Podcasting Across Borders with Marta Perrotta
Amplified is an audio blog series about the sounds of scholarship from our team here at the Amplify Podcast Network. This month on Amplified, Marta and Stacey discuss the We Pod project, a multi-partner cross-border initiative to support the European podcasting ecosystem. Marta Perrota, a professor at the University of Rome, explains the project's inception in 2022, funded by Creative Europe to innovate and support media collaboration. The project involves several European media partners and universities, focusing on creating co-produced podcasts in multiple languages. In our conversation we unpack the challenges and benefits of cross-border collaboration, integrating academic research with industry practices, and the potential of podcasts to engage audiences across languages and borders.
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Natalie Dusek 0:01
Welcome to Amplified: a podcast and audio blog about the sounds of scholarship from our team here at the Amplify Podcast Network. I'm Amplify's project assistant Natalie Dusek, and today's episode is a good one. We're bringing you a chat between Amplify co director Stacey Copeland and Italian journalist, podcast researcher and all around audio visionary, Marta Perotta. Marta is also professor at the University of Rome, and she's here to talk about We Pod, a super exciting cross border podcasting project that kicked off in 2022 with support from Creative Europe. Now We Pod isn't just your average podcast collab, it's a multi country, multi language, multi partner effort aimed at growing and connecting the European podcasting ecosystem. Think co producing shows across borders, mixing academic insight with industry know how, and navigating all the fun and the friction that comes with working across different languages and media cultures. In this chat, Stacey and Marta get into all of it, the challenges, the wins and why podcasting might just be the perfect medium for cross cultural storytelling. So whether you're a podcast nerd, a media researcher, or just curious about how audio can bring people together, this episode's for you. Thanks for being here.
Marta Perrotta 1:26
Ok. Oh. Hi!
Stacey Copeland 1:29
Hi! So for everyone listening. We pod is a multi partner cross border project that supports the growth and sustainability of the European podcasting ecosystem profit. [Audio clips from We Pod podcast episodes] and we're here with the wonderful Marta Perotta, who I will have introduced herself so that I don't maybe say too many compliments. You can decide how much of your impressive record you want to share.
Marta Perrotta 2:13
Just a few words, please. No, I am Marta. Hi, Perotta. I teach at University of Roma Tre in Rome, Italy. I teach radio, digital media and television, and my research focuses mostly on production cultures in into radio and television, but also all the wonderful stuff we have been doing together, Stacey, with the women and radio projects. Mostly one of them is, my favorite is [inaudible]. It's a network of European scholars that work on the broader, in a very broad way on the women in radio. So that's it. I maybe I could say that one of my biggest part of work is the work on the college radio, Roma Tre Radio, which is very active in in in the in putting into practice what studying radio means, not only from a theoretical point of view, but also practical. And also we are moving to, of course, to the podcast scene, because it's, it's, it's obviously the most interesting part of the disruption of the digital disruption scene in media.
Stacey Copeland 3:49
I love the women on air, the donneinoda project. And that was so interesting. You know, when you brought everyone together, which I got to meet a bunch of other people from that network during the last summit, if you will. While it's a project really focused on radio and sound media and the history of that, there was so much discussion around podcasting as well, and what that means in bringing those histories forward. And so today, we'll be talking mostly about we pod, but I definitely encourage people to check out the work coming out of that project, and also Marta's radio and podcasting work as well, because you're also a practitioner, yes, I think gives you a unique perspective on projects like we pod that are trying to bring so many different stakeholders together. So could you tell us a little bit more about the we pod project and your role in it?
Marta Perrotta 4:48
It started like three and a half years ago, so in 2022 with a call by Creative Europe, by the fund. That the European Commission gives to media, and particularly in that strand of news media to cooperate and to also face digital innovations. And I had the idea to put together media and an academic partner like my university in order to study the the European perspective on podcast production, because, of course, in a multilingual context like Europe, there was no vision of European Co production in podcasting. There were just a few examples, and they were mostly linked to countries that face multilingualism and all the issues about transnational radio that is, of course, something that some countries face since the beginning of radio, like Switzerland or Spain or other countries that have more more than one language as official language, but in podcasts, the examples are so few, and there were so few, but I was very interested into this, in order to exchange perspectives between countries that can maybe, that could maybe work together to make some big journalistic work, cross border, and I have, I put together some people that I knew in different countries and different media. And so we started to build this network and to prepare the call. It was a very long work. We, in substance, we proposed to produce different size co productions, like with two countries, three countries, four countries, or all the countries of the network, and to have podcasts that could be in different languages, co produced concept and also work of research, like the interviews, all the work on the sound, all the work on the structure of the storytelling, but in the different languages of specific countries so that they could be listen in native languages and also reflect the culture and also the needs of information that different countries have, also the perspectives that different countries have on on The topics, and they had to be all news co production, so with a journalistic perspective, and also with the idea that this could be a kind of innovation trend for maybe for smaller companies that could be helped by the bigger ones in Europe in producing something that was that could be attractive on a global market.
Stacey Copeland 8:35
Yeah, and I can imagine already some of the challenges that piloting a project like this will help streamline what it would be to make podcasts across languages and across audiences in the future, as you've already put out quite a few different shows sea of rage. So thinking there about the politics across Spanish, Italian and English. Truck drivers. There's one on a grain of powers of French, Polish, English, the drying plane, Hungarian, Serbian, the right kind of family, which is a huge one,
Marta Perrotta 9:17
seven languages.
Stacey Copeland 9:20
Imagine there the topic being quite wide ranging for a European audience. So taking these different topics, like the question of, how do you choose what topics are something that will resonate across audiences? There's also a podcast, of course, on AI mobile topic right
Marta Perrotta 9:37
That was the first one to come out, because it was produced by single journalists with the same idea, but everyone was following. It's his or her journey, but the other one, yeah, the conceptualization phase is the most difficult. You know, the. Um sea of rage. I mean, that the idea was dealing with drug traffic because and the Spanish and the Italian one, they have all, all of them have a contact point at a certain point of the story. But it's, it's just a cross reference, not, I think, after all the research we have done that this is a co production, but not as the other ones, because we found very big differences between the two contexts, and that they had the no links, except for truck trafficking of drugs, which is something very big but not so easy to To create a story that involves all of the characters. So also the music is different and also some parts of the narration. For instance, the Italian version is is narrated by two women and French, the Spanish version is narrated by two men. This makes the sound totally different. Also, that's why
Stacey Copeland 11:28
That's really fascinating about this project. When you tell someone that you know a podcast is going to be available in multiple languages, they probably just assume it's a direct translation. Yeah, and re, re voicing, but here we're actually seeing the same topic yes and questions being taken up in different ways for different audiences. An audience in Italy might be more interested in a certain style of music or sound or particular characters or roots into the topic versus a Spanish audience. So that is really interesting. And then the English one is also quite different. So thinking about,
Marta Perrotta 12:11
And you know what the English one was going to be re voiced by an AI speaker, but at the end, we didn't choose to do that. We tried, we tried to make it, but all the producers were against this, because even if it's maybe easier, we finally ended up in into having real voices and just creating a third podcast from scratch, actually, because it's, it's, it's work on a third production In the same in the same production line. So, yeah, this this podcast won the ondas prize for co production and productions. And I think it's really interesting also to for a foreign audience that doesn't speak Spanish or Italian to listen to the different version of this in the first episode, and also the the journalists feature all the all the episodes of the of the two versions. So the very interesting thing is the way the journalists cooperate into the investigation. This was the only part of the co production. The real co production was that while all the others, of course, had the task to be appealing to different audiences, and so they changed it a little bit more than than the production. And of the investigation, and yes, the the most interesting thing with the sea of Rage is that when you listen to the Italian version, it's really quiet. It's really, I mean, it started with the with the journalists going with the police to burn some some cocaine that has been found. So it's, it has a very strong opening on that, which is something it's not easy to be witnessing, also, if you are just listening to and it goes down into this second and third episode in trying to building all the all. All the elements of the story. While with the Spanish version, you start in a very different way with nothing like that action situation that you feel for Italy, but it grows more in, in the in the suspense, because it seems you don't understand what's what's the big problem there. Then you know the main character of the of the investigation, and then you you really have a heavy thing to carry on with you, because then the meeting with the character, which was very impressive for the journalist, and also, I mean, for the listener, it's it's very it's very strong. So they, they are so different, even if they they have the same heart inside. So I think it's very fascinating.
Stacey Copeland 16:04
What I see from the outside looking in is that the the we pod project seems to do quite well in highlighting the challenges and and needs of both industry and university, and talking about what a European podcast ecosystem could look like moving forward, especially as a North American coming into the European context, there's such different beasts to deal with. Of course, there is some of these root questions around, like aI ethics, production, labor. But then when you get to actually producing content, what that looks like is completely different. And so I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about more, more about how do you see collaboration between academics and industry as maybe a way forward in how we can better understand and better develop a European podcasting ecosystem?
Marta Perrotta 17:03
I hope that we pod can can start this kind of dialog between academia and and media. There is a website with some tools, some repositories of articles, of papers. Also one of the main goals of we pod is this IP marketplace, which is something that is not linked to research, but is very useful in the context of international podcasting, because you can sell the IP of a podcast for a book or for another version in another language or for a movie or a TV series or video game, and this is something that will help a lot podcaster and finding the right business model and and grow also as as producers of other of other products or other kind of contents. This is the unique, the unique novelty of of the podcast, the European podcast market. At the moment, there are no other services like this in in Europe, so making local producers aware of the challenges of the international market, but also of their potentiality, of their potential and of their of the specificity of local communities that can be translated into something that goes beyond the borders. It's very important. And I think that this kind of perspective that comes from research in media production, cultures in media, media content analysis. It's it's very useful, even if the media are not aware of that.
Stacey Copeland 19:17
Absolutely fascinating. And maybe one more question, because our time together is coming to an end. And I think one thing, if we're thinking about researchers and other academics listening to our conversation today, a question that always comes up is that question of, what do you do, or what are your best tips? If you are a researcher just starting out and you want to collaborate with industry, what would you what would your advice be coming from your perspective between the two worlds?
Marta Perrotta 19:52
It depends if you come from production, or maybe you have been producing a little bit, you probably know what are the main challenges for the production, and you know how to make questions about that. So I suggest making the right questions in interviews or in in meetings, also when you approach someone in there are also many festivals and and listening. Like listening chances in public spaces, and you can approach you can approach podcasters. You can approach producers and all the media people that are around.
Stacey Copeland 21:01
I think that's a great tip. Just make yourself part of the conversation. Yeah, right. Then on that, is there anything else on we pod that you'd like to share? Or what's what's next? The project? There's so much that's been produced already.
Marta Perrotta 21:20
Yes, yeah, the maybe we, we didn't talk about the co production, that is the one in seven languages that maybe will be the most listened, just because it has so many languages. It has Polish, German, French, Italian, English, Spanish and Hungarian. And it was such a big work. It started in December, 2023 and now it's out. So it has been a very long journey, and there are four journalists, female journalists, that are work together and make all the interviews together and make all the reporting together. So it's really amazing. It's really amazing. It's a bit difficult to to topic, to to deliver in podcast.
Stacey Copeland 22:18
Is that the right kind of family?
Marta Perrotta 22:20
Yes the right kind of family. Yes, it's an investigation on on body policies in in Europe, but also around the world, because there are insights in on this trends and networks, informal networks that are not maybe having words on the politics, but that are like lobbying on the politics of different countries in Europe, like Hungary, Italy, Spain, and so it's, it's really, it's a really big one, and I hope that all the audience of this podcast can can listen to the version that they prefer. And yeah, the next, the next work that will be released is a white paper of co production with all the insights of the research. We are just writing that. There is also the book podcast in the future of journalism. It's open access, so you can put the link of the book and it can be downloaded. So this is it. We have been applying for the continuation of the project, and we hope to have the results in August. So maybe there will be a we pod, hopefully. So that's that's it
Stacey Copeland 24:03
Amazing. Well, fingers crossed. Lots of resources to share, thanks for the time today.
Marta Perrotta 24:09
Thank you. Thank you. [Outro Music]
Natalie Dusek 24:22
Thanks for listening to Amplified an audio blog, a podcast about the sounds of scholarship. If you have comments or additional thoughts on our conversation today or on any of Amplify's initiatives, please don't hesitate to reach out. See you next time.
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Marta Perrotta is an associate professor at the Department of Philosophy, Communication and Performing Arts at Roma Tre University, as well as a well-established radio and podcast practitioner.
She coordinates the international research group Women on air, or Donne in Onda. Voices, professions and listening in radio and sound media, dedicated to the study of the history and present of women’s voices in radio, from the perspective of production cultures and listening cultures.
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Women’s Radio in Europe Network (WREN)
WOMEN WORKING IN RADIO: Methodological Approaches Comparing Italy and the International Context
Podcast in the Future of Journalism
Intro + Outro Theme Music: Pxl Cray – Blue Dot Studios (2016)
Written and produced by: Natalie Dusek and Stacey Copeland