How to create a cross-border reportage podcast series

“In 2022, in a historic and sweeping decision, the US Supreme Court reversed Roe v Wade, a landmark ruling protecting the constitutional right to abortion. The ruling came as a shock to many and in the past 3 years millions of women have lost access to safe abortions. But why would you care? Maybe you don’t even live in the US, right? Well, what if this was not only about the US? What if what happened in the United States was part of a bigger story?”

This is how Hungarian journalist and podcaster Lili Rutai introduces the English version of The Right Kind of Family, a cross-border reportage podcast series on the rise of the Political Network for Values, a global network of conservative and far-right organisations that works against what they believe are global threats, such as the “great replacement”, “wokeism” and “gender ideology”.

Specifically, the network wants to limit sexual and reproductive health rights and to marginalise even more the LGBTQIA+ community, particularly transgender and gender diverse individuals, “and they do all of this in the name of one thing: the right kind of family,” Rutai says.

Co-produced by El Paìs Audio, Chora Media, 444 and Europod, The Right Kind of Family is written, narrated and based on the research and the on-the-ground work of four European journalists: the already mentioned Lili Rutai from Hungary, Elsa Cabria from Spain, and Francesca Berardi and Claudia Torrisi from Italy.

“It has been a true cross-border work,” Italian journalist Claudia Torrisi told The Fix Media. “It wasn’t just a collaboration between different media outlets from different countries, but rather it was a small group of reporters who travelled together, reported on the ground, wrote the series together, and constantly exchanged ideas and opinions.”

The podcast series is available in seven languages, and “apart from the French, German, and Polish versions, which are just adaptations, the others tell the same stories and follow the same structure,” Torrisi added, emphasising that they didn’t simply compile separate reports from different countries, but blend their perspectives into something new. Torrisi experienced this directly: “I had already been to Hungary and followed the political situation there as a journalist, but going there with Lili changed some of my viewpoints.”

The idea of the podcast itself was a convergence of perspectives and interests. “As journalists we always start from stories, not from topics,” Francesca Berardi told The Fix Media, but this time it was different.

In fact, The Right Kind of Family is part of WePod, an international project that fosters collaborations between European productions and professionals to create transnational journalistic podcasts. Funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Commission, WePod brings together productions from various countries to focus on topics that are meaningful to the audiences in those places. So the collaboration is the starting point and the story comes after.

For The Right Kind of Family, the media productions and the journalists involved “brought forward ideas relevant to their respective countries,” and despite some initial difficulties in finding the right angle and framing the storyline, “we were all aligned on the urgency to talk about reproductive rights and the war against civil rights,” explained Berardi, who had already worked on another cross-border production within WePod called Sea of Rage: “In both cases,” she says, starting from a broad topic instead of a specific idea was “quite challenging,” because “we had to find stories from general questions” and also because “what was considered urgent and important in one country wasn’t necessarily so in another.”

The story for The Right Kind of Family came naturally when the four journalists had the chance to attend the “VI Transatlantic Summit for Freedom and the Culture of Life” in Madrid, a closed session “in defence of life and the natural family” and the sixth meeting of the Political Network for Values.

The first episode starts with what the journalists saw outside the Spanish Senate: a big crowd of men and women in formal clothes and from 40 different countries greeting each other as if they were at a family gathering, all in a good mood as they shared the common dream of imposing what they believe is “the right kind of family”.

This introduction already reveals the approach the podcast takes: as Berardi explains, “it is pure reporting, a photo of something that is quite difficult to see” as it has been playing out in the shadows, “and that hasn’t been discussed enough,” and that they translated in audio form.

Yet, it wasn’t easy, both because of the complex and intricate story they wanted to tell and because writing for a podcast has specific requirements that need to be met.

For Berardi, who already had experience in writing for podcasts and works as senior content producer and author at the Italian podcast company Chora Media, the most challenging and yet enriching part was focusing on the “small details such as the use of sounds, how much behind-the-scenes to include, and creating a balance with the different visions” of her colleagues.

For Torrisi, who instead had little experience with writing podcasts, it was “illuminating” to realise how different it was: “I couldn’t just adapt my reporting, but I had to change the way I took notes and also what I paid attention to,” she explained.

The topic itself was also challenging: “It was like a system of matryoshka dolls,” Torrisi explains: “We kept encountering the same people and names in different roles, places, and events. The network is so complex and intricate that it could almost seem unimportant to someone,” as if what they do is far from the real world.

That is why it was crucial to organise “our thoughts before writing, and to keep a connection to reality”: they did so by including many small stories within the larger narrative, “because this is something that truly impacts people’s lives.”

Teamwork also played an important role, as it helped keep the script clear and consistent: first, Rutai, Cabria, Berardi and Torrisi worked hard to make their writing as linear as possible, and then editors from the media platforms that co-produced the podcast ensured the content was understandable for everyone.

Yet, the work is not finished. At the time of writing, with two episodes already out, the four journalists are working on the last one, which is not a conclusion to the story anyway. They retraced the past and explained what led to the current situation, with political parties, politicians and organisations working together in the name of “the right kind of family”, but the podcast doesn’t give answers: “It’s an open story,” Berardi says, and “the most interesting part is seeing how this is going to evolve,” Torrisi adds.

Source of the cover photo: Vardan Papikyan via Unsplash