SPOTLIGHT: Kara House is here to tell investigative stories in audio formats

Kara House, an investigations-focused audio media organisation, is exploring new frontiers to tell non-fiction, fact-based stories beyond everyday news.

Launched in February 2023, Kara House seeks to deliver complex news content in a comprehensive, compelling and compact manner that appeals to a wide range of audiences.

Banjo Damilola, Kara House executive producer, in a chat with TheCable, said although radio has the widest penetration in Nigeria, the medium is mostly occupied with talk shows, gist and entertainment content.

She noted that Kara House was conceived to “encourage civic and democratic participation in Nigeria” while sustaining the interest of all age groups.

“When I found audio and started listening about four years ago, it felt like I’d been missing out on this impressive medium all my career life… I then began to ask myself, how do you use this medium to solve the inherent problems in Nigeria? How do you package substantial journalism work for this medium for it to get to people at the grassroots? I spoke with a lot of journalists like myself who were also catching the audio storytelling bug and did extensive research. Eventually, we came together to experiment with Kara House,” Banjo said.

FOR GEN Z, GEN ALPHA, MILLENNIALS

On the advantage audio storytelling has over other media formats, Banjo said Kara House would help solve the problem of short attention span through creatively designed and emotion-appealing content delivery that resonates with the older generation and the youths.

Banjo described audio as an “intimate medium” that connects more with the emotions of the audience than text.

“It’s all in the power of sounds and beats and rhythm and how when creatively put together, they can transport you into new experiences,” she said.

According to Banjo, since journalism content has to compete with other creative media content for audience attention, journalists must devise ways to make their work entertaining to even typical consumers of pop culture.

“If people would listen to a 30-minute episode of ISWIS, that should tell you something. If it is interesting, if it is entertaining, people would listen. The biggest challenge is, how then do you make these serious issues on corruption, health, climate change, etc… interesting and exciting for people to want to listen? That’s the biggest challenge,” she said.

“How do you grab people’s attention with issues that are not pop culture? That’s one of the prominent conversations we keep having with the editors and creatives at Kara House. When the reporters have done their rigorous reporting, we then have to think creatively about how to make that serious work into something Gen Zs or Gen Alpha would listen to. Nigeria’s population keeps getting younger, we cannot keep telling stories in a way that would only attract baby boomers and a handful of millennials.

“Our niche is investigation. If it is investigative, we are interested. Our first story is a fact check. The reporter is a fact checker with one of the online platforms. At first, we were worried about how to do fact check in audio without it sounding boring. It took creative editors like Tolu Olasoji, Olivia Ndubisi and Kelechukwu Ogu to help the reporter beat it into shape. It’s a lot of work but we are willing to do the work.”

INCLUSION-ORIENTED

Asked if the idea to adopt audio storytelling was in part informed by the need to cater for the news needs of people with hearing impairment, Banjo said Kara House is big on inclusion on a wide spectrum.

Banjo, who is a former staff of the BBC, said one of the editors at Kara House is visually impaired and working with him has “greatly opened us up to the expectations of that group of our population”.

“We are all out not just for PWDs but also other minority groups and diverse sexual orientations. We are not shy about it. We want our stories to reflect our society. If you’re creative and the story is journalistic with investigative element, we want to talk to you about it. We want to work with you to produce what you would be proud of. Remember we want to reach diverse audiences. So, yeah, we are looking out for everyone at Kara House,” she said.

OPEN TO PARTNERSHIPS AND COLLABORATIONS

Commenting on the scope of operation and plans for Kara House, Banjo said the outlet is open to collaborating with journalists and other media platforms to create new content as well as recreate existing investigative stories in audio form.

Banjo said media houses need to learn to lean on one another’s strengths, rather than each entity trying their hands on a plethora of initiatives without complete mastery.

“You can’t be an expert in everything even if you have the resources but you can build a conglomerate of thriving, independent entities. Quality work requires more than just resources, you need skills and talents. One of the ways you can get skills and talents is to leverage collaboration and partnerships,” she said.

“We will expand into documentaries. We want to bring back radio drama to our radio stations. We are talking to different radio stations for partnerships. In the next couple of months, you’ll start hearing our content on local radio stations across the country.

“We want to partner with news websites as well — The likes of TheCable, Premium Times, and ICIR that do a lot of investigations. We want to come on board and produce audio versions for those investigations. It would still be your stories, the reporters still take the full authorship/ownership of the story but Kara House wants to help make audio element for it. That way, you’re getting your content to more audiences. Your reporters are also gaining new expertise.

“We are going to be doing lots of training as well. Part of what we want to do is help Nigerian journalists become well-rounded. Telling an audio or a video story is beyond capturing the interviews and gathering a bunch of talking heads. The good thing is you don’t even need big cameras and recorders to do it. You can do so much with your phone just by taking a few precautions. We want to teach journalists how to maximise the potential of their stories.

“If anyone is looking to start a narrative podcast and is not sure about what to do, Kara House is here to take the worry off your plates. Come talk to us.”

FINANCING MODEL

Speaking on how the medium is financed, Banjo explained that Kara House is a journalism outlet distributing news products through websites, podcast channels and radio.

“We want to change the way journalism pieces are seen. Your investigative story can provide public service but it can also be commercial. We want to take up an investigative piece and treat it as a product. We will be experimenting with a lot of models,” she said.

“We are going to be borrowing a lot from film and music industry. If Funke Akindele can make money from her movies and Spyro can make money from his songs, a Philip Obaji Jr. should be able to do the same with his investigative pieces. We are thinking of journalism content as products.

“Kara House is out to solve two problems: distribution that combines both traditional and digital media to reach diverse audiences. Two, build a public service journalism outlet that is sustainable outside of grants.

“It’s early stages for us. We are experimenting with a lot of things. We are experimenting with models and strategies that are not traditionally how journalism platforms make money.

“We want grants but we don’t want to be dependent on it for so long. But at the core of whatever we do is editorial independence and trust of our audience. Whatever compromises that, we don’t do.”

Kara House has published three episodes; Cost of Falsehood, Locked Down with Their Rapists, and Noise from Zhong Tai. You can listen to them here.