Journalist Daniel Alarcon on Radio Journalism by Unpacking Latin America

Daniel Alarcon is a professor of Broadcast Journalism at Columbia University and he is the creator of RADIO AMBULANTE, an award-wining Spanish-language podcast distributed by NPR, which is produced and recorded from Columbia University. He has also written for Harpers, The New York Magazine and The New Yorker, and Etiqueta Negra and published two novels: Lost City Radio and At Night We Walk in Circles.

We talk about how growing in a Peruvian household in Birmingham (Alabama) shaped his work in radio journalism and his written pieces in both Spanish and English. We talk about doing radio in Spanish and writing novels in English as well as about the origins of Radio Ambulante. He described the type of stories he and his wife and co-producer wanted to tell and how it is easier to tell Latin American stories from a global city like New York than from a country in the region. We also chatted about recent New Yorker pieces he wrote about Peru including the happiness produced by Peru’s classification in the 2018 World Soccer Cup and the suicide of former president Alan Garcia in the midst of a corruption scandal and conclude discussing Peru’s current political crisis and the possibilities open by the call of legislative elections in January 2020.