Czech Radio and Beyond, with Audio Documentarist Martina Pouchlá 🇨🇿
Eurowaves #12 Interview
Martina Pouchlá works as a spoken-word editor at Czech Radio. Her documentaries have received awards, including the Prix Bohemia or Åke Blomström Award and have been nominated for the Prix Europa. She founded AudioCafé, a collective listening project at Masaryk University. She´s based in Brno, the Czech republic.
You can find Martina on LinkedIn here.
Share with us a general image of the podcasting landscape in the Czech Republic.
The Czech Republic is a small market that lags behind the global one. It is a bit of a paradox, as Prague was home to the world’s second continuously broadcasting radio station. Still, the podcast boom eventually reached us, though it seems its peak has already passed.
Traditional chatcasts and interview formats remain the most popular, with true crime, personalities, news, and lifestyle topics leading the charts. Many companies now use podcasts as a tool for internal communication or content marketing. Nearly every major print or audiovisual outlet has a podcast extension, and influencers are leveraging their audiences through audio.
Personally, I love distinctive audio formats that do not rely solely on the spoken word, but instead draw from a broader expressive palette, from reportage and real life situations to intentional use of silence and ambient sound. That is why I am pleased to see small pockets of documentary podcasts starting to emerge.
Most often, these are created by nonprofit organizations or individuals connected to or trained by Czech Radio. With over a century of history, Czech public radio has accumulated immense craft expertise. It remains a leader in its field, producing podcast formats that are rarely found elsewhere, including fiction series, sound experiments, and educational series.
What do you think audio can do across language boundaries that other kinds of media cannot?
I work almost exclusively in Czech, with Arabic appearing only occasionally, as in my current short project for THE ECCO. In fact, I see the language barrier as a major weakness of the European audio scene. Non-English podcasts are practically invisible, or rather inaudible, on the global market.
I personally follow the audio documentary segment, and I am always curious to encounter work by colleagues from other countries, especially at shared showcases like the EBU Audio Storytelling Festival, Prix Europa, and others. These are spaces where both linguistic and geographic boundaries fall away. We get to hear work in most European languages, usually accompanied by English subtitles.
Huge thanks go to Eleanor McDowall, who makes non-English language pieces accessible on RadioAtlas dot org with English subtitles. That platform makes such work available to anyone. Otherwise, it is incredibly difficult to access audio from neighboring countries unless you already speak the language or go out of your way to translate it using autogenerated subtitles. That is a significant investment of time and energy. Not to mention, listening in a foreign language while reading subtitles requires a high level of focus, which many of us struggle with in today’s distracted world.
I am convinced that, not only in the Czech Republic, there have been and still are plenty of fascinating projects with innovative potential that reaches far beyond our national borders. But they simply do not stand a chance of reaching a global audience. More than once I have come across praise for a groundbreaking English language podcast and thought to myself, “Wait, we did something just like this years ago.”
Your piece Berka Decides to Die resonated far beyond the Czech Republic. When you are making something so deeply local, do you imagine a wider European or international audience from the beginning, or does that come later?
When I was recording Berka Decides to Die, I did not imagine any audience, let alone think that someone in Belgium or the United States might one day listen to it. I worked on Berka’s story out of a personal need to somehow grasp it, and recording was the most natural way for me to do that, because it is simply how I explore the world. I listen to it closely, reflect on it, and try to bring out different layers of meaning by the way I edit and connect moments together.
It was actually by chance that the nearly finished piece ended up in the hands of dramaturgs at Czech Radio, which is how it came to be broadcast. That it would go on to succeed in an international competition was beyond anything I could have imagined. I created it purely as a personal project.
In general, when choosing topics, I am most guided by what resonates within me. More often than not, it is human stories. And within those, I try to find the most universal threads, the fundamental themes we all share. The fear of life and death. The longing for acceptance. The need to be understood. These are things anyone can relate to, regardless of language.
You have been part of some exciting collaborative projects like THE ECCO. How do you balance your own voice with the collective vision in pan European spaces?
I do not feel the need to consciously balance my own voice within THE ECCO. Its philosophy, shaped by Jasmin Bauomy and the entire team, is to amplify the voices of creators across Europe, and eventually also from the Global South and around the world, through collaboration and mutual enrichment in a deeply respectful, safe, and creative environment.
As a creator, it is then just about allowing my voice to sound authentically.
For the project, I am working on the story of a woman navigating multiple cultures and identities, a phenomenon that resonates with many people in today’s globalized world.
Considering your multilingual and diverse storytelling, how do you see the future of podcasting in Europe?
Now I have a confession to make. Just for fun, I asked ChatGPT to suggest some answers. I did not use any of them in my previous responses, but I do think the following paragraph turned out quite well, even if it was written by artificial intelligence:
“I believe the future will be increasingly interconnected and multilingual. Technology already enables us to collaborate, translate, and share creative work across borders more easily than ever before. Europe is inherently multicultural, and podcasting has the potential to become a bridge between cultures, not just linguistically, but on a human level. However, we will need more support for independent creators, more space for experimentation, and greater trust in the power of stories that are not strictly mainstream.”
To that, speaking now as Martina, I would add that alongside my effort to remain optimistic, I also carry a certain frustration and fear. I worry about the direction some democracies are heading—toward authoritarianism and isolation. Will there still be a need to hear voices from elsewhere? To listen to people who are different from ourselves?
I hope so. Because losing the will to even try to understand what is different from us—that is a road to hell.