Ramsey Tesdell, co-founder and executive director the Arab-language podcasting platform Sowt is a firm believer in the power of storytelling and audio as a vehicle for complicating narratives. “Audio is really good at complicating stories and narratives and not just reinforcing them,” he says.
It was this belief that saw Ramsey, Hazem and Tareq Zureikat set up Sowt as a podcasting company in 2016 at a time when podcasts were in their infancy in the Arab-speaking world. EED provided the platform with its first grant, enabling Sowt to launch three podcasts.
From the beginning Sowt were determined not to be pigeon-holed as “pro-this or anti-that”, rather their ambition was to take a holistic approach with a focus on “the nuance and the spaces in-between” narratives and to tell the stories not covered in mainstream media.
The Sowt team now produces over 25 shows that cover a range of topics, appealing to audiences in Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Morocco, and across the Middle East and far beyond, and it is one of the most popular podcast producers in the Arab-speaking world.
Eib – award winning show tackling sexuality head-on
The award-winning ‘Eib’ podcast (Arabic for ‘shame’) was one of the first shows launched by Sowt, and six years and ten seasons on, it is still going strong. The show takes a personal story-telling approach to cover themes such as getting over a bad break-up, Beirut’s drag scene, discovering you are gay or transgender, becoming a widow and much more.
“It was one of the first shows to tackle gender and sexuality in Arabic head-on and without limits…It paved the way for others to tackle these topics,” he says.
Today, the Sowt team work hard to keep the Eib podcast content fresh. The tenth season has a theme of ‘letters’, those people have actually sent and those they never sent, or those they had never written before.
Ramsey lists some of Sowt’s most popular shows, including ‘Juha’, a humorous podcast about a man and his sidekick donkey, who as Ramsey puts it: “go through life and learn lessons the hard way”.
Another top show is ‘Dom Tak’, which looks at stories through music. During its last season, it featured people’s musical memories, highlighting how powerful life moments are often linked to particular songs.
In 2022, Sowt acquired Finyal Studios, a leading fiction production company in Dubai. One of its shows, ‘1001 nights: A Never Ending Story’ is a re-telling of the famous story with twists and turns for a modern era.
And ‘Matryoshka’ is a podcast, which as Ramsey explains does as its name suggests, telling the “stories inside the stories”.
Podcasts as a way to keep audiences informed in a more challenging media environment.
Ramsey acknowledges that the media environment in the Middle East and Gulf States is not an easy one, and it has become more restrictive over the past 10 years.
“There is way more misinformation…and misinformation is a tool that is constantly used by many actors. The market is dominated by government-funded media, who have deep pockets and want to promote a certain narrative,” he says.
He believes that podcasts are an ideal medium in this environment, as unlike classical news reporting, they often go under the radar.
“Our job is storytelling and narrative; we are not news reporters. We use emotion in a way traditional media cannot to talk about things that are not covered in the mainstream media. We enable people to tell their stories and to reach more people and produce content that encourages conversation that pushes people to envision a new and better world,” he says.
“We called ourselves ‘Sowt’ deliberately, which means ‘voice’ in Arabic. We are giving people a voice and we are making sure that other people listen to the world around them. When people listen to a podcast, they stop talking and they listen. That is our goal,” he says.
He describes Sowt’s podcasting approach as partly inspired by the movie/film industry rather than traditional journalism.
“In traditional journalism, a reporter identifies the important people for a story, asks them questions, and produces copy based on these interviews. We take a more holistic approach. We analyse the characters of a story, identify the complications of their relationships, look at the arc of the story. We create storyboards, putting everything down on sticky notes as we plot the podcast,” he says.
A network of like-minded podcast companies?
The podcast market has evolved hugely since Sowt’s early days when many dismissed it as a ‘crazy idea’. Back then, one of its initial roles was to educate listeners about podcasts as a medium for communication. Today, the market is a more mature one and there are many competitors. It is harder to launch new shows and to attract good writers and content creators.
Ramsey’s role has also evolved during this time too, now that Sowt have a team of 25 working full-time throughout the region, in addition to hundreds of free-lancers. He jokes that he has now accepted his fate “as a person who is good at creating spaces for things to happen”, rather than as a content creator. “Others are better at that!” he laughs.
This mindset means that he sees this mature market as an opportunity. “Our ambition is to create an Arab-language network of like-minded platforms who can collaborate and work collectively. Coming together will enable us to support each other and help each other financially and creatively,” he says.
Only time will tell if this network can work.
“For the moment our goal is to continue to be bold and to ask the right questions, and to make sure that we publicise the right stories. Independent media and storytelling are extremely important factors in how a society develops and changes. They are part of creating a more transparent and equitable society. All my professional life, I have been part of this movement and I am not going to stop now,” he says.
This article reflects the views of the grantee featured and does not necessarily represent the official opinion of the European Endowment for Democracy, the European Commission or any other European State or other contributors to EED.
