In this new entry in the Historias de Vida series, created by Isabel López Giraldo for El Espectador, journalist Daniel Ruge talks about his taste for radio since he was a child, as well as his career in audiovisual journalism.
The search for my own voice defines me. I try not to complicate my life. Anyway, I realize that although a good part of my job is to summarize and abstract very long or tangled things, I have a hard time doing it with myself in these kinds of conversations.
Regarding Life Stories, we suggest: Gabriel Cifuentes: “In the face of indifference, the only thing that remains is to raise your voice and never lower your arms”
Origins – Maternal branch
My grandfather, Ernesto Chamucero, was an entrepreneurial liberal, owner of the first bulldozers that arrived in the country, with which he opened national highways, and was a civil works contractor in the boom in neighborhood construction in Bogotá.
Some day in 1975, my grandfather went to monitor one of the works in a neighborhood that had a very steep hill. There, a truck traveling on the opposite track lost control and fell on top of the vehicle he was driving, seriously compromising his health and preventing him from continuing with his productive activity, at a time of great economic prosperity. He underwent a very sophisticated operation for the time, received a state-of-the-art cranial prosthesis, but it was very limited and deteriorated rapidly. So, it was up to my grandmother, Edilma Rojas, who was very young, to assume control of a family of four children, who saw how, little by little, the family capital was consumed. My grandmother dedicated her life to taking care of her children and my grandfather. He was a very pampering, kind, loving and very generous guy. I remember he lulled me in the hammock he had in the backyard of his house.
A curious fact is related to the name of my grandmother Edilma, because in official documents it appeared as Aura Herminia. It turns out that the priest who baptized her did not accept to give her that name, considering it typical of women who “live in sin” and decided to baptize her with the name of the godmother. However, they continued to call her Edilma all her life. She was a fun and loving woman, guardian of the home, and until the last days of her life she maintained an excellent sense of humor.
My mother, Nubia, is a very intelligent, hard-working, dedicated, very professional and fearless woman, someone who taught me to take on the challenges of life. He thinks only of his children, he has dedicated himself to us, always teaching us to have critical thinking and independence. He loves to participate in social issues. My brother and I insist that he begin to enjoy his life and make time for it.
Follow the news of El Espectador on Google NewsPaternal branch
My grandfather, Josué Ruge, is from a typical peasant family from Saboyá (Boyacá) who fled the violence. Thus he arrived with his older brother in the Coffee Region, specifically in Calarcá, in QuindÃo. When his brother was killed, my grandfather decided to come to Bogotá, where with great effort he built a life from scratch. He first worked at Empresa de EnergÃa de Bogotá and then ended up opening his own warehouse for construction materials.
It may interest you: José Manuel Restrepo: “One always has to be willing to serve society”
My grandmother, Bernarda Rojas, was a liberal woman who lived a process of liberation from machismo, because she did not resign herself to gender stereotypes of the time and she never depended financially on a man. Originally from Santander, she also came to Bogotá fleeing partisan violence in her department.
My dad, Hernando, studied advertising, even though he’s a frustrated engineer. He inherited the business from my grandfather, but he has dedicated himself to his great passions, one of them, auto mechanics. As a hobby, he bought old cars to restore. He is totally self-taught in that field, to the point that they call him McGiver. From a young age, out of curiosity, I destroyed my grandfather’s cars and the televisions in his house.
His parents
My dad and my mom met in college. They were brought together by a friendship that later turned into love, until they finally built their life project. They got married in 1987, they formed a very untraditional family, but very practical. They were so young that sometimes their children looked like their younger siblings. When I was very little, they bought me a video game, but they were the ones who played.
We never went to follow very traditional customs, such as sitting around the table to share. We preferred to go to bed to watch television as a family, to play parks and read stories, always accompanied by a great sense of humor. Our relationships have been one of trust and transparency, they taught us the importance of making an effort and feeling the security of expressing ourselves with total freedom. But we did not grow up in the midst of very rigid norms or philosophies that could be strange to our eyes.
Childhood
I was born in the last year of my parents’ career. He graduated, but my mom decided to postpone the degree to dedicate herself to me. When I was six years old, she decided to go back to work and study. He ended up doing not one but two majors, plus a specialization and a master’s degree.
We suggest: Alberto Montoya Puyana: “I am pleased to have been able to serve the community”
I hardly ever went outside to play. I grew up in front of the television, with books and listening to the radio. My first memories are related to the Gaviria blackout and listening to ColorÃn Colorradio. When I was four years old, I asked for a brother and they gave me pleasure, but then I was given the responsibility of learning how to change diapers and helping with parenting and household work.
My brother, Andrés, is as dedicated to his hobbies as my dad is to his. He immerses himself in his subjects until he has mastered them. In his childhood he was also obsessive about sports and with his good memory he learned in detail all kinds of statistics and rules of the lesser known. Our relationship largely revolved around fanaticism for the driver Juan Pablo Montoya: we went to chase him to shopping centers to ask for autographs, we filled out the album he released and got up early to watch the races. Now, with quite different approaches, we share the concern for the country.
College
I studied in different schools, to the extent that my parents changed homes and areas, providing a process of conventional social mobility of a middle-class family.
I studied high school at the Colegio Mayor de San Bartolomé. I got good grades, but I was really an average student. I participated in class and used to speak at public events, as they taught me to express my ideas, to transmit them without fear. When I graduated, I won half a scholarship to study the degree, thanks to the Tomás Rueda Vargas Foundation, which is part of one of the alumni associations of the school.
While I was at San Bartolomé, my mother finished her communication career, curiously I helped her to do several of her projects and that defined my vocation. Finally, I started studying Social Communication at the Javeriana University.
Social comunication
La Javeriana allowed one to study the degree choosing an emphasis, and I chose two: journalism and audiovisual. One of the best teachers I had was the scriptwriter and librettist Andrés Salgado. Before seeing her class, I thought that writing scripts for film or television depended on a kind of ethereal inspiration, but no, in her I learned that everything has technique and that passion or talent are worthless if they are not mixed with discipline .
In 2007 I was the winner of ‘Bogolajara’, a contest run by the newspaper El Tiempo in conjunction with the University of Guadalajara. The challenge with this was to make a creative audiovisual capsule to tell people who attended the Guadalajara Book Fair what Bogotá was like. The award was a professional video camera and a trip to Mexico. The camera allowed me to have my first jobs during college, because with it I started to produce some videos for companies.
On the journalism side, what I was most passionate about were documentaries, I really wanted to dedicate myself to that. I did an internship at a production house that worked on content for the History Channel . There I had the privilege of working with who was also another of the magnificent undergraduate professors: Jorge Cardona, editor of El Espectador , who was also the scriptwriter for several of the audiovisual productions that were carried out for the aforementioned channel.
Starting in radio
In college I wanted to do radio. It turns out that in school I did not listen to music, as my friends did, but to talk radio. In the afternoons, especially, I became very fanatic of listening to RCN’s La Zaranda, which was the competition of La Luciérnaga , from Caracol, when the program was directed and written by César A. Betancur, Pucheros. At school I ended up imitating politicians, I disguised myself as the characters and transcribed the scripts that I heard on the radio to make presentations in flag hoists.
Later, at the university they opened a virtual station for communication students called Radiandoweb, since Javeriana Estéreo was mostly restricted to cultural content. This happened when just in Colombia we were beginning to use social networks. At first, he wanted to have a so-called serious program, but in the same strip a friend began to do a section of political humor inspired by Jaime Garzón which, as he himself recognized, did not turn out very well. After making fun of the situation, we decided to set up a radio satire space on the university’s web station and the roles changed: my friend made serious comments and I went back to doing imitations, like when I was in school, only I no longer copied librettos but trying to write mine. We invited all the candidates for Mayor of Bogotá to the program in the elections won by Petro, who did not attend, but Gina Parody, Carlos Fernando Galán, Aurelio Suárez, David Luna and Antanas Mockus did.
At some point, after my internship ended in 2011, Guillermo DÃaz Salamanca, when he was doing a program called La Escalera , which was broadcast on Radio Super , trilled something like: “I’m looking for people who write political humor.” I decided to answer him. Despite being just another tweeter, I sent him a soundcloud link with my college work, without much hope. However, to my surprise, he ended up giving me my first formal job and it never occurred to me that I was going to be sucking cock on radio.
It may interest you: Pedro Crump: “It is a requirement to cultivate yourself”
TV
At the work table of La Escalera was the journalist Norbey Quevedo, who was just starting a program with Camila Zuluaga on what is now RED + television, then Telmex. The program was called Puntos Cardinales and it sought to do investigative journalism, but with an audiovisual language, less traditional and for a young audience. That is why they were looking for a team of journalistic directors that fit the profile. Norbey gave me the valuable opportunity to present my resume, I took a test and joined the project that Camila led and presented. There I left the job I had in radio.
I like to say that this program was part of the prehistory youtuber in Colombia, with its language, without cuts, nothing neat, adapting the language of the meme to television, something that the audiovisual director Francisco Zornosa led. It did not circulate much in networks because the channel’s policy at that time was not to upload content to the Internet so that people would prefer to stay on the cable signal.
With Francisco we then worked on several documentary series on public television, he as a director and I as a screenwriter. I especially remember a series on the contributions that Colombia has made to great inventions of humanity, which was called ¿Qué inventa? , with which we won an award for the best educational series in Latin America.
In RED + I worked for about eight years doing all kinds of television formats on the street, in the studio, prerecorded and live. I learned a lot, it was a great school.
Radio and television
When Guillermo returned to RCN Radio in 2012, he invited me again to work with him. Of course I accepted, but I mentioned to him that he had to assume without withdrawing from the television channel until he delivered the programs he had to edit, according to the seasons. What would initially take me two months was actually six years during which I worked in parallel on radio and television.
We suggest: Felipe Valencia and a constant concern for knowledge
It was a tremendous effort. From very early on, I would arrive at the channel with the pre-edited programs on my computer, I would hand them over to the editor on duty, and I would wear headphones for four hours to write scripts for the radio program. When I had to go out to record, I stayed up late to get everything ready. I was favored by the fact that both the station and the channel were very close.
In RED +, there was also Vladdo, who had a late show type program called NSN News . After a while the original team of that program had several changes and a test was opened to replace some of the members who had moved to other projects. I participated and won the quota. It was a great experience that allowed me to go from behind the scenes in front of them, and share with a magnificent team.
The stage of working in radio and television ended in 2019, it gave me a lot of personal satisfaction and above all it helped me develop discipline and perseverance.
snail
When Gustavo Gómez started directing 6AM Hoy por Hoy he wrote to me via internal Twitter message to make me an invitation that I was not expecting: he asked me to send him a test to have a satire section in the program. I remember that I sent two format options, one was monologue, the other using audio clippings. That second format was the one that was finally selected.
Gustavo gave me total freedom from the beginning, he allowed me to choose the name of the section, the day I wanted it to be broadcast and since then he has guaranteed me absolute autonomy of opinion to experiment without restrictions with many types of radio languages. It is a pleasure to collaborate with this section every week, which is about to turn two years old. Throughout this time I have not missed a single Friday, whether it be Christmas or the end of the year.
Projection
At the moment I am studying a master’s degree in international law at the University of Los Andes, because I have dedicated myself to advising communications for civil society organizations that work outside of Colombia. In addition, I continue to write scripts for documentary series.
It may interest you: Amparo Jaramillo: “My wish was to work for Pereira”
I want to continue giving my opinion and continue experimenting with radio language, and hopefully with that I contribute to some extent to a huge tradition of satire on radio, which I admire and respect very much.
Reflections
What do you consider to be your greatest talent?
Try everything several times.
How do you define your talent?
Like stubbornness, I guess …
What is your code of ethics?
I try to be fair and frank.
#TALKED MEMORIES #LIFESTORIES #ISALOPEZGIRALDO
