Unheard Voices On Air

I love this image. It's the logo of Radio Fri, the radio programme in Sweden that I'm spending a week with. Today I went to their headquarters in a suburb of Stockholm called Alby. Their office is in a converted pigsty, part of a larger farming set-up once owned by the inventor and entrepreneur Lars Magnus Ericsson. It's now a classy, artistic and sophisticated media production house run by an NGO called Fanzingo. I spoke to its founder Samuel Sjoblom about why he set it up and the delicate balance he treads when it comes to giving young offenders a voice on the public airwaves without putting the organisation at risk.

"We give a voice to those groups who are unrepresented in the media. We came up with the idea of working with people behind bars when making programmes with people with mental health problems," says Samuel. "The purpose is to build a bridge between this vulnerable group and the outside. The young people aren't in prison as such but they're still locked in to these institutions and taken care of by society. It's important that we listen and understand these stories told straight from the boys and girls rather than being filtered through journalists."

Radio Fri know they are sitting on radio gold. When it launched three years ago they were all over the TV, radio and newspapers and the coverage was entirely positive. Since then journalists have picked-up on some of the personal testimonies broadcast by Radio Fri. Samuel goes as far as describing the stories they deal with as "juicy" with the potential of being "really good radio" especially if they were given more production time. But he vows never to "sell out" his young people. "It's against our values to do that. The radio content we make could be very high-profile, but is it in the interest of our young people to make a juicy story? The answer is no."

Radio Fri has a duty of care to its young people so the editorial guidelines they follow state that the teenagers remain anonymous and don't give out too much information that could identify themselves, including details of their crime. There are also rules about language and offensive content. Victim issues are a priority and claims and accusations about youth institutions can not be aired.

"It's impossible to know how many people listen to us because the local FM radio station we broadcast on doesn't have the money or tools to collect data, but we know 1000 listeners pick us up on SoundCloud a week. One very important audience group is the young offenders' families who can listen to their sons and daughters and connect and understand. That's another important bridge to build. But it's not important to us to be commercially successful or have a large audience at the moment," says Samuel. "If we can do that and retain our editorial values and keep the interests of young offenders at the centre of what we do then great, but we need to take it in small steps. Right now we've found a balance between being public, but not too public."