel. The session was held from 10.00 a.m. – 11.20 a.m. at the Multimedia Lab, Human Sciences Building, International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM).
The co-founder of EDUCED Production Works Sdn Bhd, Muhaimin Yussof and co-publisher of Travellah.my, Shahriza Shamhiri were invited as the speakers of the engaging podcast. It was hosted by Nathira Aina as she introduced the guests and the overview of the podcast. The podcast revealed on how the professional media practitioners broadcast in today’s social media.
The evolution of broadcasting is totally different from the previous decades. Muhaimin expressed his opinion with an analogy. He stated that during his years, everything should be long and comprehensive. Everything needs to be explained and have its credible sources.
When he needs to do a shorter corporate video for his IIUM clients, he argued that it is not possible to do a 21-minute duration for a corporate video. He was against it because 21 faculties with only one minute for each faculty is not enough. To differ with today, people will say that 21 minutes is too long for a video. The attention span for each person is different especially for today’s generation.
From radio to television and to digital media, the broadcasting platform has evolved into streaming. Both Muhaimin and Shahriza agreed that there is a difference between the past and present’s broadcasting. Shahriza asserted that broadcast was only radio and television during his study years. Now, internet television can use YouTube as one of its applications.
“You no longer have to wait for a certain time. Broadcasting is no longer scheduled, broadcasting can be done any time,” said Shahriza.
One of the highlights regarding the usage of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in today’s digital age. Shahriza said that the role of AI literally helps him to do his job as AI can easily understand what he wants for his articles. He just needs to provide his previous article so that AI can copy his style of writing. He also said that there is nothing wrong with it even though it seems like it is a cheat code because AI has benefits like it saves a lot of time.
Nevertheless, he reminds all of us that at the end, AI is used in content creation only for efficiency purposes, and human editing and authenticity remain important because AI would never get the whole thing right.
The two guests gave some advice to those who love to join the broadcasting field, which was to go for it and not give up easily, but they advised that the field that new broadcasters will be playing in is totally different from what they were imagining, as it is not going to be just broadcasting but also social media. They also emphasized that never say no to learning opportunities that come to students, as it is the way to make yourself relevant up until this day.***
