The show was inspired by a reporting trip novelist Daniel Alarcón made to his native Peru on assignment for the BBC. While investigating migration there, Alarcón travelled across the country recording personal stories from a wide range of people. But when he later heard the final mix, he was disappointed that the producers had largely highlighted the English speakers he talked to, leaving out much of the compelling material in Spanish. He wondered what the result would be if there was a place where Spanish-language voices could be heard.

In 2012, with the help of a successful Kickstarter campaign, Radio Ambulante was born. Programs have featured a transgender Nicaraguan woman living with her wife in San Francisco, a Peruvian stowaway describing his frightening journey to New York, and an Argentine who was jailed during that country’s dictatorship and given the choice to either work or to die. “Ambulante” can mean traveling or itinerant but also refers to “ambulantes”: street vendors who sell all kinds of wares in many Latin American cities.

While Radio Ambulante has a growing list of terrestrial stations that carry it, the show is largely distributed digitally. In early October, Radio Ambulante was awarded the Gabriel García Márquez Journalism Award in the innovation category. onMedia put a few questions to Radio Ambulante’s co-founder and executive director, Carolina Guerrero, about how the show’s format has been received in Latin America and where the show wants to go to from here.  

Carolina Guerrero (photo: Radio Ambulante)

onMedia: It’s been said that Radio Ambulante’s goal was to produce long-form audio stories, a format that largely didn’t exist on Spanish-language radio. Is it too simplistic to say you wanted stories along the lines of the popular and critically acclaimed US radio program “This American Life”, but in Spanish?

Carolina Guerrero: We are huge fans of This American Life, and that program was certainly one of the inspirations for Radio Ambulante, but we’ve created our own style, and our content is different too. Some people have called us, “This Latin American Life”, which is very flattering, but we hope our listeners now see the complexity of having created a transnational podcast in a different language, and how Radio Ambulante is still a unique podcast.

How has this new form been received in Spanish-speaking countries and communities across the Americas?

We are thrilled with the positive response we have received from our listeners. Our audience keeps growing, as more Spanish-speakers learn about podcasting and audio storytelling. Obviously, it has taken time for us to build an audience, since radio in Latin America has been mostly used to listen to music or news, and Radio Ambulante’s stories are long-narrative pieces that require time and concentration. We have around 100,000 monthly listeners, and 84 percent of those listeners are between 18 and 45 years old – 45 percent of them are in Latin America. Young Spanish-speakers are digitally savvy and interested in podcasting and in these new forms of audio storytelling.

Your audience target area is enormous. How can you be sure that all your listeners can relate to the stories you produce? Are you worried the cultural differences are too large?

Our target area is enormous since the number of Spanish-speaking people in the world is almost 400 million – but of course we don’t need to reach all of them to be successful! We hope to reach as many as we can with quality, well-reported, impeccably produced stories. That’s universal. Everyone loves a good story. And so, yes, there are cultural differences among Spanish speakers, but we believe that our stories are capable of moving audiences anywhere Spanish is spoken.

How have you found your producers over such a large area? How big is your network of contributors now?

At the very beginning we reached out to journalist friends from Latin America to find stories, and a few months later we opened a Call for Pitches that brought us many more stories from independent radio producers in the US as well. It’s the kind of thing that becomes easier as time goes on: now we have a body of work that we can point potential contributors to and people come to us with great ideas all the time. During the last two years, we’ve seen our network of producers and contributors grow and expand all over South, Central and North America, and some other countries in Europe or Asia.

Novelist and Radio Ambulante Co-Founder Daniel Alarcón (photo: flickr/Esther Vargas CC:BY-SA)

The Gabriel García Márquez prize committee praised the collaborative nature of the project, saying its strong journalistic guidelines had given the stories a distinctive voice. Is there a common sound that you’re after?

The common sound we are after is that of great storytelling. Our editors work closely with our producers for long periods of time and we have a very distinctive format where, most of the time, we have a narrator alternate with the characters telling the story. That gives the stories a dynamism that we are always looking for since listening to the same person speak for a long period of time could be boring. We try to find a balance in the way we tell the story. Ambient sound, music and sound effects are also key elements.

The committee also pointed to the economic model of Radio Ambulante. I know you got Kickstarter money at the beginning. How are you financed now? Do listener contributions make up a significant percentage of that?

We still receive support from our listeners, and expect to launch another Kickstarter campaign early next year. But most of our funding comes from different foundations in the United States. We’re also starting to get underwriting and hope to find a few sponsors now that our audience is much bigger.

You have several methods of distribution – broadcast on radio stations, your internet site, SoundCloud, etc. Which is the most popular?

SoundCloud is the platform where we upload our content, and from there it is distributed to other platforms. So every time someone listens to our story on our website, via iTunes or via Stitcher, they actually listen to us in SoundCloud. We receive specific stats and metrics from them. But we also have a partnership with BBC Mundo, and they have their own platform and analytics, but bring half of the listeners to most of our episodes as well. We are also growing in terrestrial radio stations around Latin America. In essence, however, we’re a digital project. From reporting to production to distribution, we rely on the most current digital tools to do our work. Our very nature is transnational. So without them, we could not exist.

You’ve experimented with different formats, including live shows, multimedia and English-language specials. Are there other ways you are looking at to expand your audience and interact with your listeners?

We are always looking for new ways to grow our audience and engage our listeners. Earlier this year we launched an interview series in English with PRI (Public Radio International) called Radio Ambulante: Unscripted, where Executive Producer Daniel Alarcón interviews Latino and Latin American artists, thinkers and innovators. With this series we hope to reach those listeners who are interested in topics related to Latino and Latin American art and innovation, but who might not have the Spanish-language skills to access that information through Spanish-language media.

We also hope to expand our presence on the radio dial by distributing our content to more terrestrial radio stations in the US and Latin America. KALW, the local public radio station from the San Francisco Bay Area, just starting broadcasting our content in Spanish – which is huge! We’d love to see more radio stations around the country follow KALW’s bold move. Live shows are a big part of our mission, too. We have the forth one coming up in San Francisco, and we know it will be a success. It’s all part of our mission to bring diverse, complicated, moving stories from Latin America to the audiences that crave them. With that goal in mind, we’re willing to try every avenue available.

Interview conducted by Kyle James

How can journalists use Meograph?
Meograph is particularly good for presenting news stories where a sequence of events unfold over time, such as the Boston Marathon bombings. The inbuilt mapping feature means it is also great for telling complex stories stories where events are spread across many regions or countries – think of the Arab Spring.

Created by Molly Hepworth in 2013

Importantly for those who are just starting to create multimedia content, Meograph doesn’t require any coding skills or skills in multimedia production. This is one reason why many journalism schools are using Meograph as a digital storytelling tool.

How exactly do I create a multimedia story with Meograph?

You need to create an account on the Meograph site (you can also log in with your Facebook, Twitter or Google account).

You then give your meograph a title and start by clicking on ‘add a moment’ – you can think of a moment as similar to a scene in a film or slideshow.

Here’s a list of the elements you can include in any one moment:

Video – Meograph only integrates YouTube videos unfortunately. You can either search for a video from the Meograph interface, or put directly paste in the URL of the YouTube video you wish to use. What is great is it’s possible to use only a portion of a video, you don’t have to add the whole thing. It’s easy; just insert the start and end time of the bit you want to use.

Audio – you can directly record up to 20 seconds straight from your computer or else import a mp3 of your own. I found when I directly recordered into the meograph, the quality was terrible, but the fault might lie with my computer. It’s important to note that when you upload audio or narration to an individual ‘moment’, the narration only plays for that segment. If you wish your narration to run across all of the moments, then you should upload it as a music track instead (see below).

Music – you can automatically upload a music track or a narration for the entire report.

Photos – you can reposition the photos in the Meograph viewer and also zoom in and out – which is great because it means you don’t have to fiddle cropping your image beforehand.

Text – add any photo captions or explanatory text you need.

Locations – you can put in a location that is then shown on a Google map that appears behind your image or video.

Time – you can add dates and times to turn Meograph into a timeline if you want to.

Links – you can add clickable links to any online content.

You can add as many moments as you wish, and if you decide to change the order of the moments at a later date, you can move them around.

What else should I know about creating a Meograph?

I put together the following Meograph on Endangered Eels in a couple of minutes. I cut out the first minute of a radio story I did a while back, uploaded some random eel photos I took while I was out reporting and found a YouTube video to add. I did this to see if Meograph is as easy to use as everyone says. It is.

But just because the Meograph tool is simple to use, doesn’t mean my Meograph about eels is any good – it isn’t. It’s terrible. Regardless of how straightforward the tool, creating good multimedia stories takes time. You need to carefully plan how you are going to construct your story, find or shoot the images or video you need, write your narration and add appropriate text that doesn’t distract from the narration.

Other information

Cost: Free

Publishing: Once you have put together a Meograph, it is a snap to embed in a website in the same way you embed a YouTube video. You can also share you Meograph on social media.

Support: There’s a chat box at the bottom for support. I sent them a message while I was creating my Meograph but didn’t get an answer. You can also try contacting them on Twitter.

Languages: English

Written by Kate Hairsine

There are plenty of Internet tools to help you create a timeline, but one tool that is popular with media organizations is TimelineJS.

What is TimelineJS?

TimelineJS (Java Script) lets you easily link to different multimedia sources. So as well as text, you can include videos from YouTube and Vimeo, audio from SoundCloud, photos from Flickr, Tweets, Googlemaps and Wikipedia entries and more. Scribd is also useful for including text documents.

Other media are regularly added so check with the TimelineJS website to see what else they support.

As a result, TimelineJS makes it easy to visually show events and the interactivity means users can explore further if they want to.

How can journalists use TimelineJS?

Timelines can be used to show the chronology of any event, from the history of the struggle for Apartheid in South Africa to post-election violence in Kenya. To give you an idea of what it is all about, I created a short timeline showing the first West African countries to gain independence.

As you can see in our example, the slides incorporate video, audio, photos, Wikipedia entries and a Tweet.

If you or your media organization follow a story over a period of time, you can also use your own text, photos, audio and video linked together in a timeline.

While there are no limitations on what you can use the tool for, as it says on its website, TimelineJS is best used with short texts and “strong chronological narratives. It doesn’t work well for stories that need to jump around in the timeline”.

Several news organizations have used the tool to present information about murder or missing people cases that are otherwise overwhelming in detail. For example, the small Salt Lake Tribune did a great job of putting together an interactive timeline about the disappearance of American women Susan Powell. Compare it with a text version.

The Knight Lab have a list of examples of how journalists and news organizations have been using the tool.

Here are also other examples from TimelineJS (not necessarily journalistic ones).

How can I create a timeline?

It’s very easy to make a timeline with the Google spreadsheet template provided by TimelineJS. If you don’t already have a Google account, you will need to sign up for the service (you can do this with any email).

You fill in the spreadsheet with your dates, text and links.

IMPORTANT – I originally had some problems getting the dates to work in the spreadsheet. This is because they have changed how the dates are read by the TimelineJS tool. All you need to do is click on the A column, then open the Format menu → Number →Plain Text.

You can see the spreadsheet I used to create the West Africa Independence timeline here.

More details are on the TimelineJS site or watch the tutorial below.

What else should journalists know about TimelineJS?

Cost: The software is free.

Support: There’s an excellent TimelineJS google discussion group where you can get help and support.

Languages: The software is currently available in 41 languages, including French, Portuguese, Afrikaans and Arabic. Click on the ‘More Options’ button in Step 3 to get to the language options.

WordPress: There is a WordPress plugin available.

TimelineJS was developed by Zach Wise, a photojournalist and multimedia producer who is currently an associate professor of journalism at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Wise is also a former staff member of the New York Times multimedia team.

Author: Kate Hairsine

A multimedia storytelling tool. But Cowbird strips things back to present stories in a straightforward way. Think simple: text, photographs, and audio. The story is the focus – as it should be.

How can journalists use Cowbird?

In its most basic form you can use Cowbird to produce a text story complemented by a strong photograph – or maybe that might be the other way round for you. When you click on a story thumbnail, the photograph loads first and you can move your cursor down to reveal more of the image. That also gives users a cue that Cowbird stories are interactive, albeit on a very basic level. Simple navigation buttons << < x > >> let you move to the text part of the story. Click through to the example photo-text story we produced below to see this in action.

The stories can be tagged with keywords; you can press “Love” to show you like a story; and, you can explore the “Connections” function to discover stories other people have created that might be related to your topic.

Cowbird also allows you to add an audio clip (mp3). Again, the user experience is very straightforward. Press the play icon and the audio begins. So you could present a story with text, photographs and audio or just photographs and audio.

Cowbird presents itself as a storytelling community and also has collaborated with media organizations for larger projects. This is interesting because Cowbird then offers a creative digital space where your audience can also tell their stories in their own words.

The Pine Ridge Community Storytelling Project with National Geographic shows how this tool can produce rich multimedia content and a good way of presenting a collection of stories.

National Public Radio’s youth program Radio Diaries is also working with Cowbird collecting stories from young people in their Teens Saga project.

What else do journalists need to know about Cowbird?

Costs: Cowbird is a free, but if you want more storytelling options you should look at upgrading to Citizen membership for US$5.00 per month.

Email content: You can also create a story by email – similar to blogs. Cowbird generates an individual address for each user and you simply email the photo, text and audio. This could be a useful option if you’re on the road or in low bandwidth regions.

Sharing and embedding stories: Cowbird has recently changed its share settings to allow you to embed stories on a website or blog. Cue applause! This was a feature we thought was lacking from Cowbird and made it less attractive for media outlets and bloggers. You can also share your stories through Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and Pinterest. On Tumblr it only shares the link, not a story thumbnail image. This is not so visually appealing, especially if you have a very good photograph, so better to use the embed code.

Languages: At the moment Cowbird is only available with an English user interface. Cowbird say they have no immediate plans to offer other languages. You can of course produce your stories in different languages.

Do let us know if you are using Cowbird in an innovative way for storytelling.

Author: Guy Degen

Mathews Nthala: "A lot of potential in Africa"

Being part of the African Stories workshop in Cape Town, I was most excited about meeting fellow young journalists from all over Southern Africa. The first thing I noticed was that we have a lot in common. They, as journalists, want their voices to be heard and they are eager to tell their own stories. But even more so, they want to show the world who they are as Africans – and not leave that to media outlets outside of Africa, which in their view, often present a one-sided image of the continent.

“Western journalists often only concentrate on one area like poverty,” said Mathews Nthala, editor at MUVI TV in Zambia. “In this workshop, we are given the opportunity to show that there is a lot of potential in Africa. Many people are doing well in terms of entrepreneurship and self-empowerment. An African led empowerment, that to me sums up what African Stories is about.”

Watch what other participants had to say :

Participants also told me they don’t want to ignore that many people suffer from poverty, war and corruption, but that it’s time to tell positive stories as well – stories about Africans who are doing well despite difficult circumstances.

“Three quarters of the continent are heading in the direction of development,” Mathews explained. “South Africa is a good example of that. We as Africans have to stand as one, with one voice, and get to understand each other on how we can improve things.”

Points that often came up in discussion about Africa included:

– Africa has a lot of potential in terms of its people and natural resources;

– Africans must work together more closely for the benefit of all African countries;

– Africa needs smart leadership that puts the people’s interest first.

It’s these messages that the participants want to get across in their African Stories. Besides their passion for storytelling, what really impressed me was their team spirit. The local South African team was always ready to help the other teams find an interesting story or offer advice on who best to speak to.

At the end of the workshop, many said it would have a lasting impact on how they will produce stories in the future. For instance, going into the editing room before writing a fully developed script and in that way trusting the pictures to tell the story was a real eye-opener. “At first, I was sceptical because we have a different way of working at home, but we’re extremely happy with the result”, said Anna-Etuhole Nicodemus, Senior Producer at NBC in Namibia.

What all four African Stories from the Cape Town workshop have in common is their positive outlook. These short TV feature stories show how ordinary South Africans are managing, despite all odds, to make a better life for themselves.

Team Zambia: Training the Blind

Do people with disabilities always depend on the help of others or not? Pennipher Sikainda, Alister Sibbuku and Mathews Nthala from Zambia were interested in exactly that question. How does society integrate people with disabilities and what challenges do they themselves face? For their African Story, Team Zambia followed a day in the life of Sedick Jordan, Awareness Officer at the Cape Town Society for the Blind.

Team Namibia: Memory Boxes

Africa and HIV/AIDS cannot be separated from one another. Of all continents, Africa is the worst hit by the epidemic. Like anyone else, people with HIV/AIDS want to be remembered by their friends and family the way they were. Anna-Etuhole Nicodemus, Nashilongo Gervasius and Hinsley Mwashekele from Namibia found an organization that helps people by providing them with so-called ‘memory boxes’.

Team Malawi: Grandmothers Against Poverty and AIDS

In 2001, Grandmothers Against Poverty and Aids (GAPA) was started as a self-help organization in Khayelitsha, a big township outside Cape Town. All over South Africa grandmothers are holding together families affected by HIV and AIDS. At GAPA they learn how to overcome the devastating effects on their family through practical and business skills. But they also find what many of them have lost along the way: hope. Rebbeca Phwitiko, Dennis Nliwasa and Richard Chilenje Khoviwa from Malavi visited GAPA grandmothers.

Team South Africa: Growing Organic Food

When Christina Kaba moved to Cape Town almost 30 years ago, she couldn’t find a job. Since she was raised on a farm, she decided to use her skill – and grow her own vegetables. Now she is the Operations Manager of Abalimi Bezekhaya, an organization that fights poverty by growing food in backyards and community gardens. Odette Ismail, Cassé Linderts and Siraaj Larney from South Africa checked out their work.

Jan Bruck  is a trainee journalist at DW-Akademie.