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April started well with our win for the investigative narrative journalism podcast, Phoebe’s Fall, at The Castaways. This was a surprise and a thrill, given the stiff competition we faced, from such excellent series as SBS True Stories and their series on the gay hate murders of the 1980s. Kudos to Castaways founder Dave Gertler for a great initiative and a fun night. Podcasting events are taking off. The UK have the British Podcast Awards and the London Podcast Festival, the US has an all-women event, Werk It, and 2000 people attending its annual Podcast Movement, while Australia hosts two podcast industry days, Audiocraft and OzPod. There’s also recognition via awards such as the Webbys, which honour media excellence on the internet, and new podcasting categories in older awards such as the Prix Italia and the New York Radio Festival – where Phoebe’s Fall won GOLD in the Personal Lives category in June.

Yep, not to boast, but this is our FOURTH big award: we also scooped a Melbourne Press Club Quill award and a Kennedys Award for Outstanding Radio Current Affairs. So my co-producer Julie Posetti and I thought it was worth mulling over the process that led to Phoebe’s Fall ‘s success.  We wrote about it here for The Age newspaper. We also presented a paper on it at the huge IAMCR media /communications research conference held in the beautiful walled town of Cartagena, Colombia.

I’ve wanted to go to Colombia ever since I read Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s astonishing  100 Years of Solitude, the novel that launched magic realism. I was then a student, based in grey, rainy Dublin, and the book transported me to an opulent sensual universe of epic proportions. Captivated, I resolved there and then to learn Spanish and visit this extraordinary other world. Learning Spanish wasn’t too hard – a stint as an English teacher in the Basque Country near San Sebastian furnished me with the basics. (I particularly enjoy its earthy curses.) But it took till now to get to Latin America.

Cartagena was once the epicentre of slave trading. Today’s assertive African-Colombians channel the sensuality captured by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

The first thing we did was tour the Castillo de San Felipe de Barajas, the largest fortification installed by the Spanish over centuries of colonisation of the continent. The audio guide brought to life the harrowing stories of life in this port, once a thriving centre of slavery.

Next, we tracked down the home of Marquez, who set his other great novel, Love in the Time of Cholera, in Cartagena. There is no plaque, just an unofficial appropriation by the guesthouse next door of one of his quotes. A few days later, I got to ask the unassuming Jaime Marquez, elder brother of Gabriel, why his home was unrecognised. Because his wife and children still stay there sometimes, he told me, and they want privacy.  It was not a private audience – I was one of dozens of delegates trailing Jaime on a walking tour of his brother’s Cartagena, an inspired idea of the conference organisers. Jaime pointed out places where characters and scenes from Love… drew inspiration. A door near the historic clock tower evoked one of Don Emilio’s associates. San Diego Plaza brought forth a tale of a spilled cargo of oranges that inflamed Gabriel’s imagination. I stuck close to Jaime to record his talk and at one point, I had his ear. In ungrammatical Spanish, I told him how I had had ‘quarenta años de esperando’ (40 years of waiting to get to Colombia) after reading Cien Años de Soledad. He smiled. His brother showed him the first 80 pages, Jaime recalled. ‘I told him it was quite good – he should continue’.

As for the IAMCR conference, another revelation was the scope and innovation of media and communications research by Latin American scholars, of which I – and many English-speaking delegates – were embarrassingly unaware. We were roundly chastised for our Anglo-centric views in a provocative and entertaining keynote by Omar Rincon, who chided us for imagining Latin America as a theme park for magic realism.

Among the diverse papers by over 1200 delegates, I counted only five that dealt with podcasting. I had to explain to several colleagues what a podcast was.  There is a strong oral tradition in Colombia and audio storytelling should have traction. Community radio is hugely popular, but its first cousin, podcasting, languishes. It’s partly about lack of band width; it was also chastening to learn that few Colombians have smartphones. Omar Rincon left us with a worthy challenge, to consider communications from a unifying perspective of aesthetic and narrative.