Pop-Up Magazine is telling stories over the phone as an alternative to podcasting

Pop-Up Magazine has been experimenting with audio storytelling over the phone since the spring. Every other Sunday, a new story is published, designed to be listened to while doing a particular day-to-day activity, like washing your hands or making a cup of coffee, or thinking about a specific topic.

The project, called Phone Stories, is now on its sixteenth episode. If you're thinking about getting a tattoo, you can call +1 415-529-6057 to listen to Isaac Fitzgerald, editor of BuzzFeed Books and co-author of Knives & Ink and Pen & Ink, tell you more about the stories behind tattoos.

Pop-Up Magazine's stories are usually only told live on stage. The organisation, whose parent publication is the California Sunday Magazine, runs live journalism events where film-makers, writers, radio producers and other creators tell real, reported stories in front of an audience.

The events started in California but have expanded to reach other cities in the United States, with the current tour taking the team from Los Angeles to Boston.

The Phone Stories project was started as a way to keep the audience engaged in between the events.

"Both California Sunday and Pop-Up are really invested in experimenting with different forms of storytelling that engage the audience in a new and innovative way," Phone Stories producer Annie Brown told Journalism.co.uk in a recent podcast.

"The Phone Stories project grew out of that ethos of how can we tell audio stories and engage with our audience in between the shows, so it's a little bit of our version of a podcast, but the method of telling the story and engaging with the story is totally unique to the phone stories themselves."

Unlike more traditional podcasts, where an interview between the host and a guest or a conversation between guests might be the preferred format, Phone Stories are designed as a direct call between the listener and the storyteller featured in a particular episode.

"It's been interesting noticing that actually getting someone to dial a phone number requires a kind of engagement.

"When you're listening to the story on your phone there's more of an intimacy, it feels like something you would do with a friend or a colleague or a family member.

"So it shrinks down the distance that we normally have between the stories that we're consuming and ourselves, and suddenly you're almost in conversation with a person that you normally wouldn't be.

"That I find really compelling about it," Brown explained.

As stories get replaced by new ones on the phone line every two weeks, previous episodes are available in an archive on the website.

But as most news organisations are currently trying to find ways to make audio more shareable or to re-purpose parts of audio packages to ensure they live longer online, Pop-Up Magazine isn't interested in making its Phone Stories go viral – quite the opposite.

"Pop-Up often plays with stories being ephemeral. The stories themselves only exist at the live show.

"The only exception is when we did a series of talks at the TED conference, but all of the Pop-Up shows besides the TED conference, you can only see them if you are present for that particular show.

"That means that you can't go back and watch them on video, they can't be spread virally – the way that we normally think about audience engagement is a little unconventional."

Instead, the team aims to create a sense of intimacy in the way its audience engages with the stories.

"We're also tapping into that with the Phone Stories, where the story itself is this moment you're having in this phone call with this writer and this storyteller, and it's not going to be there after these two weeks."

Listen to the full podcast about Phone Stories here.

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