Blog

Podcasting has exploded in Brazil, with the country having the highest number of podcast users globally.

Course instructors Flora Thomson-DeVeaux and Paula Scarpin (Photo: Courtesy)

A prominent member of that scene, podcasting production company Rádio Novelo, has made a name for itself at home and abroad with its narrative, journalistic storytelling.

So, when the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas teamed up with the audio journalism company for a free online course in Portuguese this May, the response was overwhelming.

The four-week course, “Telling stories in audio with Rádio Novelo,” attracted 7,228 students from 58 countries ranging from Brazil to Italy and Mozambique.

This is the highest number of participants for any single-language course offered by the Knight Center in the history of its Journalism Courses program.

"This course was very special not only because of the record number of participants, not only for the quantity, but also for the quality, on both sides. The instructors were very well organized and efficient, and the students were engaged, enthusiastic and showed a passion for the topic and for Radio Novelo's team that was truly impressive," said professor Rosental Calmon Alves, founder and director of the Knight Center.

"The success of this course and the high level of engagement of the participants with Radio Novelo's instructors are a testament to the enormous appetite among journalists to learn how to tell stories in new formats, and proof that the Knight Center's online courses program, which has trained more than 370,000 students since 2012, remains a powerful way to build learning communities of journalists around the world," Alves said.

Participants learned how to find a story to tell, investigate and research material, structure stories, and finally, develop script writing.

Journalist and course participant Vitor Anastacio said he learned “how to transform reporting into a more engaging narrative that has rhythm, structure and a meticulous attention to sound.”

“The course reinforced the idea that podcasting goes beyond mere technique: it is a form of journalism that demands deep listening, clear intention and the crafting of atmosphere right from the very first script," he added.

Rádio Novelo President Branca Vianna said the course was a “great experience” for the organization as well.

“It allowed us to systematize knowledge that was sort of floating around the newsroom for years and share it with the [Knight Center’s] very engaged and talented audience,” she said.

When Rádio Novelo entered the scene in Brazil in 2019, its miniseries were very popular, but they required a lot of time and money to produce, said course instructors Flora Thomson-DeVeaux and Paula Scarpin.

So, the production company created a weekly narrative podcast called Rádio Novelo Apresenta to provide a way for contributors who maybe didn’t have expertise in podcasts to collaborate on audio stories.

However, the team still didn’t have a way to accommodate the number of interested potential contributors. Thomson-DeVeaux and Scarpin said the free course with the Knight Center was a way to offer that learning opportunity to more people.

“Now that the Brazilian public has discovered the power of narrative audio journalism, an ever-growing number of people are eager to tell stories in this format,” the duo said. “We have observed that our thousands of students come from incredibly diverse backgrounds and intend to apply the techniques learned in the course to a myriad of formats—ranging from traditional journalism to science communication.”

Journalist and podcast Beatriz Alessi finished the course feeling enriched and ready to tell more stories.

"I loved feeling so close to such a professional, dedicated team—one that shares my very own passion for telling stories through audio,” she said.

Thomson-DeVeaux and Scarpin said the course was a learning experience for the instructors as well.

“We learned a great deal—much of it from one another—and it has been both fun and enlightening to pick up some techniques from the students on how to organize research materials, formulate questions for interviewees and conceptualize the structure of a script,” they said.