We are delighted to share the news that Daniel Alarcón, an assistant professor of journalism at Columbia Journalism School, has been selected as a member of the 2021 class of MacArthur Fellows. The MacArthur Fellowship, administered by the MacArthur Foundation, is a $625,000, no-strings-attached award to extraordinarily talented and creative individuals as an investment in their potential.
Professor Alarcón is the host, co-founder, and executive producer of Radio Ambulante, an award-winning Spanish-language podcast distributed by NPR. Radio Ambulante uses long-form audio journalism to tell neglected and under-reported Latin American and Latino stories. He is also the editorial director of El Hilo, a new Spanish-language weekly news show focused on covering Latin America and the U.S. An acclaimed journalist, fiction writer, and novelist, Professor Alarcón has published in such magazines as Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, and WIRED. As a contributing writer at The New Yorker, he has recently written about the political revolution in Chile and about Dominican musician and novelist Rita Indiana.
At Columbia Journalism School, Professor Alarcón offers the class "Telling True Stories in Sound" to Master of Science Program students who want to gain experience in long-form podcast storytelling. The goal of his class is to teach the skills of long-form audio journalism, and the techniques of nonfiction storytelling used in established shows like This American Life, Radiolab or Invisibilia, as well as newer podcasts like Reply All, or 99% Invisible. Students learn the style of storytelling used in the public radio style podcasts, which is a combination of in-depth reporting and long-form storytelling. "We really try to think creatively about what's the best way to tell radio stories so that you're getting all the advantages of the audio medium along with rigor of the kind of journalism that we teach here," Professor Alarcón explained.
Taught like a workshop, the class keeps students up to date on the changing landscape of audio journalism - the impact of podcasts on legacy media like NPR, emerging for-profit business models, and responses to shifting audience demographics - with readings and criticism. By the end of "Telling True Stories in Sound," students have the skills to tell complex stories using strong character-driven narrative. "People who have taken this course have gone on to work at places like WNYC, NPR, and Invsibilia," Professor Alarcón said. "It's been really exciting as a teacher to see the students who went through this course do really tremendous things."
Watch Professor Alarcón discuss his course in a 2020 admissions webinar about Columbia's audio training here.
Professor Alarcón began working as a journalist in 2004, first in print for Latin American outlets such as Etiqueta Negra, and later for American and European publications. His long-form journalism has included deeply reported pieces focusing mainly on Peru, the country where he was born, with topics ranging from the rise of the new nationalist left, the book piracy industry, and the emerging democracy inside Lima’s most notorious prison, Lurigancho.
In 2012, Professor Alarcón co-founded Radio Ambulante with his wife Carolina Guerrero after seeing the need for an outlet to tell long-form Spanish-language audio stories. "I got a call from the BBC to do a radio documentary - that was my first professional foray into radio," he explained. "I didn't even hold a microphone - they sent a producer from London and I reported a piece traveling around Peru. I loved it. I thought it was so interesting. My frustration was that I didn't have the chance to do as many interviews as I would have liked in Spanish, and the final edited piece privileged the interviews I did in English. So I had the idea of creating a space for narrative non-fiction radio in Spanish."
He began Radio Ambulante out of his basement. "I started doing interviews and cutting tape and tried to learn what it was like to write in audio, which is different from writing a novel," he explained. "It was really fun to be in my early thirties and not know what the hell I was doing. There's a lot to be said for the kind of learning that happens when you've mastered one thing and then throw out everything you know and start over." Under his leadership, Radio Ambulante is now reporting stories from all over Latin America, and has partnered with outlets like Public Radio International and BBC Mundo to reach audiences across the U.S. and worldwide.
Professor Alarcón began his career as a fiction writer. His first short story, “City of Clowns,” appeared in The New Yorker in 2003, and HarperCollins published his first collection, War by Candlelight, two years later. His first novel, Lost City Radio, was published in 2007, named a Best Book of the Year by critics across the country, and eventually translated into over a dozen languages. At Night We Walk in Circles, his most recent novel, was a finalist for the 2014 PEN/Faulkner Foundation Award. In 2018, Riverhead Books published his collection of stores The King is Always Above the People.
"I realize I'm a non-traditional professor in the sense of 'what's a novelist doing in a school of journalism?'" Professor Alarcón said. "On the other hand, in some ways, I think I'm representative of something entrepreneurial that's happening in journalism. I never set out to be an entrepreneur, but I guess I have become one almost by accident. The outlet that I wanted as a consumer didn't exist, so I made it. Obviously I worked with a team and with lots of support, but essentially that was something that I did. And now it's really fun teaching here. The students are great. My colleagues are great. I get to come into this beautiful building every day and be surrounded by the energy."
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