The Bits of a Podcast You Have To Leave Out... And Why?
This is how you live with leaving parts of your story out.
When Tanya Pampalone talks about this particular story the passion starts to beam out of her. In 2018 she co-edited a book called "I Want To Go Home Forever" containing poignant stories about xenophobia in South Africa. One of them, she tells me over coffee, she wants to turn into a six-part podcast series.
Tip 1# - How to live with leaving parts of your story out
"Not telling the full story is part of any investigative journalism project," Tanya says, now over Zoom in 2021 when she has acted as creator and executive producer on her own podcast series: One Night In Snake Park about the death of 14-year-old Siphiwe Mahori (he was killed in Soweto, South Africa by a foreign shopkeeper). The show also cleverly tells the story of xenophobia in South Africa.
"You need to protect your sources and you need to tell a water-tight story," she explains. "That's why not everything you know can be told." You can only run with what you know for certain to be true and this can mean large chunks of your narrative is left out. "We couldn't reveal two key sources nor their information from the Somali community because we couldn't corroborate what they told us in any official sense," she says. Another example: if you don't have a certain document in front of you, but you've been told that it exists and what it contains then can you report on that? Tanya says no and she has 20 years of experience as an investigative journalist.
But One Night In Snake Park was her first podcast. "I had turned on microphones before, but not with the intention of the sound needing to be audible to anyone but me," she says. "It was intense. It was more difficult that I thought it would be." And if she were to do a second series? "In broadcast, what I learnt is, you need to know where you are going. You have to have a structure."
LISTEN NOW: The incredible series One Night In Snakepark is about "grappling with South Africa's xenophobic demons through the death of 14-year-old Siphiwe Mahori".
Created by Tanya Pampalone, Eliot Moleba and Rasmus Bitsch. Original score by John Bartmann.
Listen on Soundcloud | Apple Podcasts | Spotify
All the best,
Paul
You should listen to the first series of the podcast In the dark about the investigation into the abduction of Jacob Wetterling and how the police mishandled the case.
Listen on Apple Podcasts | Spotify