Producing the BBC Creole service for Haiti

Last Friday, BBC World Service launched a daily radio programme in Haitian Creole for the survivors of the Haiti earthquake, offering much-needed information about the rescue and reconstruction efforts. 

Americo Martins, Executive Editor, Americas, for the World Service, gives an insight into how the service was created in record time: 

We have received many messages from Haiti since the launch of Connexion Haiti, and it seems the daily, 20-minute programme is having an impact. But we were only able to start broadcasting after we had run the gamut of logistical problems and editorial dilemmas.

The BBC had never broadcast in Creole and the World Service has no Haitian Creole speakers on its staff. Nor is there a Creole-speaking correspondent working for BBC Newsgathering. The only stringer we have in Haiti has tragically lost his house in the quake, so our main priority was to provide him with some help rather than ask him to report for us under such circumstances. 

What's more, the BBC doesn't have much brand-recognition in Haiti. We had one rebroadcaster in the country, Radio Lumiere, a distant partner which had itself suffered in the earthquake and was now off air for long periods. So we had no obvious way to broadcast the show.

Finally, we were racing against time. We knew the programme would only be useful if it was launched quickly. 

The most basic problem was to find good Haitian Creole speakers to present the show. Ideally, they needed to be broadcasters already. At the very least, they needed to have strong personalities to present an important show that so affected their community. We tried, with the help of the Caribbean Service, to find these people in London, but with no luck.

We wasted a whole day in that search before we realised we had other BBC assets that could be useful. They included a full newsroom in Miami from where we produce a good part of our output in Spanish. The BBC Mundo editor there, Adrian Fernandes, was asked to find suitable presenters - and he did so in few hours. 

Exploring our local contacts in Miami, we found Carline Faustin (below, left) and Simone Degraff (below, right), two Haitians who present a radio show to the sizeable Haitian community in Florida.

From that moment on we knew the BBC would have a show in Creole. 

But I was still concerned with a major issue: editorial control. There was no way we would do a lifeline programme for Haiti without full editorial control. The presenters are very committed, but they are not BBC journalists and had no previous knowledge of our editorial standards. 

So, despite all the recommendations they came with, we would still be completely dependent on two external contributors we had not worked with - and nobody in our team in Miami could understand the language we would be broadcasting in.

The solution was to assemble a full multimedia and multilingual team dedicated to producing content for the whole of the BBC and, in particular, for the show. The whole team speaks French, a language that has clear links with Haitian Creole, and one of them, Marie-Claire Williams, from the Caribbean Service, also speaks a variation of Creole, from Dominica. With these skills, I was confident the team could successfully control all aspects of the broadcast in Haitian Creole. 

The team also received editorial guidance about what was expected of it in several meetings with Steve Titherington, Global News Executive Editor, Debbie Ransome, Head of the Caribbean Service, and myself.

We wanted the team to focus on the humanitarian aspects of the operations in Haiti, using contacts from the Haitian community in Miami, our strong Newsgathering presence in the field after the earthquake and information from NGOs on the ground. 

We would produce the whole show ourselves, leaving the presenters to translate our scripts, do interviews and present the final version.

While all this was going on, I was discussing with our business development team, BBC Monitoring and our technology department how we could broadcast the show. Our first attempts were on short wave only. Before launching the Creole service, we had broadcast programmes dedicated to Haiti in English, Spanish and French. But we knew the language needed to be Creole and that we should be on FM.

The breakthrough came when we identified that Radio France International has six FM relays in Haiti, usually broadcasting in French only. We made a deal with it that allowed us to broadcast the show daily. 

As a result, the programme is now widely available in Haiti, and we are working with other local radio stations, offering them the programme, too.

A final point about the project is that, from the start, we decided to make it a multimedia operation. We knew the internet was still working well in Haiti - for days, it was the only way people could get any sort of information. So we are offering the show online and using other platforms, such as social media, Twitter etc. We also use the internet to publicise the show, and among the international NGO community working in Haiti. We are now asking all our contacts to disseminate the information on the show - and news of the show itself - by word of mouth.