Turn the mic around 🎤
Find out what your audience *really* wants
Last year, Liz Rebecca Alarcón took a long, hard look at whether her show The Pulso Podcast was actually serving the needs of their audience: millennial and gen-X Latinos.
Liz and her team did a series of empathy interviews with listeners. They didn’t ask standard questions like, “Where do you listen to podcasts? What’s missing from your feed?” They took a different approach, asking folks: “What was hard for you today? Where do you feel community?”
After this deep dive, the Pulso Podcast was relaunched as In Confianza. This current fifth season of the non-fiction show dives into the many ways Latinos find belonging in the US. Hosted by Liz, who’s a political analyst, speaker, and entrepreneur, In Confianza is produced by nonprofit media outlet Pulso.
Liz spoke to me about building trust and community, addressing taboo topics, and why she unexpectedly found herself at a gun range…
Talk me through your approach to choosing the topic for each episode of this season.
We wanted to tap into topics and issues that are relevant to the Latino community, whether they're being talked about or not. Choosing the episode topics comes from a mix of digging deep into our community and from the lived experience of our team. And so in this fifth season, it's really a transition season into the new vision. Episode topics include access to healthcare in Spanish; Latino farm workers in California; and abortion access – which is actually quite popular among the Latinos, even though there may be a misconception that our religious background or connections to Catholicism might say otherwise.
These topics are relevant to our community, and they’re not new issues, but we're saying something different about them, and going deeper.
With the example of the first episode [about abortion], I haven't often heard the [type of] stories of the women and what they're sharing. Those first-hand accounts are not usually what you hear when you hear about someone’s abortion story.
In our guns episode, I actually go in person to a gun range. Approaching it not as a talking head, but as actually people who are talking about these same issues with our families, living the same experiences in our homes… is all what you’ll find on In Confianza.
There was one woman in the abortion episode who shared that she was not conflicted in deciding to have an abortion, and she doesn’t regret it. It was really powerful, and not a perspective you hear all that often.
Exactly – and especially among Latinos. This is a breaking of a narrative, of that Catholic guilt, of those sacrificial expectations that Latinas often feel the pressure to ascribe to.
Why did you decide to take an extended break between seasons four and five, and how did you use that time?
We got accepted into a PRX podcast accelerator which we really spent Q4 of 2023 immersed in. It was a boot camp to look long and hard at whether we were actually serving the needs of our target audience.
We did some design thinking workshops with the PRX team, and we went out and listened to our current audience members and our target demographic [millennial and Gen X Latinos, first or second generation]; as well as people within the Pulso audience across our other platforms.
We did empathy interviews, which to me was such a rewarding process. We spent an hour talking to people about who they are - not asking them specific questions about the podcast and their listening habits, but instead: “Tell me about your day. What was hard? Why? Do you have community? Where are you lonely? Why are you lonely?”
[What we heard in response was] a need to be understood, to feel like they belonged. And that [response] didn’t come because we asked folks, “do you feel understood?” It came from them sharing their experiences at the workplace, at school.
Through that process, we mapped what we could do at Pulso with those pain points and wants. That’s how we came up with this new concept for the show moving forwards. And so really for the last six months we've been applying that learning.
Had you always planned to take this break, or was it prompted by the PRX accelerator?
We got accepted into the accelerator and we didn't realize how deep it would make us go. So that's really the prompting of the long break. It's not just a slight tweak here and there. It's going deep to address what our audience is telling us that they want.
We needed to hire-up, meaning increase capacity in the staff, to really dedicate more time for what these kinds of conversations entail, to get more personal, to go out in the field, to build trust with future guests, because we are going to go deeper than just… “so tell me about your book”.
What was the through-line from those empathy interviews to producing the new season? How did that audience insight filter into decisions like episode topics, your hosting, sound design?
After we did the interviews, we created personas from these needs and wants. Then we went back to okay, then what does Pulso do? We are a media outlet that does history no one taught us. We do commentary about things happening in the world. And so then there was a venn diagramming process. How can we adapt those conversations to go deeper?
It kind of moved from those topical issues to Latino experiences. We used to do a lot more Latino identity content, but we're hearing people wanting to be seen. The interviews said, “No one understands me. I'm the first, I'm the only, I'm the outlier. I'm craving friendship. I'm craving a space to be like, ‘Oh yeah, I feel that way as well’.”
We also looked at my role as a host – I need to share more personal experience. I need to actually talk about myself, and my POV. I'm in South Florida. It's a Latino majority city. I should actually go out there. Guns, that's a hot topic right now. I'm actually terrified. Let me go put myself out there.
That's where the production really has been more host-centered. Not that you'll hear my voice too much, but [it’s about] me being more vulnerable, sharing more of my personal experiences, leading with my own opinions, and not just in that meta way that you might hear from some of the other [previous] episodes.
Was that a challenge for you, to put yourself in the story more?
What has been challenging is talking about myself. I feel like I’ve lived like 19 different lives, and I have trouble weaving my story together. It always feels like I'm too complex, my life doesn't make too much sense, so let me just not go there. Trying to weave those stories into each episode has taken me a while to bring the specific anecdote that makes sense, that connects on that human level.
But it has been really enjoyable and has forced me to get vulnerable, just like I want our guests and our audience to feel. So what you'll see is that not just on the episodes, but in our promotion for the show and on Instagram especially, you'll see my face and me sharing anecdotes related to the episodes on video as well. For the Instagram reel teasing the abortion episode, I talk about some awkward moments in my own family, and how abortion was off limits.
What did this process teach you about who was listening to your show – were you actually reaching your target audience?
No, that was part of it. We weren't reaching enough of the people that we wanted to reach. It was perhaps an older audience. We have older audience members, in our Facebook Messenger platform.
We were really searching for people who wanted community, and not everyone listens to a podcast because they're searching for community. Within that broader scope of millennial and Gen X Latinos, which is millions and millions of people, our niche is first and second generation Latinos who are seeking to understand, belong, be understood, and want community.
Why did you change the podcast’s name from The Pulso Podcast to In Confianza?
Pulso Podcast doesn’t tell you much of anything. The name wasn't really indicative of that feeling and community we wanted to build. In speaking to the team, we all aligned on the fact that that feeling of togetherness has very clear places and spaces and sentiments in Latinidad that everyone would know. Things like la sala, which is your living room, where you’re together, you talk, there’s trust. It’s an important signifier.
Confianza is a word that is hard to translate. It's actually my favorite word in Spanish; it's that comfort that you feel with someone you're completely yourself with. The connection of being in trust and in comfort with someone: en confianza.
Like if you come to someone’s house and don’t know whether to take your shoes off, and they’re like, “you’re en confianza, you’re family, you’re one of us”.
The phrase in Spanish is en confianza, and we’re doing in confianza, because of our multi-language preference as Latinos. It signifies: if you’re listening to this, you already know what that means, you know this is for you, that this is made for and by Latinos.
So there are more layers of meaning to the phrase in Spanish than the direct English translation of “in confidence”.
Right, it's more than confidentiality or trust. It’s like that feeling when you go to your best friend's house and you just open her fridge to get a snack without asking. And that is so layered, right? Like there are some people in your family you might not feel comfortable doing that with.
What do you want to leave your audience with?
We want them to feel like they either understand something in a different way or feel understood in a way that they haven't felt before. And if it's both, even better!
We want them to feel like they belong within the Latino experience, given all the many ways there are to be Latino, that there's no wrong or right way to be of our community. We are your people and you’re ours.
And I think eventually what we want people to feel is that no conversation is off limits. I think for season six, I want us to jump into more taboo topics and more things that we're not even talking about yet, but that are kind of in the underbelly of our community, and to talk about it en confianza, full opinions, without judgment.
Do you ever feel apprehensive about addressing some of those more taboo topics?
I think I'm more nervous about us not having those conversations well than having the conversation itself. So what I am over analyzing often is: are we pandering? Has this been done before? Is this actually a unique take? Are we going deep enough? Did we listen well enough to this person? Did we ask what is being said under what they're saying?
That's more my fear when we're tackling these things. Are we contributing to this mission of understanding and being understood, or does it sound like how someone not Latino would cover our community?
Training and events
🌞 Finding Your Voice(over) and Tracking Narration Like a Pro ~ 29 June
🌞 Sonic Storytelling: Sound Design to Make Your Stories Sing ~29 June
🌞 Pitch Swap by AudioSpice and Graydio ~ 16 July
What I’m listening to
🎧 Jesse Lawson, producer and friend of the newsletter, has released a brilliant new show with their friend Holly Casio. Because the Boss Belongs to Us is about their quest to get Bruce Springsteen recognized as a queer icon. The show is a sound-rich adventure with sharp, smart writing – I loved it.
🎧 Comfort Eating is my comfort listen. This Guardian show is hosted by food critic Grace Dent who has such a fantastic interviewing style - funny and personable but shrewd too.
🎧 Another of my comfort listens is Sentimental Garbarge, a podcast for fellow unashamed over-thinkers. It’s about the books, movies, pop icons that women love but are supposed to feel guilty about.
🎧 I was preparing for an in-depth interview this week so appreciated this reminder from Rob Rosenthal’s Sound School Podcast that structure can be used as a tool for interviews as well as scripts.
Thanks for reading and supporting The Audio Storyteller! As always, let me know what you’re listening to and working on. 💌