How 19 Students Turned a School Podcast Into a Media Company

Season four of the podcast Students Incorporated opened this month not with a guest or a headline story, but with an org chart. Before a single interview segment airs, the International Community School of Bangkok's (ICS Bangkok) student production team read a written mission statement out loud, listed five core values, and introduced 19 students split across four working departments: the internal architecture of a media company, built by teenagers who produce a weekly show alongside their homework.

Four Departments, One Weekly Deadline

The show's on-air team rotates through the season, and this episode's four co-hosts (Esther, Proud, Josiah, and James, all seniors) introduced themselves before handing off to the rest of the operation. Behind them sits a producer, Highlight, who oversees "each episode's creation process from concepts and planning to recording, editing, and distribution," and a marketing director, Fonda, who runs the promotional calendar and events planning.

Two more teams do the less visible work. A four-person content team of Pan Mipramatana, Porsche, Dukas, and Peng researches topics and writes the questions that hosts ask on air. A three-person production support crew of Dorcas, Vijay, and Vanaj handles studio setup, equipment, and audio recording. The largest group, a six-person marketing and media team of Yein, Eunwoo, Robin, John, Xin Xin, and Yosep, builds the show's social clips, graphics, and online presence. Add it up and the roster runs to 19 students for a show now entering its third year on air, with 32 episodes planned for the season and a 100th-episode milestone approaching within the first few weeks.

The introductions leaned personal in a way department descriptions don't capture: Dorcas has never once cut their hair, Vijay collects fountain pens, and Robin roots for Manchester United without ever watching a match. None of that is in anyone's job description, but it's the texture that will presumably fill 32 episodes of banter over the season.

That is a lot of structure for a high school extracurricular. Most school podcasts and newspapers run on a faculty advisor and whoever shows up after the final bell. Students Incorporated instead assigns specific ownership over specific functions (content, production, marketing, distribution), the same division of labor a small media outlet would use, minus the payroll.

Borrowing the Vocabulary of a Real Company

The clearest sign of that ambition came when the co-hosts walked through the show's vision, mission, and values, a framework normally associated with corporate strategy decks, not classroom projects. The vision, as Proud read it, is "to empower students to become confident communicators, critical thinkers, and creative leaders by producing a podcast that connects learning with life and creates value for our community and beyond." The mission, from Esther, is narrower and more operational: "to create meaningful, real-world learning experience through collaboration, storytelling, and hands-on media production."

Josiah then ran through five stated values, each paired with a one-line behavioral definition, the same format a company handbook uses to turn an abstract word into something a person can actually be held to. On ownership: "We take initiative, act with responsibility, and deliver high-quality work." On growth: "We learn by doing, seek feedback, and improve every step of the way." On collaboration: "We work together with empathy and curiosity to achieve shared goals." On creativity: "We use our voices and ideas to explore, create, and inspire." And on integrity: "We communicate honestly, treat others with respect, and uphold high standards."

Host Mr. Jason, who founded the show three years ago, tied the framework together with an analogy that doubles as this episode's clearest thesis statement:

"I like the analogy that says vision is the destination, mission is the path, and values are what we take with us."

It's a tidy line, but it also describes something real: a group of minors choosing to govern themselves with the same three-part scaffolding that management consultants charge companies to write and post on a break-room wall.

What the Research Says About Handing Teenagers a Company to Run

That choice lines up with what employers say they actually want from young workers. The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 found that seven in ten companies name analytical thinking as an essential core skill, but collaboration, communication, and emotional intelligence run through nearly every other skill on the top-ten list, alongside resilience, flexibility, and leadership. The same report projects that 39% of the skills workers use today will change by 2030, which suggests the specific software or subject a student masters matters less than whether they've practiced coordinating with a team toward a shared deliverable, on a deadline, more than once.

That's also the case researchers have built around project-based learning for years. A 2023 meta-analysis published in Frontiers in Psychology found that project-based approaches significantly outperformed traditional lecture-based instruction on measures of academic achievement, critical thinking, and collaborative skill, and the researchers pointed to a specific mechanism: the advantage comes from students producing something real under real constraints, not from absorbing content passively. A written mission statement and a defined department structure are, in effect, the constraints. They force 19 teenagers to negotiate who owns what, on a schedule, in public, every week, rather than simply completing an assignment and turning it in.

Scholastic audio production has also been institutionalizing rapidly elsewhere, which puts what ICS Bangkok is doing in a wider context rather than treating it as an isolated experiment. NPR's Student Podcast Challenge enters its eighth year in 2026. The NYC Youth Journalism Coalition's "Journalism for All" initiative began placing curriculum, training, and funding for journalism programs into 30 New York City public high schools starting in the fall of 2025. And the nonprofit The Bell has run paid audio-reporting internships for more than 150 New York City students, publishing their work on nationally recognized podcasts. What's less common among those efforts is a program that hands its own students a written vision and values statement to run the operation by, instead of leaving governance entirely to a faculty advisor.

The mission-and-values framing also puts Students Incorporated closer to a different category of student organization than most podcasts occupy. DECA, the international career and technical student organization built around business and entrepreneurship competitions, counts more than 322,000 student members, teacher advisors, alumni, and professionals worldwide, according to the organization's own figures, with students judged on exactly the kind of structured planning, role division, and stated objectives that Students Incorporated's co-hosts read aloud on air. The difference is that DECA's version of the exercise culminates in a competition round; ICS Bangkok's version has to hold up in public, every week, for 32 episodes straight.

The Season Ahead

The team has metrics to back up the structure. Season three's short-form clips crossed 500,000 views and 30,000 likes, according to the co-hosts, numbers usually associated with a media brand's growth curve rather than a single high school class. That reach is also arriving at a moment when the format itself keeps expanding: Edison Research's most recent Podcast Consumer report puts monthly podcast reach in the U.S. at 58% of people age 12 and older, an estimated 167 million people, with roughly 130 million listening weekly. The same research found that weekly video-podcast consumption overtook audio-only listening for the first time in the second half of 2025, a shift that helps explain why a department built specifically around visual content, the show's marketing and media team, has grown into the biggest of the four.

None of that guarantees the org chart survives contact with a full season. Mission statements are easy to write and easier to forget by episode fifteen. But the show has already outlasted three prior seasons' worth of teams that presumably wrote their own version of the same document, and it's still standing at 97 episodes with a 100th on the horizon in the next few weeks. The next episode pivots hard, from organizational values to a very different subject: how artificial intelligence is starting to reshape the classroom itself.

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