Curious minds select the most fascinating podcasts from around the world. Discover hand-piqd audio recommendations on your favorite topics.
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Danielle Batist is an experienced freelance journalist, founder of Journopreneur and co-founder of the Constructive Journalism Project. She lived and worked all around the globe and covered global and local stories of poverty, exclusion and injustice. Increasingly, she moved beyond ‘problem-reporting’ to include stories about the solutions she found. She witnessed the birth of the new nation of South Sudan and interviewed the Dalai Lama. She reported for Al Jazeera, BBC and the Guardian and regularly advises independent media organisations on innovation and sustainability. She loves bringing stories to the world and finding the appropriate platforms to do so. The transformation of traditional media fascinates rather than scares her. While both the medium and the message are changing, she believes the need for good storytelling remains.
I recently stumbled across a BBC series called “Stories that shape us”, which includes a long-read section with first-person accounts from ordinary people with extraordinary life stories. I hadn’t expected such a series on BBC, as some of the headlines looked more as if they were coming from a classic lifestyle section of a women’s magazine.
Yet, when I started reading some of the articles, I was struck by the power of life stories, as told by the people who lived them. There is something so innately human about simply hearing another person talk about the things that happened to them. It is one of the oldest tricks in the storytelling books and in some way, it still works best in its simplest form. Just let people talk. And listen.
I can’t help but think that in today’s polarising world, individuals’ stories could bring us closer together and lead to some understanding, or even common ground.
One of the pieces that struck me is by Maryann Gray, who accidentally killed a little boy who ran onto the road she was driving on. I find it particularly moving because she re-tells it more than forty years later, and you can feel her pain still.