Hearing Myself in Your Voice 

When Maria Hinojosa founded the Futuro Media Group in 2010, she was told that radio was dead. She began her career at the Columbia University student-run radio station WKCR and continued to blossom at National Public Radio, where the medium allowed her to talk about major political issues to millions of listeners—not just as a voice in the dark from 10pm to 1am, but as a journalist of meticulous standards with the ability to hear and tell a story from a personal perspective. Radio audiences had limited experiences listening to a Latina journalist. Maria says: “I wanted to make that connection. They always saw me as the other, so I was always having to use my humanity to make myself more human.”

Building on Hinojosa's approach, Futuro’s podcast productions cover a range of subject matter, and couple it with intense intimacy. With a team composed of fellow veteran radio journalists, Futuro is crafting audio stories (and multimedia content) for and about today’s American mainstream, proving that the practice of talking to one another to tease out the complexity of our diverse and evolving world will never fade out. We remain connected and curious because hearing each other's thoughts is an essential part of the human experience.  

When asked if a person’s voice is the most trusted source of information, Alana Casanova-Burgess, producer, journalist, and host of the podcast La Brega, offers a practical explanation. “Microphones can go places that cameras can’t go. People respond differently to a camera than they do to just speaking to a microphone,” she says. “Not to say that microphones can’t be scary, but I think that they’re less scary. They’re certainly smaller and less noticeable.” She continues with thoughts about audio over print media: “You can't put a pause in print with the same potency. [In audio reporting] we’re very careful with people's pauses, with the ums and the sound of laughter. You can write laughs in print, but you don’t know if it was a nervous laughter or if someone was really losing it.”

Empowering the listener to sift through the nuance of how a statement is expressed calls on the audience to be intimately involved with how a tale unfolds. In this way, audio storytelling demands active listening, and also activated listening. 

“There’s something about having somebody’s voice in your ear. When there are no visuals, only sound, meaning comes into focus,” says Maria Garcia, executive editor of Futuro Studios, overseeing long-form narrative podcasts. Without the preconceived notions that accompany what a speaker or a situation looks like, a listener must tap into their own imagination to step into and interpret an aural world. “I want people to connect with their culture, their roots, their heritage. And with the culture and the roots and heritage of other people to show that there’s something universal—all of us come from somewhere,” Garcia says.

Specificity leads to universality. The story of Anything for Selena—Garcia’s acclaimed podcast about the legendary Tejano superstar—is rooted in Garcia’s own experience as a queer Mexican American woman, and yet the audience it affected was widely varied. White listeners in rural North Dakota were as invested in her series as fans in Puerto Rico, Latin America, and Europe. She credits the braided narrative format as an innovation that Futuro has championed with the studio's ability to build narratives that deeply touch people who have not heard themselves represented in other mediums.  

Another series that employs this braided concept is My Divo, an exploration of the contrast between a Mexican pop icon’s private life and public persona and how that influenced his audience's identities. “Two narratives are happening throughout the eight episodes. We’re weaving Juan Gabriel’s story with my own personal reconciliation of my culture, my roots, and my family,” Garcia says, noting that the series includes intimate conversations with her own mother and son. “We’re really proud of this practice of both radical transparency and centering voices that have been historically left out of the narrative.” 

Embedded in their programs is the studio's collective philosophy that journalists do not report from an entirely blank slate. Journalists are humans with lived experiences and histories and therefore come to a story from the place in the world that they personally occupy. “If you really own your positionality in a story, then you’re able to investigate more clearly and check your own blind spots, elevating your own expertise when it appropriately strengthens the story,” Garcia says. 

“The issue of trust right now is central,” says Hinojosa. “Some people think of us as suspect because we are journalists. Our properties continue to exist because of that trust factor—the doubling down. We don't shy away from the fact that our journalism is done with heart.” She credits the studio’s commitment to on-the-ground reporting—getting on the plane, going into communities, and hearing people's voices—with winning listeners’ attention. “I've always wanted people to feel represented in my work. If they feel represented, then they will feel they have the power to participate in democracy.”

Maria Garcia adds: “People are coming to podcasts where they feel seen and understood, a place where they feel safe and where they can make meaning of the news cycle in a way that’s more human, in a way that centers their humanity.”

With so much being written about the male Latino community’s effect on the 2024 presidential election, and on how the popularity of so-called “bro roundtable” podcasts promote negative ideas about gender and immigration, Futuro's response has been to remind its audience that the conversations that we have about ourselves are more impactful than what is said about us from an outside perspective. The keys to having productive discussions are specificity and intimacy.

Hinojosa describes a studio-wide practice that is perhaps antithetical to how other media groups perceive its tools for growth. Instead of using big technology to pinpoint audience commonalities or AI to deliver highly tested programming, she talks about following up with subjects that she interviewed years ago, maintaining relationships with people that she reported on many stories prior. In this way, Futuro's innovation is its ability to promote its own humanity and the humanity of its collaborators and audience by talking to people simply and directly.

“Journalism is not a job; it’s a mission. You consume the ethics, being a journalist of conscience. Fairness is what we live and breathe,” says Hinojosa.

“You literally go talk to people and then you turn around and tell people what you just heard,” says Casanova-Burgess, with the caveat that collaboration and rigorous fact-checking are part of the backbone of their process. There is an unending hunger for hearing stories that reflect underexplored histories that contribute to how we behave today. She stresses that that being Latino is in no way monolithic. “It's an interesting time to think about what being Latino is because it's in flux and there is no one term that encompasses us. But, many people have come up to us on the street or written to us to say, ‘Wow, we talk about this in my family all the time and it’s so great to know that this is a conversation other people are having.’”

Hearing yourself captured in another person's words can forge strong bonds of community.  “People who find podcasting and really love podcasting tend to be real nerds about it,” says Marlon Bishop, co-CEO and co–executive director of Futuro, as well as head of podcasts and new business explains. “They’ll recommend podcasts to everyone. They’ll talk about podcasts—for a lot of people it is almost an identity thing.”

This reflection via audio storytelling has grown exponentially since the format first became available in 2004. Nearly 120 million Americans of a myriad of backgrounds, beliefs, and experiences listen to podcasts on a monthly basis.

Language, how we express ourselves to each other, is intrinsically tied to who we are as individuals. Futuro Studio creates a majority of their programs in both English and Spanish to acknowledge the multiplicity of their audience's identities.  

Alana Casanova-Burgess has written extensively about the complications involved in producing a narrative in two different languages. Her examination of the explanatory comma and the propensity of the public broadcasting industry in general to center white listeners by defaulting to their cultural references deeply informs the studio's decision-making process on what expository information to exclude within an episode. To paraphrase Casanova-Burgess, a listener who hears an aside of information that they believe is obvious to their own existence may feel that a piece of journalism is not for them. 

Yet, it must be acknowledged that language alone is not the sole determinant of how a listener receives a story. Not only are they crafting two unique podcasts for two different audiences—not translations but nuanced tellings to reach lingual subsets—but as producers providing meaningful content accessible to as many potential listeners as possible, they recognize that shared tongues do not automatically mean shared touchstones. “The word marquesina is the word used in Puerto Rico for an open garage that you have next to your house, and listeners in Mexico were like ‘what is that?’ In Puerto Rico, everyone knows what that is. The question becomes who are we leaving out and who do we actually not want to leave out?” says Casanova-Burgess.

This ambiguity is one of the strengths of the bilingual, long-form series format: it leaves room for curiosity, exploration, and continued conversation. We go through the effort of making everything twice, but it pays off because people are playing it for their grandparents or kids,” says Casanova-Burgess. “What’s really fun is hearing from partners whose dominant languages are different. They’ll listen separately but then come together and discuss.”

“There are a lot of educators in our audience, people who are thoughtful about passing along information to other generations,” Bishop adds. 

As the idea of truth and how to properly find it becomes increasingly scrutinized and politicized, independent journalism is key to bringing people together with facts directly from the most pertinent sources. The Mellon Foundation has provided support for production of three original podcast series seasons (La Brega, Suave, and one other program yet to be announced) recognizing Futuro Media’s dedication to amplifying stories told with authentic timbre.   

In the media landscape, it has always been impossible to predict what will happen next. As the technology that we use to receive information evolves—cable making way for streaming, smartphones putting the entire internet into our pockets—it can be difficult to sift the volume of thoughts produced for the ideas that reflect our priorities. The continuous crash of heartless, autogenerated content has made it harder to echolocate where we've come from and where we want to go. The search for meaning will always lead us back to the voices of the people around us. 

“Our product is art. Podcasting allows you to be lyrical and poetic, but our reporting, fact-checking, and research are all grounded in rigorous journalistic process,” says Garcia. It is this music-like structure that gives so many different kinds of people something to hum along to.

“The beginning is where you’re pulled in, you feel invested. There are stakes, there’s a reason for you to listen. A middle is where we get to the peak of the tension, the sort of pinnacle of our disputable idea, and we wrestle with the themes of the podcast. And then the end, there’s a release. There's a catharsis. We hope that something within you lands. It has to be artful. You have to hold the listener through a journey. That comes to life with pacing, with crescendos, and you have to let a point land with sound design,” says Garcia.

Futuro Studios has three pillars of criteria when creating a program. The first is that the host must have a connection to the story that they are telling. The second is that the story must be riveting. The third is that it is not enough to have a captivating host and story—it has to say something about being human on this planet right now. It is a format for getting to know each other deeply that is very much alive.