BEHIND THE SCENES with Radio Ambulante senior producer Martina Castro (MC) and El otro, el mismo producer Camila Segura (CS)
What inspired the creation of Radio Ambulante, who's involved, and how did you get the project off the ground
MC: The idea for Radio Ambulante came from an experience my co-founder Daniel Alarcón had when he was asked to work on a BBC radio documentary about Andean migration in Perú (that's where he's from). He loved the experience, but was bummed to hear the Spanish interviews get covered up with voiceovers in the final product; it seemed like a show should exist where those voices can be heard in their entirety, a show of the same caliber as the BBC and NPR programs hat we all love. So he and Carolina Guerrero set about bringing together a team that could create that show. That's when Annie Correal and I joined, and we brought on partner organizations like the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, KALW in San Francisco, the FNPI in Colombia, magazines Etiqueta Negra in Perú and Anfíbia in Argentina. With that network behind us, and many friends and family rooting us on, we led a successful Kickstarter campaign to pay producers from all over Latin America to help us make our pilot season of episodes
What kinds of stories are you focusing on, and where are you finding these stories
MC: We want to tell compelling, sound-rich, stories that get to the heart of how diverse the Latin American experience really is (by the way, we include the U.S. in that region – 50 million+ Spanish-speakers here makes it an honorary member!). They can be in-depth reports that take you to a time and place through sound and narrative storytelling. They can also be deeply personal, stories from all along the spectrum of what it means to suffer from the human condition. In that way we hope to highlight not only what makes us different from one another, but also what unites us. We are also trying to include a piece of fiction in each of our episodes to highlight the work of many of Latin America's brightest and most creative writers
To find these stories, we put out a call for pitches twice a year, and we get the word out about it among our network of collaborators across the continent using Twitter and Facebook (We actually, launched our second call today.
Our magazine partners also refer stories to us, so we can produce the audio version of a written story. And we're in conversations with a couple of investigative reporting organizations in the U.S. and Perú to do the same
What's unique to RA, as a Spanish language radio project (besides the obvious, the Spanish)
MC: We don't know of any other show that's producing stories of this caliber in Spanish for such a wide audience. But beyond the show, we are holding training sessions across Latin America, spreading the word about this style of culturally-relevant, intellectually stimulating, and artistic storytelling. So as we continue to get the word out about our project and hold these sessions, as well as giving talks in journalism classes and literary festivals, we're getting on radio stations and finding podcast listeners online, and in essence creating the audience for this kind of content
Who is your primary audience
MC: Being a podcast means our target audience -- very broadly -- lives anywhere Spanish is spoken. Since we've gotten hits from over 80 countries, that is a very large range, but that's where we are starting. Also, as I said earlier, we are creating the audience for this content as we go along
We hope it will be people who are hungry for this kind of entertaining and informative storytelling on the radio, but also we are finding Spanish learners and Spanish teachers are very interested in using Radio Ambulante stories in their classrooms due to the variety of accents and diversity of the content. For now, the show is only available by podcast, but we are already hearing from stations from all over Latin America – Perú, Colombia, Mexico, Costa Rica, Panamá, Argentina, Nicaragua, and the United States that want to air either segments of the show or entire episodes in the coming months