Laura Ubaté:
When I came to the U.S., the first thing that impressed me was how diverse, how open, and how well-funded the podcast industry was. I come from a place where everybody loves to tell stories, but the resources for storytelling are very scarce. So I would like to start by talking a little about access: Who gets to craft audio documentaries in our regions?  

Josephine Karianjahi: Yeah, one of the biggest impacts on audio documentary has been the growth of the film industry in different parts of Africa. When you talk about the industry, a big part of its sound design comes from people who are composing for soundtracks in films, particularly in countries like Nigeria, which has birthed a huge audio industry because of the demand on the film side. The other area is the news. Entities that operate across the continent have been the ones who initially developed audio documentaries. Initially, the shows were produced outside of the continent. So you would find an entity sitting in a European country that would produce shows for Africa for example, in different languages. Then those documentaries would be commissioned from African writers and then developed somewhere in a European country or another continent and then kind of broadcast from their studios. What we are seeing now is major news entities developing audio-first programming in the form of podcasts. 

Investigative journalism has taken on that mantle of audio documentary production. And also you're finding that a lot of people are looking at converging from solutions journalism and taking that fact-based work and converting it into podcasts in documentary form. So you're looking at a canon in that realm that is best known from the US, Canada, Australia, Europe perspective. And then the other thing is that because press freedom is a huge issue in many parts of Africa, a lot of what is produced in terms of audio documentaries is considered as kind of like a safe place to produce because it goes straight into the ears of people who may be able to make decisions in other parts of the world. 

And then the last way that people are hearing audio documentaries is nature documentaries, and we're going to see many more of those. That's my prediction for, you know, kind of going forward. 

Laura: I relate to the things you described about having our stories documented from a foreign perspective. My take on Latin American audio documentaries is that our way of thinking about audio comes from reading. So we have the classic Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Leila Guerriero, like all these journalists that were traveling around the world in the ‘80s and ‘90s and writing their chronicles for media outlets from Latin America. That kind of storytelling is what we knew before podcasting boomed, right? I've seen a lot of podcasts that feed from those classics, and sometimes they can feel heavily weighted on the voice of the narrator and less on sound design or ambi. 

And then there's a tiny, tiny group that’s the audio drama that comes from the radio novelas. Like the ones back when TV was not common. These novelas on the radio became really popular, actually. When the podcasting boom came and people started thinking about audio drama, they started thinking about those novelas. It's a very old-fashioned way of doing stuff. I remember like a couple of years ago, you could go to a theater in Ciudad de Mexico and watch a radio novela live, that kind of thing. But few people do it. 

I think nowadays when you ask a lot of people in Latin America what a podcast is, they say it's just two people talking. And the reason behind that is that very few people are doing audio documentaries, and even fewer people are doing audio drama.

Josephine: Yeah, I hear that. And I think that's really important because I think the conversation about audio documentaries in Africa can get a little slim when you recognize that a lot of the new podcasts are not in the audio documentary space, they are in the interview space. And so you have really amazing creators getting in front of a mic and a camera, having a podcast mic, and having that audio only on a visual platform. There's a huge piece missing in terms of what else we can do with audio in this new and growing podcast space. I think some of the most popular podcasts are not yet narrative podcasts. There are rich stories that are not making it into that space because the folks who are doing that production know that it takes a lot of resources. You can't make ten episodes really quickly. It's a slow story. And so I wonder if there's something getting lost in that, like, early understanding that it's easy to start a podcast, and not as much of, “Hey, you have such a rich story to tell.”

Laura: Yes. You know, we are used to making and consuming content very quickly.  And there is a lot of enthusiasm too. Like, “I want to do a YouTube channel, I'm going to launch it! I'm going to do a podcast!”  There's a lot of drive and enthusiasm in Latin American culture. But audio documentaries, that slow-pacing, can serve us too, bringing a deeper understanding of our own history. 

Josephine: I think what's interesting that's happening now is that you have audio producers who are in the diaspora, so they have this dual language whereby they can speak the language of the industry, but then they also have the experience of growing up in the culture, in the context and in the language of where the subject of the story is. And I think that's really powerful because, you know, people maybe are now in a position where they can reconnect with their countries of origin.

Laura: Yeah. Those are the ones who are building this new way of doing things, trying to figure out how to deliver something that adds value to our media, and also to our own understanding of our realities. Let’s talk a little about the aesthetic of audio documentaries. Let's say that I want to do a story about a girl who lives in the Caribbean, and then I'm doing this for our audience in the US. When thinking about scoring there are two choices there, right? Either add some reggae music or, you know, something like music for the beach. Or this music that's just strings or maybe like a subtle drumming.

Josephine: Intuitively, you're just like, I know what I'm going to hear. This is something we share as well, this idea of something exotic. It's infuriating because, you know, my question is, why can't it sound like what the street sounds like on a normal day? Or the road or the side of the lake where you live? Why do we still stick to this formula? It's cringe because you hear, and you're immediately like, “Oh, I know what this story is going to be like.” 

Laura: Yeah, but then on the other hand, you have Latam producers that are like “Oh, it's a happy moment. I'm going to add some cumbia with horns and everything”. And I'm like, “No, this music is competing with your voice.” But then I stop and I think “What if I'm trying to just make it in my way when they want it to be loud, you know?” Caribbean culture is very loud. And then my take on African culture, some places are also very loud. So everything blasts, right? 

Josephine: It's a couple of things. One it's the style of the producer, right? The producer wants to kind of convey that this is happening in a background of active and energetic conversations. The music is like taking you there. But on the other hand, there are certain things that maybe silence would be a better option. Maybe it's asking the producers to listen to the tape and then record themselves listening. How do they affirm the choices they made? 

Laura: Sometimes the best decision is to come back to your protagonist and ask how their world sounds and then try to build around that. There is a Chilean podcast called Las Raras, which is really good at this. They go, they spend days with the protagonist, and then sound design with things they recorded in the field.

Josephine: It’s the experience and the context of the people who are living it. And having them hear it and say, “Oh, I know where that is, I can hear it for myself.” And so it's sort of developing an audience that appreciates those choices as well. 

Laura: For people who are producing a narrative podcast in the U.S. and have listened to this conversation let’s finish with some things to keep in mind when working on a story in Africa or Latin America. It can start with the Equality in Audio Pact, right? That principle of having someone from the region to be involved. 

Josephine: Yes. That can mean paying them the same rates that you would pay in your context. And if you are producing in a region where you don't understand well enough the security, the economic situation, the impact of your work, bring in people who have the ability to research and treat the material with sensitivity. And then ask yourself, “Who am I serving?” Like for me, that's front and center because of my background. I think it should be front and center for everybody who is producing.