A ‘written podcast’ follows women in India

Times insider explains who we are and what we do and offers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism is created.

I’ve attended award shows in Hollywood and seen couture-clad A-listers walk the red carpet, but I’ve never seen anyone as glamorous as Arti Kumari.on the day of her wedding in Bihar, India.

For the closing ceremony of the multi-day celebration, Arti wore a full velvet skirt covered in gold embroidery to match the gossamer red veil over her head. Heavy gold jewelry circled her neck and wrists and dangled from her nose and earlobes, so that every movement caused a jingling rustle of metal against metal.

On that warm May day in Arti’s village, I was eleven months into a reporting project with Emily Schmall and Shalini Venugopal Bhagat, my colleagues in The New York Times’ South Asia bureau. Up until that point, we had assumed we were going to write a fairly traditional article about one of the most pressing questions facing India: what keeps Indian women out of the workplace? It was a pattern that not only trapped many women in poverty and abusive relationships, but also limited the country’s economic growth.

We followed Arti and another young woman, Nasreen Parveen, hoping to use their lives to bring statistics and expert analysis to life. We wanted to show our readers what the macro trends for women’s employment looked like in women’s real lives. But as I stood among the crowd of wedding guests and looked at Arti and her new husband, Rohit, on a flower-decorated platform, a doubt began to gnaw at me.

The material we had collected was fascinating and deeply enlightening. But it simply didn’t fit the structure of a typical news story or a column for The Interpreter, the Times newsletter I write every week.

As I organized my growing folder of notes, the story began to remind me of a podcast or television miniseries: the drama lay not in one event, but in the way the women faced a series of obstacles. And that reflected the reality of what was keeping Indian women out of the workforce – not a single barrier, but a series of obstacles that reinforced each other.

That kind of episodic drama didn’t fit into one article, which had to be short and focused. And we didn’t have enough audio to make the story work as a podcast. But I realized there could be another way to tell episodic stories in a podcast style by using a platform that The Times has embraced in recent years: email newsletters.

The Interpreter Newsletter has a large and loyal audience. And it reaches subscribers directly. What if, I asked Emily and Shalini, we turned this project into an email series?

It would be an experiment: While podcasts like “Serial” had shown there was a demand for these kinds of stories in audio form, The Times had never done anything like this through its newsletter. But I was pretty sure that the Interpreter audience would like the new format. And it would give us a chance to let the story breathe.

Emily and Shalini agreed, and our editors signed off on a six-chapter “written podcast.”

In the following months we continued our reporting. Arti entered her marriage, experienced triumph and disappointment in her job search, and became pregnant. Nasreen made plans to open a fashion boutique, persuaded her parents to let her marry the man she chose and faced tragedy when a fire ripped through her family’s home.

Emily and Shalini, both based in India, have made multiple reporting trips to visit both women and their families. From my home in London, I searched for explanatory context for the struggles of young women, in the same way I do when reporting on events such as wars and corruption scandals, calling on scholars to ask for statistics and analysis. The series slowly took shape.

We wrote. And rewrote. And rewrote again. Although the series as a whole was long, the space felt cramped. Each chapter of approximately 1,400 words had to move the story forward, provide context for readers who had never been to India and end on such a cliffhanger that they would come back for the next installment.

Many concepts later we had our series: Indian daughters.

But as the publication date for our first article approached, I felt a heavy burden of responsibility. Several colleagues had warned me that they thought readers would not listen to six chapters of any story, let alone one about two unknown young women.

What if they were right? Certainly, Arti and Nasreen were compelling characters. And the issue of women’s employment in India is important. But there was no news hook.

Fortunately, Times readers proved the skeptics wrong. Thousands of readers became deeply engaged with the two women’s stories, and hundreds sent me emails telling me how much they enjoyed the series. Many begged for spoilers, saying the suspense was killing them. Some wrote that the series had taught them about a part of the world they knew little about. Others had lived or spent time in India and told us they were happy to see their reality reflected in the series. Our gamble paid off.

Arti and Nasreen’s stories are not over yet, even though our series is. No one can say what will happen to them, or to the millions of other daughters of India, in the years to come. But their fight for the future they demand, and the parallel struggles of millions of other young women like them, will continue to shape the world’s most populous country.