Campside's Global Commitment to Narrative Podcast Series
Co-founder Josh Dean on how great stories transcend borders and languages
This is part of Inside the Tent, a series going behind the scenes of Campside’s award winning podcasts.
Any of my co-founders at Campside could tell you I’ve been excited about doing podcasts outside the US almost since the day we started the company. I spoke at a conference in Brazil around that time - in the Fall of 2019 - and what I saw there was genuine excitement for narrative longform audio combined with a just-developing level of expertise in the medium.
We just needed to find versions of us — longform journalists who specialize in finding and telling complicated, stranger-than-fiction tales — in other countries. I found one of them there in Brazil, in Ivan Mizanzuk, the guy who interviewed me on stage.
Ivan had created and hosted Brazil’s first smash hit narrative show — Caso Evandro — and we struck up a friendship that, over many Zooms, became a partnership.
Campside helped Ivan make a subsequent show, a wrongful conviction tale set in Amazonia, involving a serial killer, called Altamira. And that show became a number one hit in Brazil for Ivan on both the Apple and Spotify podcast charts. (I still hope we can adapt it into English one of these days.)
Another talented, foreign-born journalist found me pretty early in Campside’s run: Antonia Woloshyn, the creator and host of our first-ever German language show, Land ohne Vater. It premiered last month and went straight to number one on the Apple Podcasts charts in Germany.
Antonia pitched me a version of this show — which she was then calling Lone Wolf Lisa — nearly five years ago. Antonia is German born, but studied in both the UK and the US… which is to say, she is bilingual, and she wanted to tell this infamous story of far-right terror in English.
We were unfortunately unable to sell that version, but I thought of it when talking to our partners at Wondery about global shows - and one of their first and most robust expansion markets was Germany. The show that became Land ohne Vater was perfect for a Campside x Wondery global co-production.
We paired Antonia with an excellent, bilingual Germany-based producer named Vanessa Guinan-Bank and began our production of this German show… in English. This might seem surprising, but Campside’s specialty is making tentpole narrative series, and Wondery didn’t want there to be limitations on our team’s ability to work on the show.
Of course we could assemble an all-German-speaking team, and we ultimately did, but if the show were to be produced in German, those of us who don’t speak the language couldn’t contribute much to the process.
Doing it this way – scripting the episodes in English up until it was time for mixes – meant that managing producer Ashleyanne Krigbaum and I were able to contribute meaningfully to the project. And hopefully the show is far better for it!
By the time we switched languages — after Antonia recorded her narration, and the sound designer from UK-based Granny Eats Wolf began work on the mixes — we’d done numerous revisions of every episode, and were confident that we’d helped to create a compelling and sensitive version of this complicated story. The show, from there, could be finished in German, with no worries that it lacked that Campside magic.
Land ohne Vater was made for Germany, but this tale of a string of murders of immigrants by far-right terrorists was fascinating to me as an American, and is arguably more relevant today than it was when Antonia first pitched it. Violent forces on the far right in both our nations continue to gain power and popularity. I think we could — and hopefully will — adapt it into English.
Either way, narrative podcasts like Altamira and Land ohne Vater — as well as The Evaporated, a barn burner of a show about missing people that we made in Japan, proved my thesis to be true. (If you haven’t yet listened to The Evaporated, co-created by Tokyo Vice author Jake Adelstein and the bilingual journalist Shoko Plambeck, now’s your chance!)
Great stories transcend borders and languages. I remain convinced that the kinds of stories that make for the best narrative limited series are basically universal.
So convinced, that my last show — White Devil — takes place almost entirely in Belize. And when the action is not in Belize, it’s either in Canada or the UK.
Every country has its own fascinating stories that would interest listeners around the world. (The same thing is probably not true, by the way, of many chat shows, which feel far more specific to certain cultures.)
Challenges remain, of course. Narrative limited series are expensive to make, and face commercial headwinds that frustrate many of us, especially considering how wildly popular they are with audiences.
But one of my ongoing goals at Campside is to keep looking for journalists outside the US — like Antonia and Ivan and Jake and Shoko — who know how to find and tell these incredible stories. I hope we’re just at the beginning of our narrative world travels.
Thanks for reading, and subscribe now for updates on all of Campside’s hit shows.
Josh